u/Numerous_Delay_6306

we’ve been renting out a property here for a few years, but honestly, dealing with the constant tenant turnover and keeping up with the ongoing maintenance from a distance has just become a massive headache lol. we are officially ready to just list the place, cash out, and simplify our lives completely. does anyone know an absolute pro listing agent who is a total data nerd? i need an absolute professional who tracks the numbers perfectly and knows exactly how to position an investment property so it sells fast. thx!

ok so i switched careers about 8 months ago after watching a pat walls video on cold email at like 2am and thinking "i could do that." fast forward to now and im pulling about $4k/mo which isnt crazy but its real money for someone who was making $18/hr at a call center last year.

im not an expert. i want to be clear about that because every time i talk to someone whos been doing this for like 5 years i get this wave of imposter syndrome and feel like i should shut up. but i just went through all my subscriptions because my credit card bill was getting out of hand and i figured i'd share what i actually kept vs what i cancelled.

my first client was a landscaping company in ohio that wanted commercial accounts. i had zero idea what i was doing so i signed up for Apollo because thats what every youtube video told me to do. and honestly for finding contacts at property management companies and facility managers it worked fine? the free tier got me started and then i bumped to the $49/mo plan. the filters are decent for that kind of search. but i noticed pretty quick that like 40% of the emails i was pulling were bouncing which was terrifying because i didnt even know what bounce rate meant at the time.

that landscaping campaign is actually what taught me verification matters more than anything. i signed up for ZeroBounce first because it was the first result on google lol. it caught some bad emails but i was still seeing bounce rates around 6-7% which i now know is way too high. someone in a cold email discord told me to try MillionVerifier as a second pass and that helped but the real difference came when i switched my enrichment to Prospeo. like instead of just relying on Apollo data i started running contacts through Prospeo and the email accuracy jumped to around 82% which meant my bounce rate dropped from 7% to under 2%.

for sending i started with Lemlist because again, youtube. its fine? the interface is nice and the personalization stuff is cool but at $59/mo per seat it felt expensive for what i was doing. after about 3 months i switched to Instantly and thats what i still use. $30/mo for the growth plan and i can connect multiple inboxes. the analytics arent as pretty as Lemlist but i dont really care about pretty i care about emails going out on time.

oh wait i should talk about inboxes because this part confused me for the longest time. i was literally using my personal gmail for the first two weeks (please dont judge me) before i realized you need dedicated sending domains. i tried Mailforge first and got 5 inboxes for i think $16/mo which is cheap. they worked ok for about 2 months and then deliverability started tanking and i couldnt figure out why. switched to Maildoso and its been better, $84/mo for 10 inboxes which hurts a little but the warmup is built in and i havent had the same issues.

for my second client, a B2B saas company selling to HR directors, i needed better data than what Apollo was giving me. like Apollo is great for broad searches but when you need specific titles at companies with 50-200 employees in a specific geo it starts to feel thin. thats when someone recommended Clay to me and... ok Clay is both amazing and overwhelming. the $149/mo plan gives you these waterfall enrichment flows where you can pull from multiple data sources and its powerful but i spent probably 2 full weekends just figuring out how to set up one table. not exaggerating. if youre technical you'll love it, if youre not its gonna be rough.

my CRM situation is embarrassing. i used a google sheet for the first 4 months. then i tried HubSpot free tier and it was fine but felt bloated for what i need. last month i switched to Attio and i actually like it alot. $36/mo and its clean and fast. not sure if its the best option but it works for where im at.

the saas client campaign is where i started understanding enrichment as a seperate step. i was pulling contacts from Apollo, running them through Clay for additional data points, and then Prospeo handles the email enrichment piece. then everything goes through MillionVerifier before it hits Instantly. is it overkill for someone doing my volume? maybe. but my bounce rate has been sitting at 1.2% for the last 6 weeks and reply rates are between 3.1% and 4.8% depending on the campaign.

one thing that tripped me up for a while - i kept thinking more sends equals more results. my third client (IT staffing firm) wanted volume and i was blasting 80 emails per inbox per day. deliverability cratered within like 10 days. took me almost 3 weeks of re-warming to recover those inboxes. now i keep it at 25-35 per inbox per day max and things are way more stable.

for linkedin stuff i tried La Growth Machine for about a month because a friend was using it. its cool for multichannel sequences but at $60/mo and the complexity of managing linkedin + email at the same time... i just wasnt ready for it. might revisit later when im doing higher volume.

so the monthly breakdown of what i actually pay right now: Apollo - $49 Instantly - $30 Maildoso (10 inboxes) - $84 MillionVerifier - around $15 depending on volume Prospeo - $39 (though the UI could use some work, its not the most intuitive thing) Clay - $149 Attio - $36

thats about $402/mo total. on $4k revenue thats roughly 10% which seems ok? i honestly dont know what the benchmark is.

anyway i know this is kind of all over the place. theres definitely stuff im doing wrong that i dont even know about yet. the imposter syndrome hits different when you realize how much you dont know. but if youre just starting out and feeling overwhelmed by all the tools... just pick a few and actually learn them instead of signing up for everything at once like i did

I keep seeing Prospeo pop up in my LinkedIn feed and a few sales slack communities. From what I can tell they do contact enrichment and have some kind of email verification built in, but I'm wondering if anyone here has actually used it for outbound.

My team's been using Apollo for the past year and while the contact volume is decent, we're burning through credits on bad data. Like a third of the emails bounce or the person left the company months ago. Really frustrating when you're trying to hit 150 activities a day.

What caught my eye about Prospeo was they claim really high accuracy and only charge for verified contacts. Sounds too good to be true? Also saw they have direct mobile numbers which could be huge for us since we're doing more multi-channel outreach now.

Anyone running Prospeo for their SDR team? How's the sales data quality compared to what else is out there? And are the mobile numbers actually worth it or just another data point that sounds good on paper?