ColdIQ

Inbound-led-outbound is changing the world of outreach. In this exclusive webinar, we’ll show you how you can convert website visitors into paying customers. Secure your spot in this one time live event with Adam Robinson, the CEO & Founder of RB2B. We’ll walk you through the entire campaign creation process step-by-step live. But that’s not all… All attendees will be provided a template & messaging framework they can use to plug in and play right away. 😎 We’ll be running this event on August 27th at 4PM CET, hosted by Michel Lieben & Dan Rosenthal. You really don’t want to miss it. P.S Can’t make it? We’ll be sending out the recording to all attendees after the event.

We booked 162 meetings in June using ‘Inbound-led Outbound’ The principle is simple: - create content on social media - build audiences based of the engagement (profile viewers, website visitors) - reach out with context We use a mix of RB2B, Clay & lemlist to implement these systems via both Email and LinkedIn. If you need help setting such a system… You can book a meeting on ColdIQ’s website: coldiq.com ✌️

641 e-mails sent, 5 opportunities. For those who attended the ColdIQ x Clay event last week in Barcelona. You might know I launched a campaign live in-person. Not just any campaign. One that showed the full extent of what is possible via AI + automation in Clay. And at first, it was an epic fail. Almost everyone was telling me I got 1-3 points wrong. I was relying on some data points that I shouldn't have used. And my AI outputs were hallucinating a bit. At least it was polarising enough to get a high response rate 🤷♂️ . So I paused the campaign the day after the event. Spent a week fixing it. Reduced the amount of personalisation points from 4 ➡ 3. And changed the data I was pulling. Relaunched yesterday. I haven't been this excited about a campaign in a while. Got a response that literally read: "You have my attention." 5 sales opportunities created in one day. 1 meeting booked so far (2 more leads look promising). And I expect more responses to come in today. For 641 emails sent (200 of which were bad), I'd say this is a big success. So we are going to keep running this play. Even though there are some unavoidable mistakes in the AI outputs. ----- What were the main takeaways here? 1️⃣ Make sure the data you are feeding AI is accurate. 2️⃣ Choose your enrichments wisely and understand their weaknesses. 3️⃣ Thoroughly spot check AI outputs for hallucinations. 4️⃣ Be quick to monitor negative responses. 5️⃣ But if you make a crazy play like this work, you're winning. With ColdIQ having 9 CSMs to help clients. I'm shifting focus to mainly our own campaigns. The goal is to have the biggest outbound operation in the space. And I will be experimenting more than I have ever before. Sharing my learnings here. So make sure to follow if you want to see outbound insights from the market. For those who attended, is this what you expected? 👇 CC: Jérémy Grandillon, Arnaud Belinga 🧊🔨, Pierre Patrouillard, Ryane Tully 🎥 🤖, Oriol Serra, Alan Ruchtein, Stefan 🦁 Kollenberg, Gleb Kolyada

Major FOMO for this event! (especially 'cause Barcelona is my absolute favorite city to visit) Shoutout to the ColdIQ team for hosting and bringing together this group of sharp minds. Michel Lieben 🧠, Alex Vacca 🧠🛠️, Dan Rosenthal. From our team, thank you to Stefan 🦁 Kollenberg for a stellar live pres, and of course Kae Burke and Lele Xu for empowering our Clay Club chapters! More to events to come from this new and awesome community 😁 -- excited to have another reason to go to Barcelona!

Can AI SDRs truly replace your SDR team? Here's the catch 👇 Last week, I met 4 CEOs who churned after trying AI SDRs solutions. The promise convinced them: → Fire your whole SDR team → Pay a subscription → Get meetings booked for your sales So what’s the catch? The catch is living up to the promise. AI-SDR are mostly automated cold emailing campaigns. Running a successful cold outreach campaign is hard. There are: → Technical aspects: setting up emails → Strategical aspects: identifying ICPs and narratives, testing, iterating → Operational aspects: finding the right prospects To be successful, these AI SDR companies need to build: 1- Email Infrastructure: buy domains, create emails, set up technically, monitor health, warm up domains, basically rebuild a lemwarm 2- Lead database: mix of company, prospect data (like Apollo.io, lemlist, ZoomInfo) 3- Intent database: (like RB2B, Snitcher, 6sense, Clearbit) 4- Emailing automation platform: (like lemlist, Outreach, Salesloft) 5- LinkedIn automation platform: (like lemlist, HeyReach, Expandi.io) 6- A solution for Lead Routing, Reply Management & Reporting No existing player even combine all these features perfectly yet. Not even Apollo.io, created 9 years ago. On top of that, AI SDR companies will need to build all the intelligence: complex AI workflows on top. Now consider B2B Growth Agencies like ColdIQ or Scalability. They are among the best in the world. They still don't automate more than 50% of what they do. They hire skilled people with tech-savvy backgrounds, and years of experience to run campaigns. Do you believe one company that raised $20m can build: 1- All the technical brick required 2- An AI that outperforms world-class agencies? Of course not. So what's next? AI SDR companies will become services companies disguised as software. This will not be the first time. I wouldn't be surprised if they try to partner with agencies to outsource their customer delivery operations. In my opinion, AI SDR is not a software category. AI-powered outreach is a feature that every serious player in the Cold Outreach space will offer and improve over time. Additional thoughts: Never forget SDRs are your future Sales reps. It might be short sighted to cancel your SDR program. Instead, you can hire better SDRs, and invest in a Growth Outbound team & tools to make them more efficient. Or invest this money in a leading Cold Outreach agency like the ones above to feed your SDRs & Sales teams. I'm curious: what are your thoughts on AI SDRs?

With 100s of tools out there, building a tech stack from scratch can feel a bit overwhelming (and expensive). If I were an agency or small sales team just starting out, here's where I'd put my money: Database Apollo.io - $99 Linkedin Sales Navigator Premium - $99 Data Scraping Instant Data Scraper - Free! PhantomBuster - $49 Data Enrichment Clay - $350 Clay works best when integrated with APIs; otherwise, it can get expensive quickly. Some of my favorite integrations to use are: LeadMagic, Ocean.io, Prospeo and of course ChatGPT. Sales Engagement Smartlead - $94 or Instantly.ai $80 Multi-Channel La Growth Machine - $100 or lemlist - $100 ____ This covers all the bases. And for under $800 a month, you have an absolute juggernaut. What would you change?

AI isn’t replacing SDRs, marketing teams are. At least SDRs that aren’t using tech to plug into their org’s whole GTM motion. Getting 554 email leads in the next 6 months is totally doable. IF you take advantage of these 5 performance boosters. For context, there were 13 campaigns behind this screenshot. And here are some important notes on the strategy: 1️⃣: 2 step sequences, with 3-4 step subsequences. 2️⃣: 3-4 sentences max each. 3️⃣: Every email had at least 1 sentence that was personalised through Clay formulas or AI. 4️⃣: CTAs offered 1 of 3 things: content, event invites, or meetings. 5️⃣: Sender had an online presence in their B2B niche. So yes, there is a variation in buying intent across the 554 leads. But most importantly, every lead was heavily qualified, either through: Generic filters like company size, location, niche within sector, headcount, and job title. OR The above + content/marketing engagement. So here is the cheat sheet. 👉 Build an online presence (e.g. with LinkedIn or YouTube). 👉 Target qualified leads (ideally marketing-qualified leads). 👉Automate personalisation based on your qualification data (e.g. using Clay). 👉Use content-driven CTAs (e.g. Would you want to see…?) 👉Convert with quick-response subsequences (e.g. send the content and pitch the relevant offer in <30 min). With Nr. 2, we saw ~10x positive reply rates when ICP-qualified leads had previously engaged with content (upwards of 10% PRRs). So partially “inbound-led outbound”, but all these campaigns fall under the umbrella of “marketing-led outbound”. And I’m stealing these terms from Adam Robinson. So shout out to him, Bethany Stachenfeld, and Patrick Spychalski for inspiring this take with their RB2B x Clay x Sendspark webinar yesterday. Do you think marketing and sales may as well converge into 1 GTM/Growth team at this point? 👇 PS: And excuse the bounce rate, single-tenant Outlook setups got messy 😅. Also we shut off open tracking for most of these campaigns.

This workflow booked 10+ meetings for every 1000 non-responding CRM or newsletter leads included. Doing it like this, is advantageous because you: 1️⃣ Target warmer leads thanks to your marketing efforts. Extra points if you personalize your outreach. 2️⃣ Get the most out of multichannel bandwidth, since you're prioritizing the most promising leads. 3️⃣ Maximize deliverability since newsletter email open rates can be much lower versus sending on Instantly.ai or lemlist. 4️⃣ Clean and update CRM data in the process. This is how the workflow is split up: Cleaning contact info 🛁 - Formulate basic merge fields (e.g. Company and first names). - Validate emails with LeadMagic. - Use LinkedIn to find updated work emails for invalids with Prospeo, LeadMagic, Datagma, Icypeas, Findymail, and Hunter.io. Scoring leads 💯 - Qualify based on basic prospect info (job title + company size). - Find additional relevant data points (hiring, ads, or funding data). - “Score row in Clay" based on data + validation formula outputs. Personalizing messaging 👫 Personalize first line based on their last engagement date. (Optional) Further personalize relevancy in first line using AI. (Optional) Personalize the value prop based on significant lead score triggers. Campaign routing 🛣 - Route into Phone+LI+Email, Email+LI, and Email only sequences based on scores, enriching for phones with FullEnrich. - Lookup invalid emails in CRM (where we have a new email) for previous deals at the company. - Enrol those leads into new in role "previous champion" campaign. ----------------------------------------------------------- Here’s the general messaging framework I use here: {{first_name}}- Since you were having a look at (the problem you solve) {{Time since last engagement}}, I was wondering how it's been going with (the wider initiative) recently. {{Value Proposition}} Opposed to checking out the latest? No expectations. (Shoutout to Gong for inspiration on the CTA!) Hope this is useful. Like + comment on this post and I can send over the Clay table, full-res schematic, and Notion page containing the formula personalization prompts we used for this 🚀 .

We’re launching a Private Community and Coaching Program … in which we’ll teach you *exactly* how we run outbound campaigns at ColdIQ. That is,  → the workflows/processes that generate 100+ monthly leads for some of our clients. But also, → how we leverage AI and tools like - Clay: coldiq.com/tools/clay - RB2B: coldiq.com/tools/rb2b - Lemlist: coldiq.com/tools/lemlist - Instantly: coldiq.com/tools/instantly + Apify, Ocean.io, Apollo.io, LeadMagic, FullEnrich, Prospeo, HeyReach & more. → how we prompt LLMs like OpenAI GPT-4o & Anthropic Claude 3 Opus to power our account research & personalize at scale. → all our frameworks & SOPs (Prompting, Automation, Copywriting, Outbound Plays, Email Infrastructure) We debated doing this for a long time. But here’s the thing… We’re posting a lot on LinkedIn.  And we get a lot of inbound because of it. The issue is that many inbound leads are ‘unqualified’ for our ‘done-for-you’ offering. Admittedly, prospecting services aren’t cheap, especially for smaller organizations. And despite our best ‘qualification’ efforts…  we kept talking with people who couldn’t afford our services. The ‘sad’ part is that smaller teams are the ones who’d actually benefit the most from learning AI, automation & tech applied to outbound sales. So here’s our solution 👇 A cohort-based coaching program that includes: - Weekly Live sessions (where we build campaigns from scratch with you) - A private community where we answer all your questions - Step-by-step tutorial videos - All our internal resources - 1:1 Onboarding If you want more information on the program… Have a look at the video and chat with our team 👇 👉 go.coldiq.com/accelerator P.S: The first cohort will be limited to 25 people.  Get in, fast :)

Knowing if a company is running ads can be a fantastic sales trigger to use. But how do you find that information? Let me show you. ⬇ Now, there's a few ways you can do this natively through Clay but they're expensive and less accurate. But through integrating Serper, we're able to find out if a company is running ads for next to nothing. Each company on the list is put through a sequence where Serper scrapes the Linkedin Ad Library and determines if they're actively running ads. The best part? It's 2 Serper credits per search. ($0.0075 in USD) Like + comment "template" and I'll send the step-by-step guide over. P.S 🤫 Follow me for more free templates like this.