Hi, it’s Melissa, Cofounder and CEO of eWebinar. Welcome (back) to “your founder next door“, a weekly publication on the strategies and stories behind building a company without an abundance of resources and friends in high places. No BS, just straight-up truth bombs.

The Big Aha! 💡

I’ve been in sales for over 20 years and never learned how to do mass cold email outreach. Last month I hired an expert to teach me how to use Clay and Instantly so I could understand what it involves. This article breaks it down in layman’s terms to demystify the process, so you can learn it too.

Backstory 👩‍🏫

I’ve been selling since my first job. Every company I’ve worked for and every company I’ve owned before eWebinar sold direct to other companies, so the version of outreach I learned was always one to one.

You pick a specific company, find the owner or the executive who would care, write them something personal, follow up, get the meeting. Small batch of targets, every email written by hand. I got pretty good at it. With eWebinar, at a $99/month starting point, we’re not a sales-led company, so that outreach strategy wouldn’t work.

What I never learned is the other kind of outreach. The kind where you’re not writing to one person, you’re writing to hundreds or thousands of people a week, and the entire game is landing in an inbox instead of a spam folder.

For years, I’ve watched friends build successful businesses with that as their core growth engine. I just... never picked it up. It never occurred to me that this could be a viable marketing channel for my current company. And that’s exactly the problem. I never thought about it as “marketing”. I thought about it as “sales”, and I told myself we weren’t a sales-led company.

I started paying attention to who’s winning right now. Instantly. lemlist. ZoomInfo. retention.com. Some of the most successful companies of this moment are either the software that powers mass cold outreach, or the data layer that makes it possible.

There’s an entire industry around the thing I decided wasn’t for us.

Was this a mistake?

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Everything that used to work, stopped working 📉

Two years ago, search was our number one channel. It isn’t anymore. Traffic is down, trials are down, and now we’re all busy worrying about whether we get cited by an AI instead of ranked by Google. We’re fixing it. It’s slow.

I’ve written on LinkedIn consistently for three years, with a couple of breaks. I’ve published on Substack every week for over a year. I post on Instagram 3-4x a week. I’ve been on over 150 podcasts. I can’t attribute meaningful, direct revenue to any of it. I treat all of it as credibility and trust building, billboards on a highway type effort. It takes an incredible amount of time, and I love doing it, but should I stop and repurpose my time elsewhere? I’m not sure. I’m scared of not existing because of dark social, so I have to believe that all of this together creates an impact I can’t see.

We can’t hire salespeople. There’s a rough rule in B2B that if your contract value is under $10k a year, you can’t support a salesperson on it. The math doesn’t work. We’re well under that line, which is why we’re a product-led company and not a sales-led one.

Ads? Too expensive at our revenue level. Especially for a product very few people are searching for yet. We’re not a scroll stopper. We still need to explain what we are to most people before they get it and want to see a demo. (More on that here: The strategy that got us to profitability and kept us small)

That’s the position we’re in. Search weakened, social unattributable, no sales team, ads uneconomical, and a product that needs a demonstration to make sense. 🫠

Cold outreach was the last door I hadn’t opened. Mostly because I didn’t know how.

I hired someone to teach me 🙋‍♀️

I found Bogdan Liutic through an article in : Your playbook for LinkedIn ads that work. The piece he wrote was about LinkedIn ads, not cold email. I read it, thought this guy actually knows what he’s talking about, and reached out to him.

Two weeks later, he spent two hours teaching my team and me how to use Clay and Instantly from scratch.

It was humbling to have been in sales for over 20 years and realize I didn’t know the basics of how most companies out there sell. Fifteen minutes into Bogdan’s crash course, I saw how long I’d been avoiding the one thing I should’ve and could’ve learned a decade ago.

I’ve been selling to executives since the beginning of my career, running complex sales cycles. Getting on calls, pushing to the next one, going to conferences and sitting at booths. Cold outreach is an entirely different beast.

The thing everyone looks down on 🚗

Cold outreach has a reputation for being pushy and intrusive. The “used car salesman” of the internet. We hear it and we think it’s beneath us.

I don’t believe that anymore.

Cold outreach is how an enormous amount of discovery happens. It keeps the economy moving. Somebody has a problem they haven’t named yet, and the only reason they ever hear about the thing that solves it is because someone decided to tell them.

It’s also not a standalone act. It’s one touchpoint among several. Picture this: someone reads something you wrote on LinkedIn, they go to your profile and see your company name, then you land in their inbox, then they see an ad. That’s not four random hits. That’s trust building, and cold outreach is one of the pieces.

Learning how cold outreach works was a good reminder that the learning should never stop.

What is cold outreach? 📬

Here’s the simple version I wish someone had given me.

There are three things that matter, in this order: the infrastructure, the list, and the message. That’s it. Everything else is detail.

One: the infrastructure 🏗️

You don’t send from your real company domain. You buy secondary domains that look like yours without being yours, something close enough that a human recognizes it. If one of them burns (lands emails in spam), your actual company domain is untouched. It’s not sneaky or scammy, it’s the way it works.

Once you have emails on new domains, you have to warm them up. New domains blasting out email look exactly like what spammers do, so the sales engagement software you choose sends small volumes back and forth across its own network for about two weeks to build a sending history. Is warmup required? Most experts say yes. Some say no.

After warmup you ramp. Don’t send 30 emails on day one, which is the maximum each inbox should send at full capacity. Maybe 5 to 10, increasing gradually. The ceiling is roughly 20 to 30 emails per inbox per day. If you want to reach 3k or 30k people a month, you can do the math on how many inboxes you need.

Domains also burn. Enough people mark you as spam and that domain is done, so you retire it and bring up a fresh one, then run it through the same warmup and ramp-up process. This is why the operators who do this for a living are sitting on hundreds, even thousands, of domains at various stages of age.

Two: the list 📋

You need to decide who you’re talking to.

You pull lists from a data provider. Clay is the poster child, and it’s also the one I’m using. There are plenty of others, Apollo and ZoomInfo being the obvious ones, plus services like Prospeo and Moltsets that sell the underlying data.

What makes Clay different is the waterfall method. When it’s looking for someone’s email, it asks one provider, and if that one comes up empty it asks the next, and the next, until it finds something. Then it validates the address before handing it to you. It charges credits to do this.

That validation step matters because bounced emails damage your sending reputation, and a damaged reputation lands you in spam. Your sending software will pause your campaign if it hits a ~5% bounce rate, so it’s on you to build a solid list. You’re not buying data, you’re buying data that won’t wreck the infrastructure you spent time building.

Realistically, you’ll get a match on 80 to 90% of the people you search for, depending on company size.

A few rules I picked up. Cap yourself at two or three people per company, because hitting five people in the same department looks exactly like what it is, annoying and sloppy. Your list size should be dictated by how many inboxes you have, not by ambition.

You need to find people who care, then write a message compelling enough to show you understand their pain. Thirty people with a strong reason to care right now will outperform three hundred who fit the demographic.

Three: the message ✍️

There’s a formula, and there isn’t.

Every expert I follow does it differently. Taylor Haren sends one email a month, written like a newsletter, on the logic that newsletters are the format spam filters have learned to let through.

Bogdan teaches three short emails: two carrying the value proposition, then a breakup.

Josh Braun, whose course I took, says three or four and then come back later with something new.

Sam McKenna does something different again, though she’s writing to executives, which changes the rules.

None of them are wrong. They’re playing the game differently in a way that reflects their own philosophy, driven by what has worked in their own career.

The formula everyone can agree on is: write a message that gets opened, in a way that gets them to respond.

The subject line has to earn the click before a single word of your pitch is read. Your prospect is deciding, in a few seconds, whether your email is worth their attention.

Then the offer has to be compelling, which to me means two things at once: almost no effort for them, and real value delivered immediately. Not “click here to book a 30 minute call”. Something where the value arrives in the email itself, one click away, or in a one word response.

One more thing, and I feel strongly about this because I’m on the receiving end of a hundred of these a week. Fake personalization is worse than none. When someone opens with a line that’s obviously machine generated to sound like they read my stuff, I know they didn’t, and now I trust them less than if they’d told me plainly what they sell. We’ve all gotten that email: I love what you’re doing here {quote line from website}, want to buy my stuff?

Tell me what you have. Tell me what it does. I can take it from there. That’s an example of a philosophy I follow because of how I like to receive messages. You might be different, and that’s what I mean by there’s a formula, and there isn’t.

The good news in all of this: most of what’s being sent is bad. If you’re willing to put real intention into the list and the writing, you’re competing in a very shallow pool.

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What we’re doing with cold outreach 📩

I’ve launched two campaigns so far. One two weeks ago, the other last week. My goal is to launch one campaign every week for three months to test different industries and different roles that our current customers represent. The intention is to test messaging within specific verticals and see which ones stand out.

From the campaign launched two weeks ago, 2-3 emails have gone out, 15 out of 159 companies have sent a positive reply, and all of those are now in active sales conversations. For a first try, that’s pretty good, I think?

I’ll share in next week’s newsletter how I wrote my emails after taking Josh Braun’s course, The Badass B2B Growth Guide, and Sam McKenna’s Sequence Playbook.

Why I’m running this myself 🛠️

I’d love to hand this to an expert, but not right now. Outside of not having the budget, I need to prove this is a channel that could work for us first.

I’ve learned the hard way, again and again, that you can’t hire someone to fix a pain you don’t understand. You can’t delegate a job you’ve never done yourself. You’ll either be sold something that doesn’t work, or you’ll be unable to critique a process you’re supposed to follow.

If it turns out this channel works for us, then hiring a specialist becomes an easy decision and I’ll know what to ask them. If it doesn’t work, I’ll have learned that myself rather than paying someone to tell me.

The biggest lesson I learned through all of this is:

Cold outreach is a craft and an art form, and when it’s done well it shouldn’t be underestimated.

Reflections 🪞

Like anything done well, it takes a lot of experience to do properly. The infrastructure, the list, every individual email. All of it asks for intention and effort.

It’s easy to do the job but hard to do it right. The companies winning at it are the ones willing to do it right with a human touch, instead of leaving everything up to AI.

We’re all looking for the channel, the hack, the thing that works. Meanwhile the edge is sitting in the gap between doing something and doing it properly, and that gap is wide open in almost every discipline right now because the tools and AI made it so easy to do the shallow version.

If you’re where I was a month ago, aware that cold outreach exists, vaguely (or not-so-vaguely) certain it’s not for you, or maybe fearful of it because it seems complicated... I can tell you it’s not that complicated. It’s one to one selling at scale. It’s a different way of getting in front of people who were never going to find you on their own.

Till next time,

— Melissa, your founder next door ✌️

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What’s cold outreach and why is it important