Hi guys I really really need help finding leads. If you know how, I'm actl begging for any help or advice.

I've searched for at least 50h+ (manually) on facebook and IG but cannot find enough coaches who fall in my ICP. most of the profiles I can find are unqualified or too little followers...

ICP Finance coaches on Instagram with 10-500k followers who want more clients (and they have a conversion issue) -- is the TAM too small? I have a friend whose ICP is health coaches doing the same thing and he's on track to hitting 100k/mo this year...

I really don't know what's wrong with me and my partner and I are completely f*cking clueless...

We have the capacity to hire someone who can generate qualified leads reliably.

The most common technical mistake I see in cold email: starting campaigns too early.

Actual guidelines that hold up:

• Minimum warm-up: 2 weeks
• Recommended warm-up: 4 weeks
• Before sending: run an inbox placement test (not just warm-up score, actually test deliverability)

Warm-up scores can look good before your domain is actually ready to sustain real sending volume. The inbox placement test catches issues the warm-up score misses.

The 4-week window also gives you time to find any DNS/SPF/DKIM issues before they affect a live campaign.

Patience here pays off significantly in reply rates.

I’m currently building a SaaS and starting to think seriously about sales and lead generation.
Right now, I’m considering doing cold outreach through both email and LinkedIn at the same time since I’m on a limited budget.

My biggest issue is knowing where to start: How do you identify the first qualified target companies/users . What are the lowest-cost actions that actually work in the beginning? Do i need automation in the beginning ?

Would really appreciate advice from people who already went through the “0 to first clients” phase.

I interviewed 10 of the cold email industry's top 7 and 8 figure CEOs - these are the top 50 lessons I learned

Hey everyone,

I run the Cold Email Podcast where I interview some of the most successful people in this space. I also run my own cold email agency on top of that.

Over the past few weeks I've spoken to 10+ people running 7 and 8 figure businesses across cold email agencies, SaaS, infrastructure, coaching, and lead generation tools. I've been learning so much from these conversations that I wanted to put together a post with everything I've picked up so far. Here are the top 50 lessons:

1. If your business has been growing through referrals or inbound, you can't just plug cold email into the same sales process. The people you reach through cold email don't know they have a problem, don't trust you, and don't know solutions exist. You need to rebuild your positioning, your offer, and the way you build trust before you start sending emails.
2. Before chasing a new niche, look at your existing client base. Identify which clients paid you the most, closed the easiest, and had the least competition. Then reach out to people who match that profile, and say to them the things your best clients told you on their discovery calls.
3. People can tell when an email was written by AI, even when the content is technically relevant. Write your emails the way a real person would type them on their phone in between meetings. Short, casual, and human.
4. Inboxes will always burn at some point. It's just part of running cold email at scale. Stop spending weeks trying to figure out why one specific inbox died. Set up a standing order where someone on your team buys fresh inboxes on a regular schedule and you'll never have to think about burn again.
5. When someone receives a cold email from you and decides to look you up, what they find online needs to match what you're selling. If your email is about web design but your LinkedIn is all about sales coaching, people will sense that something doesn't add up and they'll lose trust in you immediately.
6. When someone replies to your cold email with a positive response, call them within minutes. You can literally say "you replied to my email three minutes ago, does that ring a bell?" and start the conversation from there. This alone can double or triple the number of meetings you book from the same campaign.
7. The businesses winning at cold email are the ones with strong offers, high client lifetime value, and good retention. When each client is worth way more to your business, you can afford to send more emails and outspend everyone else. Build a better business and the campaign numbers take care of themselves.
8. When you launch a new cold email campaign, test multiple angles against smaller batches of contacts first. Run seven to twelve different scripts against two or three hundred contacts each. Once you find an angle that's actually working, then scale the volume behind it.
9. Cold email works best when your offer is tied directly to making the prospect more money. If you sell something complex or expensive, you can't expect to close a six figure deal from a single email. Sell a smaller entry level offer like a paid audit or a pilot project, and use that to build trust before pitching the bigger thing.
10. Whenever someone says cold email is dead, they've usually tested two campaigns across a few hundred contacts and given up. A proper test runs multiple split tests on your framing, your pain points, your calls to action, and your offer across thousands of leads before you can draw any conclusion.
11. Before you launch a cold email campaign, make sure you have a proper website and some visible content online. Your website should be focused on the outcomes you deliver for your clients. Anyone who gets your email is going to look you up, and the more evidence they find that you know what you're doing, the more likely they are to take a call with you.
12. Never run your entire cold email operation through a single inbox provider. At some point Google, Microsoft, or any other provider will push an update that takes a large portion of your inboxes down overnight. Run multiple inbox types and check your blacklists and inbox placement regularly so you're never completely dependent on one platform.
13. If you use AI tools that write your entire cold email campaigns for you, you'll never actually learn what's working. You'll get some short term results but you won't be able to scale because you don't understand what made the campaign work. Use AI to make your existing process faster, and only after you've built that process yourself.
14. There's a new tactic in cold email every few months that gets called the next big thing. Personalized first lines, LinkedIn post references, case studies in the email. Every single one of them works until everyone is doing it. The things that always work are having a relevant offer, sending at the right time, creating curiosity, and building trust.
15. The bigger the promise in your email, the more specific you need to be about why you can make it. Saying "I'll get you a million dollars" sounds like a scam. Saying "based on your dev team size and your location, you likely qualify for a one million dollar tax rebate, can I show you how?" sounds real because it's tied to specific information about that person and their business.
16. Most people put their best case study in the first cold email they send and it doesn't work. When someone has never heard of you, they don't care that you got a result for someone they've also never heard of. Save your case studies for later in the conversation when the person already trusts you enough to consider buying.
17. When you're testing what works for a cold email campaign, start with the offer itself. Send out five variations of the same offer with slightly different framing. If none of them work, move on to messages that simply ask if your prospects are struggling with a specific problem. Only after both of those, start adding things like intent signals or recent triggers.
18. Try targeting by situation. A situation could be a business that just lost their only marketing person, or someone making their first sales hire. The advantage of targeting situations is that the offer becomes the same regardless of the industry, and you stop competing with every other agency chasing the same lists.
19. The most underrated way to use Claude Code in cold email is for managing your data. You can use it to merge hundreds of spreadsheets, scrape competitor websites, build personas from your closed deals, and automate workflows that you used to do manually in Clay. Most people in cold email are still hand managing their data when they could be doing this in seconds.
20. The reason some businesses generate predictable revenue every month is because they have systems for everything. Pre call videos, follow up sequences, automated contracts. Skills take years to develop, but systems can be built in days, and they protect your revenue even when you personally have a bad week.
21. Track every step of your conversion funnel from cold email through closed deal. Without this you'll end up trying to fix things that aren't actually broken. For example, if your meeting show rate is two percent and your close rate is ninety percent, the problem is getting people to show up to the call. Changing what you say on the call won't change anything.
22. When a prospect tells you on a sales call that they need more time or that they need to speak to their business partner, don't just book another call. Ask them what specifically they need to discuss. A lot of the time you can address whatever the concern is right then and there and close the deal on that same call.
23. On a sales call, the most awkward question to ask is usually the one that needs to be asked. Asking someone what will happen to their business in twelve months if they don't fix the problem they're describing is uncomfortable. It's also what creates the urgency that gets them to buy.
24. When someone pushes back on price during a sales call, don't immediately offer a discount. First figure out whether their concern is actually about money, whether they trust themselves to implement what you're selling, or whether they're afraid of change. Discounting too early turns potentially great clients into bad ones and trains them to keep negotiating with you forever.
25. When you present the price on a sales call, say the number, mention that payment plans are available, and stop talking. A lot of salespeople keep justifying the price after they've said it by listing all the features included. That makes them look weak and removes the prospect's sense of control. Let the prospect respond first.
26. An offer is a transaction. You do something and the prospect pays you for it. Positioning is when the prospect feels like they specifically need you to be the one doing it. Two businesses can sell the exact same service, and the one with better positioning will charge more and close faster.
27. Personalizing your cold email means nothing if the personalization has nothing to do with what you're selling. Mentioning that someone went to the same university as you and then pitching lead generation is worse than sending no personalization at all. Whatever you mention about the prospect needs to connect to the offer you're making.
28. Don't ask for a meeting in your first cold email. Start a conversation, get them to engage with you, and then ask for the call once you have some kind of positive signal back. Asking for the meeting in the very first email almost always converts worse than having a back and forth exchange first.
29. Don't try to automate something before you've done it manually first. Solve the problem with your own hands, then automate the parts that work, then optimize, and only then look for ways to make it cheaper. People who go straight to building Clay workflows and AI agents before they have a process that works manually end up with broken systems and no results.
30. Before you onboard a new client onto cold email, make sure they have the basics in place to actually convert the leads you'll send them. If they don't have a calendar tool, a sales process, or someone to take the meetings, your campaign will fail no matter how good it is. You'll end up losing the client.
31. If you run a cold email agency, audit and update your packages every six months. The market moves fast and the offer you were selling last quarter is probably already being beaten by a better one somewhere else. Agencies that keep their packages the same year after year quietly fall behind without realizing it.
32. If you run a lead gen agency, your own internal lead generation matters more than the quality of your fulfillment. Most lead gen clients churn within twelve to fifteen months no matter how well you deliver. The agencies that actually scale send hundreds of thousands of emails every month for themselves, on top of what they do for clients.
33. If a single client makes up more than five or ten percent of your monthly revenue, every cancellation becomes a crisis. Pricing your packages lower and signing more clients spreads the risk and gives you a much more stable business. You'll have to manage more clients, but you'll survive any single one of them leaving.
34. Report your client results in terms of positive responses. Booking ratios after a positive reply tend to be quite low, so showing ten positive responses tells a much stronger story than showing two meetings booked. The same campaign sounds completely different depending on which metric you lead with, and this affects how long your clients stick around.
35. The fully automated cold email business is mostly a marketing idea. AI can replace personalization teams and reduce the number of sales reps you need. You still need skilled people who know how to prompt the AI, build the lists, and refine what the agents are producing. Anyone selling a one click solution is overpromising.
36. When someone in the cold email industry is loudly talking about a deliverability crisis, they're usually selling you the alternative. People who sell Google inboxes will tell you Microsoft is failing. People who sell Microsoft inboxes will tell you Google is failing. The chaos in 2025 was specific to legacy and Azure setups, and cold email as a whole was working just fine.
37. A lot of businesses sending cold email don't actually know what type of infrastructure they're paying for. Someone will say they use Outlook with ninety nine accounts per domain, when what they really have is an Azure tenant. If you don't know what you're subscribed to, you can't predict how it will perform and you're at the mercy of whoever sold it to you.
38. When you're setting up your cold email infrastructure, decide whether you're trying to maximize volume or optimize for longevity. You can't really do both at once. Whichever you choose, keep around ten percent of your accounts at a different provider as a backup in case the main one goes down.
39. When a cold email campaign starts to lose performance after running well for months, look at whether the offer or the angle has fatigued before blaming the infrastructure. A lot of businesses change their entire tech stack when the actual problem is that they've been running the same script for too long.
40. Dot info domains perform just as well as dot com domains in cold email, and they cost about a third of the price. If you're running high volume campaigns where domains burn regularly, the cheaper option gives you about three times the runway for the same spend.
41. If you run a business, you don't need to become a cold email expert for cold email to work for you. You need to be an expert at your product, your offer, and your customer. Cold email is just one form of lead generation, and you can either outsource it to an agency or use an all in one tool to handle it for you.
42. Cold email is a volume game in two ways. The first is how many emails you send. The second is how many unique campaign angles you're testing at the same time. If you spend ten thousand dollars on Meta ads, you need around fifty unique creatives to optimize that spend. Cold email works the same way, and the businesses that scale are the ones running many angles in parallel.
43. The simplest way to win at cold email is to launch one new campaign angle every single day. Try different offers, different framings, different target audiences. Most businesses run one campaign for three months, see nothing happen, and then conclude that cold email doesn't work for their business.
44. Cold email fundamentally hasn't changed much in the last five years. Google inboxes are still the best to send from. Warm up is still around two weeks. Verified leads and some personalization still work. What's changed is that there are way more businesses sending cold email now, so the basics matter more than they used to.
45. Most cold email campaigns stop generating responses after each person on the list has seen your email two or three times. The most successful Meta ads have a frequency of ten before someone takes action. Cold email is the same. You need to keep recycling and relaunching to the same people with new angles until you've reached them enough times to convert.
46. After running one cold email campaign with a few follow ups, around ninety nine percent of the people in your ideal customer profile have either not seen your message or not responded to it yet. Most businesses stop reaching out and complain that they've exhausted their list. You can keep going back to those same people every few months with a new angle for years.
47. There is no cold email deliverability crisis right now. Outlook gets harder around August every year. Google gets harder around November every year. That's normal. Diversify your inbox providers, send relevant emails, don't get marked as spam, and you'll keep getting results.
48. A flat reply rate across your whole campaign doesn't tell you anything useful. If you have twenty domains and your average reply rate is one percent, that could mean ten of your domains are at half a percent and ten are at two percent. The ones at half a percent are the problem. Always track your reply rate by domain.
49. There are only five metrics that reveal whether you have a deliverability problem. Reply rate by domain, bounce rate by domain, warm up reputation, inbox placement tests every two weeks, and the specific type of bounces you're getting. If you track those five things, you'll always know when something is wrong.
50. Most businesses are run on gut instinct. The owner feels like cold email is working, so they keep pouring money into it without ever measuring the actual cost of customer acquisition by channel. Make decisions based on actual numbers. That's usually the unlock for anyone trying to scale.

Drop a comment if you want me to go deeper on any of these. Happy to share more from the specific conversation each one came from.

Has anyone actually gotten clients/leads from manufacturing companies through LinkedIn, cold email, or calls without having strong industry connections?

Our ICP is around 50–100 employee manufacturing companies for IT support/services, but one of my friends told me that in manufacturing, only direct relationships and referrals work — cold outreach usually doesn’t.

Just trying to understand if this is realistically possible or if I’m chasing something unrealistic.

I'm running a small B2B managed IT services business based out of Austin, Texas, and I'm trying to dial in a cold email system that actually books discovery calls — not one that just disappears into inbox black holes.

We're targeting small-to-mid-sized professional services firms (law firms, accounting practices, medical clinics) with 10–50 employees in the Austin metro area.

I've already got my ICP locked in and a clean list of around 500 verified leads. What I'm struggling with now is the practical side of getting replies.

My main question is:

What has actually worked for you to get real reply rates (not vanity open rates) from cold email in a local B2B service business?

I'm not looking for generic "personalization at scale" advice or another tool stack list — I'm specifically interested in:

• What email structures actually pulled replies for you? (subject line style, opener, length, CTA type)
• How do you handle follow-ups without sounding desperate or spammy?
• Any sending workflow that kept you out of spam folders when warming a new domain?
• What mistakes should I avoid in the first 100–200 sends before I try to scale?

The goal is to build a repeatable system that books 5–10 discovery calls per month from cold outreach — not to blast 10K emails hoping something sticks.

Would really appreciate insights from people who've actually run cold email for a service business and seen results, not just resold the playbook.

Thanks 🙏