PumpGTM retweeted
Alex Hormozi on lead magnets in cold outreach:
according to him, it’s the #1 response rate booster in cold outreach.
but a lot of people hear "lead magnet" and send a generic PDF.
generic PDFs WILL NOT WORK.
free work is what works.
it takes real effort from your team, so not a lot of people are willing to do it.
that's exactly why the prospect sees it as extremely high value.
i personally know people who built entire branches of their agency just to fulfill free work.
the full breakdown is in my article below:
PumpGTM retweeted
If I forgot everything I know about outbound tomorrow:
Here's exactly how I'd email my entire market again, templates included.
1/ PICK 3 DREAM COMPANIES
Dream companies are the customers you'd clone 10,000 times.
Copy the "About" section from each of their LinkedIn pages, word for word.
Pull out the words they use to describe themselves, and turn them into 3-5x more search keywords than you think you need.
Those keywords find companies like them far better than any industry filter.
2/ PULL THE WHOLE MARKET
Set Apollo broad (industry plus one tech filter) and search by those keywords.
Multiply the raw contact count by 0.7, because that's roughly what survives enrichment and verification.
Then work out your volume:
(verified contacts ÷ 3 months) × emails per sequence = emails per month
100,000 contacts with 2 emails each = 66,666 emails a month.
3/ QUALIFY BEFORE YOU PAY FOR EMAILS
Add an AI column that summarises every company, and a second that scores it against your ICP.
Tell it what your ICP is AND what it isn't, or it starts making up reasons to qualify people.
Cut anything under an 80% match.
Raw pulls land at 50-60% qualified, and this gets you to 90-95%.
4/ FIND EVERY EMAIL
Run the waterfall in this order:
GetLeads → BlitzAPI → Prospeo → Icypeas → MillionVerifier → BounceBan (for catch-alls)
Keep the info@ and personal addresses too, and send to them from a separate instance.
5/ SET UP SENDING
66,666 a month is about 3,000 a day on weekdays.
> 15 cold emails per inbox per day = 200 inboxes
> 2 Google inboxes per domain = 100 domains
> 15 days of warmup before a single cold email
> warmup stays on, open tracking stays off
> 80% of daily volume to new contacts, 20% follow-ups
Buy the domains on Porkbun, and never send cold from your main one.
6/ WRITE ONE OFFER, THEN ONE EMAIL
Subject line: 1-3 words, lowercase.
The email:
"{Hey|Hi} {{first_name}}, {would you be interested in|open to} a free [front-end offer] for {{company}}?
PS: [social proof from their industry]"
The opt-out line:
"If you don't want any more emails from me, reply 'banana' and I'll stop."
The one follow-up:
"Quick question - are you the right person to talk to about [topic] at {COMPANY}? If not, happy to be pointed in the right direction."
7/ TEST THE OFFER FIRST
Keep every word identical except the offer.
Each version gets 1,000+ sends before you judge it.
You're looking for a 2% positive reply rate, or 20% of all replies being positive.
After 2 weeks, kill the bottom 60-70% and put the volume behind what's left.
8/ ANSWER EVERY REPLY IN UNDER 5 MINUTES
Pipe every reply into Slack, let AI tag the intent, and push positive ones to your phone.
Reply with 2-3 specific times (no Calendly link on the first reply).
When they ask about price:
"Hey {{first_name}}, pricing varies - but we typically do {PRICING MODEL, NOT EXACT COST}. Can't give you a specific number since it depends on {CUSTOMER NEEDS}. We can speak for 7-9 minutes about this briefly if you wouldn't be opposed to it. If you're open to it I'll send over an invite, if not no worries."
9/ MAKE THEM SHOW UP
The second they book, send a 1-2 minute video on what to expect.
Then reminders at 24 hours, 4 hours, 1 hour and 10 minutes before.
That takes show rates from 20-30% to 80-90%.
THE MATH
$10,000 ACV and a 20% close rate.
100,000 contacts in your market.
1 lead per 250 contacts, and 1 meeting per 4 leads.
At 10,000 contacts a month: 40 leads → 10 meetings → 2 clients → $20,000 added.
Reach your whole market every month: 400 leads → 100 meetings → 20 clients → $200,000 added.
Then re-contact the same market every 90 days with a new angle.
Run the numbers.
PumpGTM retweeted
I've built signal-based outreach workflows hundreds of times, most people suck at it despite understanding it from a top level, here's a hyper-realistic 8 step picture of what it looks like in motion -
(this for for SMBs - doing between $50k/mo and $500k/mo selling B2B with atleast a $4-5k ACV offer)
1. Build a 3-tier sending infra
- 10 ".com" domains, 30 Google inboxes warmed up for atleast 4 weeks
- 3 LinkedIn profiles with Sales Nav Core from 3 leadership members on your team
- One cold caller/ Account executive with a power dialer
(never more than 15 emails a day on google inboxes, never more than 2 emails and have 30 smtp inboxes ready for backup, optimize for safety of inboxes more than volume here)
_______
2. Decide signals for your use case
My favorite ones are:
- Website visitors identified (rb2b)
- Partial form submissions on your webiste
- High quality accounts that signed up and dropped off before paying
- atleast 30-50 LinkedIn profiles and creators for scraped for post engagers, includes:
(1) Founders and leadership team of competitors
(2) Founders and leadership of your users/clients
(3) Top agency owners and thought leaders in the space
(4) Founders of adjacent tools in the space, even though not directly competing
- Company profiles of adjacent tools, competitors, and agencies in your space
(scrape their followers)
_________
3. Your ICP recently hired into a new role
(just build a sales navigator lead list and toggle "got hired in the last 90 days"
scrape, enrich, qualify
__________
4. Lookalikes for every single client you close
Build a simple system that connects to your database/stripe, whenever a new company above a certain threshold (ie 50 employees) becomes a user, have an agenct look for 100 extremely close look alikes to this company.
___________
5. Set up your QLS (qualified lead stream) engine
- buy any decent tool that's reliable and can run waterfall enrichment for emails and phone numbers + a separate email validation tool
- get a subscription for Exa, Serper, FireCrawl, etc
- your normal claude max subscription
- Apify that scrapes these leads from sources
_____
6. How to qualify without breaking the bank
Simple rules -
- Pull all the data you can for free from contact data providers
- Have Claude Haiku do a preliminary check for obvious non icp fits (students, interns, wrong country, etc)
- everyone gets gets pushed to sonnet
- Exa does a surface level cheap research on every lead to remove any other mis fits and removes them
- everyone else who is qualified goes through deeper research and ranked for how good a lead it is
Rank based on:
- Quality of lead (company size, budgets, role etc)
- Quality of signal (aka lead on your website's pricing is better than someone who liked a competitor's post)
_______
7. Outreach orchestration:
-> highest quality leads immediately gets assigned to a rep, get a personalized LinkedIn connext request/inmail + send to slack with phone number for AE to cold call them
-> Everyone else gets a personalized email outreach , get cold called within 5 minutes of a reply from them
-> every lead, no matter score gets uploaded to LinkedIn ads manager for a retargetting campaign
______
8. Recycle non responsive and closed lost deals
- Every quarter, every lead that did not reply gets rotated to a nameless cold email campaign with different offer and copy incase they bite
- Account exective pulls a list of closed lost deals for updates and tried to win them back with pricing/value or new features etc
____
Rinse and repeat.
Go win.
last night I presented this workflow at my friends GTM engineering event in SF
this event is invite only and I can't even say the event's name because of some fight club rules
but I presented this workflow to monitor 100+ LinkedIn accounts of your competitors and steal their leads from who engages with these accounts
these leads are so good
no body engages with your competitors unless they're about to start buying from them let's be real
this flow extracts the net new engagers daily automatically
then does a waterfall enrichment to find emails, phone numbers, company size,
and then it will save it to a postgres database
and then you can old DM them on LinkedIn with HeyReach and also cold email them on Instantly AI and like build pipeline for your sales org
and all this runs automatically in the background 24/7, it can be shipped in 5 minutes and literally anyone with a claude code subscription can set it up right now
just give you agent this skill URL - github.com/graphed-inc/marke…
and say set it up for me
it will walk your through everything
PumpGTM retweeted
we booked 101 law firms and real estate offices in 8 weeks without pitching a single service in message one
wealthy managing partners ignore cold emails about SEO or marketing retainers because 30 agencies hit them with that before 9am
so we let chatgpt close the partner's ego before he even replied to us
heres the exact funnel:
the setup: claude code, google maps, sales navigator and eaglesend
step 1: run the ego prompt
open chatgpt and type:
"who is the best personal injury lawyer in [city]"
chatgpt names 2 or 3 local firms and leaves the other 400 attorneys in that city completely INVISIBLE
step 2: build the invisible list
we have claude code scrape google maps for every firm in that city with 20+ reviews that chatgpt left out
- pull the managing partner on sales nav
- keep the ones active on linkedin in the last 30 days
- check who has an open profile so the inmail costs zero credits
step 3: send the rival screenshot
subject line is just the partner's first name
- line 1: "asked chatgpt for the best injury firm in dallas and it recommended [rival firm] instead of you"
- line 2: "want to see why its skipping your site?"
attach the screenshot of his competitor winning the prompt
"won't he think you faked the screenshot"
he always thinks its fake for about 10 seconds
then he pulls out his own iphone at his desk and types the exact same question into chatgpt himself
when his own phone tells him the guy he hates down the street is the #1 lawyer in town, his ego snaps and he replies in 5 minutes asking how to fix it
step 4: how we turn the reply into a signed deal
- a human setter calls his office within 5 minutes of the reply
- never drop a calendly link in the chat
- pitch two specific slots: "does tuesday at 10am or wednesday at 2pm work"
- send the calendar invite while he is still on the phone
this works on plastic surgeons, med spas, commercial roofers, and wealth managers in any city on earth
find the business owners losing to a local rival on AI search and make them look at the screen
PumpGTM retweeted
this is one of the best cold emails i’ve seen in a while 🔥
great job Philip Smith @deel 👏🏾
PumpGTM retweeted
Sent 30 cold emails and heard nothing back?
Before sending another 30, read the last one from the recipient’s side.
Can they quickly tell why you chose them, what you can help with and how to reply?
PumpGTM retweeted
Anyone that’s been sending cold email campaigns is sitting on a free inbox placement test but they don’t even know it. Here’s how you can implement it.
I’ve posted plenty of times that our cold email deliverability stack is
Have enough domains to send 100% of the goal capacity. Enough sitting on the side warming for 50% of the capacity. 200% warming for free on Hypertide.
Every Friday, we pull the numbers and look for domains that are getting lower than a 1% reply rate.
95% of the time, this gives us all the insights we need to cancel inboxes and buy more.
There’s one more variable that’s been creeping up on spam filters.
Is your copywriting landing you in spam or are your domains actually burned?
Really tough to get a fast feedback on this quickly.
So we what we started doing was collecting all of the responses that would say “this person no longer works here, your email won’t be forwarded to anyone. And then we’d take a domain and test it.
“Hey, is this domain really not forwarding anywhere?”
If we got no response other than the auto response, we would use it for seed placement testing and send the true sales copy and something like asking them if they want to go to lunch to see where we get the auto response and where we don’t.
Seed inbox placement tests are limited that the inboxes you’re sending to have never marked anything as spam.
here you at least try your send on a real domain with a real spam filter.
It is limited that outlook will sometimes send the auto response even if you go to spam, but google won’t so at least on that MX you get a clear sign of what’s working and what’s not.
Take this post and give it to your AI to read your responses and you can make your own too.
PumpGTM retweeted
best performing cold email we sent this year:
"hey {name}, saw you're hiring a marketing manager
i'll book you 30+ calls per month without a 6 figure salary, fair?
james"
21 words
7.1% reply rate
why does it work?
it's extremely relevant
find a reason to actually reach out to your leads
PumpGTM retweeted
How I set up cold email for a new client:
> Buy domains on Porkbun
> Google inboxes on ScaledMail
> Add SPF, DKIM and DMARC
> Start warm-up
> Scrape Apollo, AI Ark and Google Maps
> Qualify before enriching
> Run the email waterfall
> Verify every email
> Pull MX records
> Split Google and Microsoft
> Write 15 to 30 variants
> Send replies to Slack
> Add them to my dashboard
I buy the infrastructure on day 1, because new inboxes need 14 days of warm-up before a single cold email goes out.
Everything else gets built while they warm.
I split every list by Google and Microsoft, because Google users reply at 6.5X the rate in our data.
Every client goes on my dashboard, so I can check their replies, positives and bounces against our agency averages and catch a dip early.
PumpGTM retweeted
Cold email is a huge hack fr fr.
For those asking for a template, there are dozens of templates online, but that's not what makes cold email or any sort of outreach work.
it's research.
It's understanding exactly what the prospect needs, and showing in up in a way that makes you impossible to ignore.
Basically speaking, you need 3 things:
1. A reason to send the cold email. There must be a trigger that you observed that makes that person the right recipient at that time
2. A subject line that is impossible to ignore. if your subject line cannot stop the reader in their tracks, you will get ignored
3. A simple, easy-to-say-yes-to CTA.
Good luck as you send.
P.S I built a tool that can help you with this. Check the first comment below for the link.
PumpGTM retweeted
The biggest, most underrated hack for getting replies to cold emails is answering the "why" question.
Before you write anything, ask yourself, “What do I want to get from this cold email?”
It's simple, but it's the key to writing a good CTA and structuring the whole email. Most of the cold emails I've reviewed were written with no clear outcome in mind for the prospect. You left them confused, so they ended up taking no action.
PumpGTM retweeted
don't fall for "only talk to investors when you are fundraising"
that works for seed rounds, but not for big rounds
well before one of those rounds starts, build relationships
PumpGTM retweeted
Here’s what you can do instead of sending cold emails:
> handwritten letters as image
> send a spotify playlist named after their problem
> send them a reddit thread where people are asking for exactly what they sell
> personalised voice notes
> loom videos
> send them “my mom will get mad if you don’t reply” and other funny DMs referencing a third party
> comment as outreach
> memes as outreach
> send a custom pitch decks
> send gift cards (works)
> tag them in a post where you break down their playbook
> build a tiny tool for their niche and share it free
> show up at their conference
> cold call them keep it non cringe
outreach is not just cold emails you just need to know what makes them click..
PumpGTM retweeted
when AI writes 80% of cold emails, the only sales skills that matter:
picking up the phone
talking like yourself (cursing included)
knowing who not to call
asking the question they can't google
shutting up after you ask it
remembering their kid plays travel ball
a beer at the hotel bar after day one of the conference
PumpGTM retweeted
the 4 line cold email:
line 1: something true about them
line 2: the problem that usually comes with it
line 3: what you do about it, in plain words
line 4: an easy question
that's it
PumpGTM retweeted
This cold email will never stop working…
-
Hey {{firstName}}, could I get you {result} with {BIG risk reversal}?
{{signature}}
PumpGTM retweeted
"you need a new domain for every 2-3 cold email inboxes."
we run up to 60 off one domain using subdomains.
we tested it across ~30,000 accounts first.
these are the rules that held up:
the root:
• one clean .com per tree, bought from Porkbun or Namecheap
• it gets forwarded through Cloudflare
• it NEVER sends, not even one campaign
• it's only there so the branches have something to hang off
the branches:
• each subdomain looks like send.yourdomain. com
• 20 branches per root is the hard ceiling
• every branch holds 2 to 3 official Google or Microsoft inboxes
• SPF, DKIM, DMARC and MX are set on each branch before it sends
• a flagged branch gets cut off and the rest keep going
the sending:
• each inbox sends 10 cold emails a day
• each inbox also sends 20 warm-up emails a day
• warm-up and campaigns start together and run side by side
• i build to about half the ceiling, so roughly 10 branches per root
where to be careful:
• somebody sends from the root and one burn takes every branch down with it
• the root is a .info, which is fine on its own but too shaky to hang subdomains off
• a root gets filled all the way to 20 branches, with no margin left
• you only run ~30 inboxes across the whole business. this earns its keep at hundreds or thousands of accounts
a few of our customers send from ~10,000 inboxes this way.
PumpGTM retweeted
Hunter analyzed 31 million cold emails to find out what gets replies.
Here's what they found:
