https://www.listennotes.com/e/52506d007c41415089db7828aa8c2fa1

What is up, ladies and gentlemen? Welcome to another episode of Unfuck My Startup. Today's a topic that we all wanna know about. Everybody wants to know how to cold email better. We have somebody with us today. His name is V. He is literally the doctor of cold email these days. He's the founder, CEO of Smart Lead. He is helping businesses finally break free from the manual grind and unlock a consistent flow of qualified leads. He's built a platform. It's all about working smarter, not just harder when it comes to outreach. Get ready to think, rethink how you find your next customers. We're joined by the founder and CEO of Smart Lead. What is up V? Welcome to the show, my man.

Thank you, sir. Thank you for having me. That is a great intro. I will try to get a snippet of that and do it before every call I've got.

Every call, every call later on. So the thing that there are, so there's, What all of you want to know from V, which is what is working in Outbound today, and this guy knows more because of what his system does, which is sends loads of cold email. He knows more about what is happening in Outbound, what's working, what's not in the macro than literally anybody else, but he's also a bootstrapper. So fuck yeah, there, brother. That's what I'm talking about. And he's one of these magical bootstrappers that has reached this, Exit velocity, beautifully sized 20 million plus ARR business, like not a ton of employees. I have to imagine it's pretty profitable. So, you know, I just wanted to mention that because everybody should know that here's another exemplar of how we should all be building. So thank you for providing such great inspiration, my man.

I appreciate it. Thank you, sir. We stand on the shoulder of giants, much like yourself.

Well, I'm flattered. I'm flattered.

So.

Pete, what do we. What is the order these days?

So the. Or, I mean, it hasn't changed too much. So we're gonna hop into the pitch slab. So, V, we have our first section is called the pitch lap. We pull up somebody that we pre-selected from the audience. Today we have Vadim Galiev. He is from score machine AI. You're no stranger to sending messages out to bad leads. I'm certainly not. And Vadim is here to help correct that. So there's two sections where we call up audience members. This is the first one. It's called the Pitch Slap. If folks, audience, audience, if you would like to participate in the Pitch Slap, email producer@rb2b.com, we'll take a look. We would love to have you up. This is kind of like half Shark Tank, half QVC a little bit. So people will pitch, There's usually the chatter box goes a little wild, the chat down there. We'll run a poll where people can vote if they would like or if they're, it's something they would buy or not buy just off the concept. And then we have the book demos straight within the chat, which is usually pretty awesome. Sometimes they get a couple dozen demos, which is depending on your ACV and your company, that's like an SDR's month. It's good. We love doing it. So we're pulling up Vadim here.

Thanks for having me here today. It's a huge pleasure. Thank you. I'm flattered as well.

Yeah.

And this audience, I hope it will take less than usual because in this audience, I don't need to explain why do we need to have good leads, right? And also because we all came here to listen to WhiteCoat, I think I don't need to explain why you need the tools to validate emails and let me present you a score machine. That's a project that I'm working on. Just let me know, guys, if you see my screen right now. Do you see my screen?

Yet?

Oh, no, we are right.

Yes.

Okay, cool. Pretty much score machine is like a zero bounce and never bounce, but four mobile phones. And for those of you who have been using Clay, and I'm sure there are a lot of people who are using Clay, you've probably seen Clearout won't be added to their normal waterfall. So unlike that tool, we are not just about normalization and making sure that the digits are right there in that number. We are actually getting the actual status for the, whether that number was ported from one server service to another service from one operator to another network and we can give insights on connectivity. You've probably seen another tool like that, it's called Titan X and unlike Titan X, we are covering more than 160 countries and we don't take, and let me just use my Dubai number just to prove the point, and we don't take 24 hours to deliver the results. It's, well, it doesn't say anything, but let me just do it again. I'm bootstrapping that thing, guys, and yeah, it's all built as we go. So yeah, as you can see, here are my mobile operator details, carrier name, where I'm based, the time zone, and moreover, we also retrieve instant messenger statuses. So if I have a WhatsApp or Telegram account connected to that number, you will be able to see that and you will be able to add that to your outreach sequence. Soon we will have device detection, RCS, iMessage, so much more. And just because we have a Web Cof today, I want to show you something that is literally is still in the baking. And do you see me switching between tabs? That's.

Yeah, we got it.

It's on the Chrome. It's on the Chrome, rather.

All right, I hope you see the next tab. On that tab, I'm just showing our take on email validation. Unlike zero-bounce and never-bounce, where you have the, whether it's a valid or invalid or catch-all address, we go a little bit beyond that and we also retrieve the last seen status. You will be able to send your emails only to those to the inboxes where there was a recent activity. And all this information adds up to our contactability score. That's why we are called Score Machine. So stay tuned, book a demo, and let's unfuck cold outreach together.

Hell yeah. Who's gonna book a demo? Right demo. Who's gonna book a demo with Vadim?

Is there a, or Vadim, is there a way to upload like in bulk? Can I do like a CSV of emails?

Okay.

Well, right now, not a CSV. So we are still working the self-service and that's probably the area we need to grow at. But right now we support API and SMPP integration, which is probably, by the way, let me know when the next time Varun is here, right? Because the end goal is to be on that Clay waterfall as well. Right now we support API and SNMP. We are happy to provide all that integration support for you. If you are doing more than if you have more than one SDR doing more than 100 calls a day, which is totally normal, like Kevin last week told us that it normally is between 150 and 200, then probably that tool would like having that tool in your marketing stack would make sense. so we are happy to provide all the support and integration. We are just starting and as I said, I'm bootstrapping that whole thing. So yeah, I'd love to have demos with the crowd from.

Cool.

Well, hey, pop in your calendar link into the chat. People will book some demos with you and yeah, folks, I think most outreach strategies fail because people reach out to 80% of just dead leads. So I'm glad folks are out there. they're fixing it, especially a bootstrap founder like yourself. So hey man, thank you for joining. And let's hop into it. So V, a lot of people want to, I think the first place we should start- well, hold on.

Let's just, in the event that there's anybody in this chat that does not know what Smartly does, what does Smartly do? Just to give some context to why you are such an authority in this area of study.

Right? All right, fair enough. The goal simple, we help people who want new leads reach their leads primary inbox consistently. That's about it. You can send a lot of emails at scale and the best hope that we can offer for you is we make sure that you constantly show up in your leads top of the line primary folder so they get to reply back to you, you get to book a meeting and then you close the deal, make some money.

Boom. Now let's get into it.

Heck yeah. The ultimate 2025 lead generation.

By the way, V. Anthony Richards wants to know what does Instantly do?

They're a great tool. They're a great tool. We tend to just play front and back with each other.

Oh, that's good stuff.

Anthony off the top rope there.

Yeah, we like that kind of stuff. So let's jump into, are you doing cold outreach at Smart Lead? Is that one of your lead gen tactics?

Yeah, we definitely do outbound. It's been doing it for a while. As you guys know, that does flip based upon how the markets go. Sometimes it's the higher perspective, sometimes it's a lower perspective. Content takes precedence, word of mouth takes precedence, product-led takes precedence. Right now, outbound accounts for not the lion's share of our revenue, but I think the first year and a bit it accounted for a lion's share of revenue.

So is it more right now where you're at, kind of supplementing the other growth channels that you're leveraging?

Absolutely. I think we're nearly three years in at this point, just a month or two shy of it. We're pumping on all cylinders, right? We're doing ad band, social, paid, content, collaborations.

You're making appearances on people's live shows.

We're making appearances on people's live shows. And that's wherever we can be, we want to be. So omnipresent. And I think that's the same thing that I tell for most people is it's not a fight. It's not like engineers are beating marketers and marketers beating engineers. Both need to exist. for each of us to make money.

We hear that. We'd slow down some of our outbound stuff last year and focused really heavily on brand. If anyone doesn't know, you're on a brand marketing asset right now on this show. And still, today, I'm sure there's a ton of emails going out via Smartlead for our B2B right now. So what are you or your clients and the customers of Smartlead But there are like some foundational elements of an outbound strategy that you're seeing work today. We've just seen email change so much over the years. And, I mean, especially smartly, right? You're sending out these, you have this kind of robust infrastructure that you have to set up. Nowadays you want your emails to look like they're coming directly from that person, even though you might be sending out thousands. So what are some of these tactics that people are using to get ahead right now?

Right now, a bunch of people are trying a bunch of these. venders that have really interesting setups predominantly from the outlook side where you can do a bunch of Azure type setups or shared mailboxes. There are a ton of vendors out there. I don't keep any bias. You can check most of them out there in the market. That seems to work well for a ton of people. Other than that, the market switches up and down, but the core functionality doesn't change as much. Some people change their warm-up settings up and down here and there. Um, which is completely fair and we see that happen all the time. Back in the day, people used to do 40 warmups. Nowadays, people do a lot less, maybe in the 20 to 26 range. Back in the day, people used to do 40 outband. Nowadays, you know, 20 to 20, 27 is more so the floating range. Some people still do 40, some people do five, some people do two.

Um, you're saying emails per day, sorry, from that.

Yeah, mails per day per mailbox. Um, some people do two, some people do 26, some people still stick to the traditional 40. Right. Um, but putting the technicals aside, the biggest thing still has been, will be and continue to be, and I've said this on multiple of the similar brand asset office hours we've got is content copy and relevance. Um, you, you, you definitely have to have varied content. You cannot keep the same information anymore. Um, I think, some people have seen this or not. More recently, we, we introduced a principle called sender balance. What sender balance effectively means is, the lead actually exists, the mail has bounced, but the mail has bounced simply because either your tenant's blown up or you're sending spam copy, right? That's pretty much the way it is. And the reason why I think this has happened is pretty simple. It's pretty much peeling the onion. Back in 2010s, what occurred was Gmail and Outlook, again, this is me with the tinfoil hat on, of course. Gmail Outlook said, all right, we'll beat them on the technicals. the MX records, DKIM, DMARC, SPF, we've all heard the fancy titles. Then they said, all right, now everyone's doing the fancy shit, let's just go something a bit further than that. They started getting into things like tenant fingerprinting and not buying too many mailboxes from a single workspace or tenant is the equivalent of an admin for anyone who uses Microsoft. All that fancy stuff, right? We cannot have too many mailboxes pretend and bounce rates matter, reply rates matter, etc. that was part two and that's still existed. Part three is kind of where we are right now, effectively meaning they're now gonna use content as a way to identify whether you're a spammer or not, right? Or your relevance is high or not. We've seen this and again, so I may say that the whole, I've said this in the previously said this, so please forgive me, 'cause I've repeated this a few times on my side as well, which is we've literally seen where we would send mails to 10 people, which is our own mailboxes. And when I would mark the first mail as spam and I refresh on the right side, maybe three or four, you would see that mail disappear and hit the spam folder. And it's common. Other people have seen it. We're not the first ones to discover it. It happens. And the reason why that happens, because the content is the same. So when your content is the same, these Bayesian algorithm baseline security mail gateways are Google spam filter or Outlook spam filters pretty much pick up that this content has been previously marked as spam. So I'm going to go ahead and change it up or move it to spam, right? So yeah, that's the TLDR. The baseline format is quite straightforward. You're in the world of AI, in the world of relevance, our B2B obviously has something great to offer on that part as well, which is stay very, very relevant to your lead, change your copy very proactively, spin tax the crap out of it, use AI where you have to. and it's not that hard to close a deal then at that point.

I have a lot of questions about, well, I have a couple of really big questions about this content or copy thing. So I remember, I mean, I think we've all seen that HubSpot list of like, it's like, here are the 400 spam words that you want to avoid in your email copy. We were all using that for probably 10 years. Is there, I would imagine with just AI and I mean, Google has one of the most robust AI systems. I use Gemini every day. Are there new rules to follow when it comes to copy? Is it still based on words or is it more like the repetition of the copy? Are there certain kind of changing principles that people should be aware of?

Great question. A bit nascent for me to give a direct answer saying this is the absolute, because I know when I say something, everyone says, I told you said that in this, I get a screenshot recording and I'm like, all right, okay. So I've been caught in the past for that. try to be very neutral. So please forgive me if I come with very lame politically correct answers, been burnt. And that's just because it changes. What I say right now, as you all know, will probably change by the 19th of May, right? Something's going to happen by then. But to answer your question very quickly, we've actually got a spam tracker. The words, it's actually when you create content, you can see that yourself at that point in end. and what we also go and do is we have something on the delivery side where you can actually see which, when you change content, how many meals land in primary, how many land in secondary, how many land in the promotion or spam folder. So what I can point out to very straightforward over here is without going into certain, I guess, patterns to follow, what I can suggest is what you can do to be on top of your game so that I'm not giving a templated solution. Right? If you got Microsoft or if you got Google, with Microsoft you got Microsoft Defender, and with Google you got Postmasters. So Microsoft Defender, the interesting thing, I don't know which subscription model it is, but on the higher tiers, you can effectively see where your emails land. So it's not that secretive. So if you set up for Microsoft Defender and you send your mails through Microsoft Defender, which is basically you can connect your mailboxes to Microsoft Defender, it will tell you if your mail has landed in the target leads Microsoft account, if it is Microsoft, if it's landed in the spam or primary folder. It's not 100% accurate 99% of the time. There's irony in that, but it does work. Cool. And the second thing is with Postmasters. What Postmasters does for you is it gives you a very good indication of how many people are marking your content as spam and how many people are not marking the spam. When people are marking as spam, what you can easily do, it's actually straightforward. you'll get a list of those mails that have been marked as spam, pull it down, and generally if you're just lazy AF, take that CSV, dump it to ChatGPT, and straight away say, what are some common word clouds of patterns of words that I'm using here? That's marking me as spam. So it's not that your mail will go to spam directly because of this, but what it will mean is there's a higher chance now future mails we send that content similar, that contains similar words, will probably end up in spam. These are just preventative patterns that can offer. So sort of flipped it, if you don't mind, which was less around here's what you should do versus here's the measures that you can set up and you'll be able to figure out or, you know, sail your own boat as a result.

Can I ask some detail about something you said earlier? So you were like, are you suggesting that it's a good idea to send completely unique emails to all of your leads. So, and you use AI to do that, use Clay to do that, whatever.

But it's- you- can use AI, you can use spin taxing, like regressive spin taxing. So the magic number, spin taxing basically means is pretty much just instead of saying, hey, first name, blah, blah, blah, you get to say, hey, hi, hello, first name. So the change of verbiage, effectively, quote unquote, the job of that is to effectively help bring in more randomization and draw in a bit more humanistic pattern. But the concept to draw here is Google's not dumb. Hey, hi, hello is kind of all the same shit, right? So what they're going to look for is intent or switch. So effectively it's the same as doing AB testing. So you have to try different angles and offers or your spin tax needs to be so aggressive, which is not, hey, hi, hello. But it has to be, good morning, Adam, or, I read about you somewhere, Adam. So it's all greetings, but very different greetings. It's not just, Hey, hi, hello anymore. And you can do that in nested ways and you can do that littered across your entire content. So when you're sending an email, it can be the same copy or intent, but it's completely separate messages because of the permutation combinations you've got going for 1000 separate.

That'S crazy. Does your system do that?

Yeah, yeah, we've been doing it for two years, two, three years, whatever it is.

And is that, is that like a, is that like a PLG feed? Like some, everybody listening could just sign up and like within, they could uplevel their skill and they could just get in there and do it. They don't need agency help or anything.

Uh, great question. So as of now, you want to use like a spin tax generator, but probably as of tomorrow day after we've got our own, like we've got a spin tax creator. So you can click a button, put in like general content or your, your singular copy, click a button and then we'll spin tax crap out of it for you.

So you should be sorted. I'm in the chat, asked about the subject line.

Do you do the same thing for subject lines where you- Fabulous question. No, I don't do it for subject lines. For subject lines, you actually have to have AB testing. The reason is simple. Cause the goal of spin tax over here is to be the spam filter. the goal of the subject line is to get through click-through rates. So if your subject line is different and you've got spin taxing, most platforms, including us, will not be able to tell you won't have the analytics to get the exact verbiage that converted. I mean, you'll have all the data, but you'll have to actually pull it down and do it your way. But if you're, you want to different subjects, you can simply A/B test it. You can, you can add like 90, A/B variants on our platform. So don't spin tax just, create your 90 variants. So that way you actually have pretty solidified data sets to let you know this is working versus this isn't. Because again, with Spintax, it's not treated as a separate variant altogether. It's just randomization.

A few other questions popped up about subject line. Are there a specific number of words that you are finding from smart lead folks who are getting I guess, quality open rates.

It's not words. It's actually, it's how human you keep it. So some, a new pattern that a trend we're seeing a lot of people do more recently, I think as of just like literally April, May is all lowercase and like three or four words. All lowercase. It looks like, it's like a work email. Yeah.

Actually, somebody, Venky in the chat had asked about, Yeah, like he said, pretty much everyone's inbox is flooded. I wonder if any economic buyer is spending more than one second to look at cold email these days. I think they are if it looks like it's coming from a human. If it looks like you're actually trying to reach out to them with something of value and there's intent behind it, I think even at the end of it, if they realize that it's a sales email, they've already digested your value proposition. And at that point, that's really what matters. And yeah, I mean, we're, we're big users of Fixer here. I don't know if you use Fixer. I do. We had the Fixer guys, Richard and Archie, on, on the show too. So, I mean, heck, that all goes into a marketing folder that I don't even see. But the really, really good ones still hit my inbox. I still open them and I read them.

So. Well, I think you've nailed a really good point over here, which is kind of what happened to resumes where a, you're not actually building the resume for a recruiter, but for AI. Now, you're actually going to be writing emails to be categorized by AI. So step one is to be the spam folder. Step two is not to be the AI categorizer that decides that, yeah, your mail is actually something that's important versus marketing. And I think, because I use Fixer as well, there's the important marketing, promotion, notification, all that jazz. So you probably not want to use these tools or sign up to them. Good idea. I'm thinking we'll have to go through it and figure out where their AI categorizes your mail. Because to your exact point, Pete, I pretty much don't even read anything that says marketing or notification. I literally just click on it, select all, mark as read, right? I only focus on the, I think, urgent or whatever the term is.

Yeah, like needs response. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Two responses and those are the only two ones.

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if more people start offering email filtering with needs response. If you start getting really clever outbound that solicits response.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, so it's, it's actually a great way for you to go ahead and figure out what these tools are doing because you're probably going to be reaching out, the more they grow, you're probably going to be reaching out to someone who's their customer. That means they effectively kind of become a meta Google. 'Cause they now get to decide your fate, not just Google itself.

Oh, dude, why is it so hard?

We say that, but we're all using Fixer.

Yeah, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know. But that's the ultimate play, right? I mean, if someone goes ahead and builds the root and the cause, meaning that you built a filter on top of Other mailboxes to classify males, but you only just allow like smart lead males to come through. That'll be, that'll be, I don't know if that's going to have some legal.

Cycles to it, but that'll be a fun one to build.

Hey, how about this?

We'll build the product and you can just like pay us. I'm ready for it. Okay, Lucina is a great question, but let's do the unfuck my startup segment first. And then we want to ask you about enterprise spam filters because Jesse Willette was on here two weeks ago. Yeah, I've seen that. And he was like, he was like, nobody's getting through fucking enterprise filter. I just want to know if you have a differing opinion.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm very curious about that. That was new news to me. He was basically, he made us believe that you shouldn't even waste your time emailing anybody if they could afford Barracuda or whatever, if they could afford 50,000. So anyway, so let's go.

Yeah, let's pull somebody. So I would love somebody to come up and whose email infrastructure or they just can't land in an inbox or they can't convert or get opens or whatever it might be, they're just there. their email infrastructure is completely fucked.

Hey guys, sorry I was just having a technical difficulty here. So sorry about that.

Thanks for coming on Steve.

Thank you guys, thank you for the opportunity to ask some questions and see how things go. So yeah, just let me know where to start and I can start from there. I have some email sequences that basically I uploaded to a Google Sheets that I can, if that's something that I can share, and then we can go over that. Just to know how it works.

Sure. Yeah, feel free to share. You know the best place to start.

Let me see here.

You're getting a lot of good comments on your collection behind you as well.

Yeah, I was gonna ask this.

Thanks.

Thanks.

Keith Gill. Is that. Are you the Keith Gill that did the GameStop thing?

This is.

Is this a different Keith Gill? You know, the Roaring Kitty. Never mind. Anyway, we'll have Steve share screen. Different guy. Right on.

All right, sorry. I'm just pulling it up. I did just start, like, I've been in a company for two months, and I feel like most of my emails are going to spam as I did similar sequences to what I used to do in my previous comment company as it was a similar. tool. It wasn't, you know, copy and paste. And basically it wasn't working as expected. So I'm very curious. Maybe I use spam words because in our industry there's a lot of fraudsters. So I'm guessing that that might be one of the spammy words, let's say.

Right?

So have you shared it somewhere or? Yeah.

Can you share your screen?

Trying to share. There we go. Okay. Window. Okay. One second.

You might need to hit more. It's got three dots in a circle around it. There you go.

Here.

Do you guys see the screen with my email?

Yeah.

We now see a bunch of docs.

Okay. All right. So this is, you know, let's say, for example, My starter email, I ask if they are aware, and then I have like a B version where I'm telling them we're monitoring your website and we see over X amount of active users. So all this information is true, right? So we're giving them actual data. So in my view, I'm sending them something that's humanized and not robust.

I'm gonna let V answer this one, but the word articulating the word fraudsters and saying things like hijacked in a prospecting email is my opinion the wrong vibe, but turning it over to V.

Yep. Anything with hijack phishing itself that probably will be flagged directly by Gmail and Outlook. Even saying things like fraudsters will probably come to it that point. I would just, I think this is great in terms of the brevity and you're getting straight towards it. Let's just say you were trying to go ahead and sell, I always look at a WIFM, right? What's in it for me? And if I were to position it as a WIFM type approach, which is you're trying to sell to me saying, we've got a bunch of people targeting my brand, because we've had this issue, right? Affiliate jacking has happened to us, right? if you can just go and throw a random number, it can be completely inaccurate. Or if you got the accuracy even 10 times better, right? And be like, hey, I found 50 something fraudsters targeting your brand. And what does that mean?

So for example, here, like I'll have that, right? Like usually my idea is to do a small intro in the first email and to try to get in the inbox, right? I try not to send any pictures, URL links, demo, demo, demo.

That's something. So this is actually perfect, right? Because the brevity smartly is actually good, it's plain, it's very simple and straightforward. I'm just saying if I were to receive this message, I guess because I'm in the industry, I sort of get called out and see that this is pretty much an automated mail. But if you were to just send me a message saying, Hey, we've been monitoring smart leads impressions, notice that you've got about 30-something fraudsters hitting your brand and probably causing you unwanted affiliate revenue. Great.

Okay.

Now I'm interested. So I do have, like, I do want to say, like, for example, here my first email that I decided to do, that was my first draft. This is like my, what I've sent. I just wanted to get an idea. So here, like, this is for, like, CMOs head of growth. So people that have, like, a lot of responsibilities for the company's brand. So I'll say, like, several marketing leaders we've spoken to were shocked to learn how many impersonators abuse their brand in paid search. highjacking, blah, blah, blah. And then I talk about pain points. It damages your brand's reputation, it drives up CPC, and it makes it harder to measure true marketing performance, which these three things CMOs care about.

Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, can I ask what your role is in your company?

So I'm a BDR. I do from A to Z.

Okay, sweet. So this is just a genuine question, right? So. So please let me know if you can completely disagree because some copy is sometimes just opinion and I might be wrong in this, right? If I were to say, hey Steve, sales is a very important part of any business and it's important to drive revenue for the company. People are shocked when they realize that, you know, the ad band engine drove X amount of revenue for them. I've helped companies, blah, blah, blah, to do this much revenue. Would you like me to see how? the second part is fine, but the first part is you're explaining my own job to me in the sense that it's, I think there's a term I learned. It's called the presumed knowledge curse. The presumed knowledge curse effectively means it comes in two ways. Either you, you speak less about it, assuming that the cost, the other person knows about it already, or you speak more about it, assuming the person doesn't know about it. Right. So if you're selling to CMO, they're already well aware of brand impersonations causing impact to their business. So you've wasted three lines on that part, right? I would go more into the point of, yo, if this is hurting your brand right now, I've got a solution for you. Qualify them straight away because like I said, I always put myself in it. I am the person who was having some people take our affiliate link, make some money out of it, and we were actually paying, they were actually targeting our own brand keyword, right? And even if it was a cold email, I would have just restarted saying, send me a link, right? And if you send me a screenshot showing me the Google thing, one or two things would have happened. Either I would have just ignored your mail and I said, I would have gone after my head of growth saying, hey, can we get this fixed? Or I would have restarted you saying, what the hell are you doing?

What software are you using? Because I'm not able to solve it myself. So I do have in my second or third email, which my third email, like I'm, that basically like it goes here into more details, right? I'm telling them this is what our tool and covered and I'm sending a screenshot with verification backed up by like Google ad transparency. So I'm showing them like this is again where it's not personal. I actually have a screenshot of their company. It's not a random company.

You've done that. But so this is in terms of you know what, Um, Adam and Pete have been asking in terms of, Hey, trends and patterns, most people don't go through even the third meal. Um, I think by the third meal, you're probably hitting spam. Um, it's, it's one or two, after which it's kind of just like you're doing it because your team has said you have to send a certain number of meals cuz you need to hit a KPI, but it's either one or two nowadays. Nowadays, not, not before I'm completely wrong there, but nowadays. I remember.

I'm curious to know when you say that, because I was, I had a ratio of, let's say, of 100 companies that I would reach out to. I booked around four meetings with my, with my sequence that I had, and I had a five sequence. And, like, basically, my last sequence, like, is, like, very simple, right? It's a, is this something that will be relevant to you? And I actually got the most answers on this one here. Like, it's such a simple thing, like, they'll go back in the thread and they'll most likely read it, I'm guessing. But yeah, that's why it's curious to me.

But again, this was like around- no, like I said, three months ago. If that works to you, fabulous, right? If that works to you, fabulous. What we've tentatively seen and my perception has come mainly from spam, not from content, right? Okay. So like I said, at the start of the conversation, after two year hitting spam, it's not your fault, it's not their fault, it's just that you're not going to get beyond two. And I think if you've had Jesse in the previous session, Jesse would have repeated a very similar concept saying that as well. And we've seen the same thing. Just for reference, Smartlead has a 1 to 5 ratio of leads to email sequences. That's pretty much our pricing model. But we've actually seen a lot of customers actually just stick to 1 to 3, 1 to 4. Rarely do they get to 1 to 5 nowadays, right? For no reason alone, but the fact that their mailboxes get burnt out. I see. Okay. Just to add one slight caveat to everyone while you're over here, everyone talks about being marked as spam or bounces, Etc. Leads to you going to spam. No, it's not that. It's. It's. We all need to realize that meals are built for getting and receiving meals. That's it. That's the. That's the balance. It's not that complex. It's. We're making a science out of something that is just, you know, very, you know. playground clay stuff. So if you are sending thousands of mails for a very long period and your ratio is even 10%, that's great in the market, right? You get 10% reply rates or even 20% reply rates. That's still 80% who've not replied back to you. You scale that over three to six months and now you've got a mailbox that effectively has not got 80% of mails every day for six months. in a row, your mailbox will burn out. Now, if you do that with a five sequence ratio, that six months probably gets squeezed down to three months or two months. So that's the only thing. That's what we've seen. But I will put my hand up over here and say I've had many, many, many times where I've been proven straight up wrong. So all I can share is trends and patterns. And if it's working for you, I'll always say this. I'll keep saying it. If it works, no touchy, let it do its thing.

I I agree. I agree.

If it works, no touchy.

Yeah, right now.

One.

One other thing I just want to add, too. Like, I think it's really, like, if you are going into your cold email trying to educate the heck out of people, the way to do it is by meeting them where they already are, like, start by. start by telling the people, telling people the story that they're already telling themselves, and then work backwards from there. If you're trying to tell this completely different story, it's not going to pass the two second rule, which is essentially with the two seconds that I go to scan this, to decide if I'm going to read it, am I able to filter it out in a way that my inbox wasn't right? So I think a lot of people just try to educate way too much. and immediately speak within their own world. But Steve, thank you for coming up, my friend. So let's get into Lucine had a great question about enterprise. So let's chat about emailing those heavier hitters. Let's say a, you know, a CEO of, I don't know, a hospital or, you know, a chief at, you know, whatever we all know.

Anybody at like, Nike, right? Or like, you know, can I reach somebody at Amazon?

Yeah, 100%. I think Jesse was warranted in what he said, and he's got a lot of data and information to back his point. Not a but, however, to add to that piece, we see people booking meetings with large companies every other day. Like, I think I just scrolled upon a LinkedIn post yesterday where someone shared a screenshot, which was our UI and they booked a meeting with Nike. You called out Nike very actively. It was a Nike executive. We had someone who booked someone with an Apple. And that's just old as yesterday or two days ago. This works. That definitely works. However, the whole perspective over here is that will work once or twice and not at all after that. for that particular domain. So if I were to go and reach out to someone on Apple with a particular mailbox domain and so on and so forth, the whole Barracuda example or Proofpoint example you gave, once my IP or once my domain is blacklisted, that's it. Say goodbye not only to my domain, but say goodbye to everything within that tenant. Right? So it's a bit of a cache 22 where if you're sending to a Fortune 500, you probably want to keep like a separate set of mailboxes in completely separate isolated tenants because once you get called out there, yeah, the tenant level thing that I said is a bit aggressive, but if you are very proactive and you're very aggressively reaching out, you will be blocked. And it'll be a straight block. Like it will not even bother. It'll be very unforgiving. It'll just lock you out altogether. So you will pretty much have to get whole bunch of mailboxes that are not associated to your workspace or tenant at all, and then start sending midway.

It's probably worth on those being, sorry, continue.

No, no, go for it, go for it.

I was just reading the chat and popped in. I was just gonna say it's probably worth on those two since you are sending out to enterprise and the opportunity is so much higher. I mean, one, the infrastructure recommendation V of having your own domains is fantastic. But number two, like send less emails and send more personalized emails, like stuff that shouldn't get flagged as spam.

Like it should be very, I think that's the general rule. I think everyone says how do I don't get flagged as spam by not being spam. That's the easiest answer I can give you. It's how do I not kill someone? Don't stab them.

Is the spam is the current spam threshold? I remember like 10 years ago when we were selling email marketing software, it was like, you know, you don't want to be more than you don't want to get more than one spam complaint per thousand, per thousand emails sent. Is that still kind of a benchmark that you follow or are you even more?

No, I think it's actually not as bad as that. But Google did have that thing they pushed out about a year and a bit ago where I think that, sorry, I'm forgetting the number at the top of my head, but I think it was three complaints per thousand messages, but for personal Gmail accounts only. And so if you get three mails, if you're sending to private mailboxes like @gmail.com leads and three leads mark you as spam, Gmail pretty much set it face first that they'll screw you over after that.

Interesting.

But that was for Gmail. And then I think they redacted because they initially set it for B2B and it spewed the whole market. Everyone was like, Legion's dead, Outbound's dead, which happens every six months in our space. And then I think literally two weeks after they pull back on their statement.

Jim had a good summary. These are old school rules and also old school solutions. There really isn't a way around doing it right. Own hundreds of domains of possibles. Don't overspend. No spammy crap. Right on V, he says. I think that sums it all up. So I want to quickly, oh, right before I dive into this next topic, guys, Adam and I are recording our new show. We're doing two episodes tomorrow. Some of you have already left us voice notes. If you've seen podcasts before where they take audience calls, that is what we're doing. Click the link in the bottom. It says, leave us a voicemail and leave us a voicemail about your successes, your failures, your entrepreneurial journey, crazy stories.

Whatever it might be. We'll send you some dope ass swag if you leave us a voicemail. We're just looking, we want to help solve people's problems. So leave us a voicemail. Audience, we were talking to you again. I feel like it's helpful to remind the people sometimes who are currently doing four things and watching this. Leave us a voice note if you want to make it on our new show as someone with a featured problem. You can even prank call us if you want. That might be kind of funny. I don't want to invite that. Anybody in a personality here and want to prank call us and just surprise us on the YouTube show? We'll take it.

Hey, it's all about entertainment. So equal parts.

Equal parts entertainment and education is what we're going for.

That's right.

V, next question. Can you put links in cold emails? Question mark. And then I got a follow up to this one.

Got a hot take. Just to be controversial, if that link is brand fresh and you, sure, why not? But otherwise, no.

Don't send the same link in cold emails.

Right. That's it. That the general rule over here as to why links should not be included beyond the fact that it's HTML and CSS and that's usually an easy red flag for most mailbox providers or secure email gateways. Beyond anything, the principle of links, it's static, right? Because it's static, it actually ends up having an impact. We actually had a customer who removed, they were going through the whole thing, did not know what's up. Just they did it, not to take any credit, they did it, they removed the phone number. from the signature. Boom, flipped. Now causation versus correlation, I don't know, but seems pretty neat and makes sense in terms of staticization because Google's picked up or Jim Outlook's picked up the fact that the second this little digit, like, you know, this combination of numbers exist, people have marked us down. So same concept with links as well.

So can we send a SendSpark? Hey, Bethany. If you're here, I'm shouting out again, check SendSpark out. It's dope. I'm going to start actually doing this stuff. I keep saying this, but I'm actually.

Going to do it now.

Can you send something like a SendSpark video? Because that would be a unique, right? If they're personalizing the name of the person you're sending to, that would be a unique asset.

So to be clear, if you just put in a dead domain, like, yeah, firstly, shout out Bethany, SendSpark. Love them. They're great tools. They know what they're doing. They're ahead of the market. compared to most people. If I attach a loom video, I don't end up in spam. And I've seen that happen multiple times. I send looms all the time. I don't end up in spam. The premise over here is if you have a single, like, hey, check out my website blah.com. And that blah is just there all over the place. That has an impact. But I do believe even the team, the SenseSpark team, Go ahead and actually do the SendSpark message in the follow up as well. So general rule, you want to keep the first mail as vanilla as possible. And the second mail is where you want to sparkle all the HTML and fancy grub.

Ah, okay. So first email should be all lowercase, four words. And then the second email should be...

Do whatever you want to do with.

The video of me stripping in front.

Of the LinkedIn video with the Bitcoin. That's what you want to show. And then just have a Habibi come to Dubai at the background. That's what you want to have driving. Once you get your foot in the door, then it's pretty much the gateways are open.

Rock and roll. What about open tracking? Somebody's asking about that. Do you believe in it? Do you not believe in it?

No, it was gone.

How do we evaluate if our stuff's working? If we can't track open, I think.

Deliverability tests are a common thing a lot of people do. You can run them.

And what does that entail?

Deliverability tests are simple. It's literally like we offer it, other tools offer it as well without any bias. It's your actual campaign, but you're actually sending it to a bunch of mailboxes that that particular platform owns. And then you can just see whether the mails are landing in the primary or secondary folder. Some caveat for you over there, something that we're excited to bring in very soon, is Mailboxes, just like anything else, have personas. So what I mean by that is if you send me an email about hair products, it's going to land in spam because I don't give a shit about that, unfortunately. But if you send Adam an email about hair products, it'll probably land in the primary folder because it's relevant to him, right?

I mean, it's what I spend most of my time on when I'm not- Exactly, right?

That's- I'm going to ask for some links right after this. so with that perspective, so mailboxes actually have personas as well. So we've got it coming. We know a bunch of other people might be doing it as well. So we've got a bunch of mailboxes where we're going to have 500 mailboxes that are personified to be a CEO, 500 personified to be an accountant, 500 personified to be a sales leader.

Right.

And the same mail sent for this person will land in primary here, but secondary here and promotional here. So the TLDR answer for you is if you want to go ahead and track, you want to see performance, you can use the tools that do placement tests as a way to validate your open copy, your open re-tracking, et cetera. However, if you don't want to do that and you're like, nah, this is too redundant, you can use open tracking. No one's stopping you, but just don't use it as an end all be all. That's not your measurement of success. It is, it's a pretty redundant metric. It's been sort of, well, we're in 2025, May, so It's been redundant for about three and a half years now.

One question I just wanted to get to, are there any filtering tactics that you're seeing work well? Because I think nothing is going to ruin your domain or increase your email infrastructure costs or decrease your success like sending emails to a really shitty list. So are there specific tools that your users are using, whether it's inside a smart lead, outside Clay, whatever it might be, that you recommend using as a filtering mechanism before you hit the send button.

So when you say filtering, you mean validation?

Validating and filtering out probable non-ICP fits.

Okay, non-ICP fit comes from the very root itself. So Clay, after mentioning, that's the most common one we've seen. People don't talk about it a lot, just maybe because they don't think it's cool. But, you know, we love Clay. I love Clay. Warren's incredible. The entire team, Kareem, are fabulous. Clay solves a very important problem, but Apollo still exists. And Apollo does a great job, right? So the irony of all of this is Apollo is actually, well, we've seen a pretty decent share of lead sourcing for people. so if I were to put Lynn like it is a balance, but we have a lot of customers who use probably get their lists from Apollo, upload the list to Clay and then do all the like they do the relevance, relevance generation, the content, Etc. Using Clay. So it's not that Clay alone does the job or Apollo alone does the job. Most of the time you, you can use Apollo. not alone, but you need clay, but you can't, so clay can be used alone by itself, right? But Apollo, most of the time, you probably want to have Apollo plus clay to get something out for you in terms of the relevance. In terms of validation, I would simply say we've got a validation tool internally, or you've got Lead Magic, Jessies, it's by far been the one that's worked the best. We've seen customers prove that through and through. I do not get paid for this affiliation. I just have no agenda but to push something that works. So Lead Magic does a pretty sick job. People have good results from that if you want to validate your leads. In terms of relevance, like I said, Clay does a job for you. But Apollo is where you want to get the bulk of the meat, and then you want to trim it all down based upon what Clay gives you.

Did you hear that, everybody? That is great. Great advice right there. Let's pick out one last audience question. Yes, we are posting the recording on YouTube shortly after this. We've changed up our editing, so hopefully it'll be out there before Friday. Let's see. Are you using Clay to write AI personalization? Are you doing that elsewhere? Brian Smith asks.

Yes, Clay works great for your personalization. It does the job. It does what you have to do. SmartLeads got personalization set up as well. You can do that instantly. A lot of the tools have it. To be honest, it's such a feature-parity market right now. If we have it, the next person is going to get it in three weeks. If someone else has it, we'll bring it in three weeks. As customers, it's the best time to be. But in terms of that extra nudge of relevance, Clay is built for that. Fortunately, unfortunately, it takes the lion's share for that.

And folks, Clay has so many great resources on YouTube, on Clay University to figure out Clay. We're not affiliated with Clay, by the way. We're just fans and users.

Yeah.

V, dude, thank you for coming on and dropping knowledge. I'm excited to start this outbound thing again and to start using some of these tips that you gave us. I wouldn't have guessed the three to four word thing. I wouldn't have known the two email thing, but to be fair, Taylor Herron probably would.

Yeah.

A lot of this stuff is incredibly helpful, man. Thank you very much.

Thank you so much. Pierre, it's good to see you, man. It's been a minute. 100%.

Next week, by the way, for everybody who's still here, we got one of the most legendary epic bootstrappers, Nathan Barry from ConvertKit. OG Bootstrapper, 45 million ARR. Yeah, I met him last week at this YPO marketing summit event, and he's he's going to be live with us next Tuesday, same time, same place. Until next week. Thank you for showing up. Thank you again, V. This is so valuable. Emails, what everybody can't figure out. So thank you for helping us unfuck our email.

Thanks, everyone.

Thank you, V.