Case Study: How He Built a $32,000/mo Cold Email Lead Gen Agency inside Client Ascension

All right, what's up everybody? Got my boy Aaron here he is inside client ascension, running a cold email agency. Just hit $32,000 last month.

Aaron, how we doing bro?

You are doing good. Happy to be here, man.

So first of all, just quick intro. What do you do, what do you.

Sell, who do you sell it to? Just kind of all that.

Yeah, absolutely. So we are a B2B outbound agency. You know, dive into all things cold email, all things lead generation, dabble in what the kids are calling go to market these days, which is super fun, nice little way to spin things. The focus ICP in the last little bit. And pretty much what I attribute a lot of our like recent success to has been the shift into the finance space. So we're working with a lot of M and A firms, a lot of investment banks, a lot of private equity firms, just generally upmarket. We still do all the typical, you know, marketing agencies, SAS companies, so on and so forth, but that's kind of been our bread and butter lately.

Dope.

So what is your offer? What is the structure of what you sell people?

Pretty much what we sell right now is A. And I don't want to discredit it at all, but it's a very standard outbound package. So we'll do everything from positioning the client's offer for cold traffic, building out the outbound infrastructure capable of reaching, you know, in some cases like hundreds of thousands of prospects per month. We will do all of the outbound copywriting, all of the automations associated with that, pretty much just like end to end outbound fulfillment. And then there's some, you know, niche applications that get into more multichannel or different, I guess, mechanisms for generating opportunities. But the idea realistically is, is, you know, we're defining the icp, making things cold traffic ready, reaching to prospects on behalf of our clients, qualifying the prospects and booking them in for sales opportunities.

So you're booking the calls in, it's not just like you're selling them the leads or anything like that.

Yeah, so most of our competitors, I would say don't even really do any sort of like pre call qualification. We'll actually take the interest that we get that we generate through our campaigns, book them through calendly, have them go through a pre call form, get a lot of like good private information like in some of our, you know, finance clients, cases like the EBITDA of a company or like general revenue numbers, timing numbers, just all of those like good juicy things that you can't really get from a database. Prior to the call. And then we're kind of using that to determine whether or not the call is qualified and booking right through to the sales opportunity, taking it all the way to the end. So not just a lead but an actual like pre qualified sales opportunity.

Yeah.

Nice.

Good stuff. So how much do you charge? How does that, how does that work?

How we charge has changed so much since we joined Client Ascension. We went from 100% performance model, which was like pulling my hair out on a day to day basis, to a tech fee plus performance model which was definitely a lot better to now a retainer model which we find is just a more simplified way of taking care of how a client pays us. And truthfully, like, because we aren't just handling the lead, we feel like there's a lot more that we put into our delivery, more on the strategy perspective that isn't really, I guess, appreciated with a performance model. So we kind of fell upon the retainer. Right now we're doing anything between like 3 to some clients, all the way up to like 6k a month.

Do you know what your LTV is for a client that you sign?

I really should, to be honest, but I don't. If I were to guess, I would say LTV on a client's probably like 6 to 10K. The least a client usually stays with us is like three months. But we have some clients that have been with us the past like 15, 16 months.

Who is the ideal client for this? Like who do you target a specific kind of business for this? Like how does that all work?

Yeah, so going back to kind of that shift in ICP that we had recently and by recently probably like the last eight months or so, the ideal client is probably somebody in the finance space to some degree, usually pretty established. Like companies that have been in business for like five years plus we usually look at a minimum revenue of like 300k a year. For the most part. It is somebody who has a very large tam. So cold email ends up being an outbound in general, ends up being a numbers game to some degree. So those who have a bigger market up in the like, you know, 50,000, hundreds of thousands end up almost being like more guaranteed to get results. If you have a smaller tam, you know, in the thousands, it's probably not going to work. Yeah, I'd say that's the biggest thing, large tam. And then if you're industry agnostic, so like if you can reach out to companies that meet a revenue threshold regardless of their industry, you're bound to get much Better results as well.

Do you typically like working with people.

Who sell considerable higher price things as opposed to lower ticket stuff?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in the M and A space and the private equity space, a lot of our clients deal sizes are in the millions. So all it really takes is one deal to go through and that's like they're playing with house money after that.

Why aren't you taking any of that upside? Is this like a, like a legal thing?

There is some legal issues there, especially when it comes to capital raising. Can't really take success fees or, you know, you have to jump through hoops to get to it. I think there is a world where we shift into that direction in a way that is legal. I think right now we're just establishing our client base, really building up our reputation with those that are in finance, showing them that we are this credible person that really understands their universe and can get them the results that they're looking for. I think the more case studies we get in the space, the more we can really drive home the end result. But in that nobody really wants to give away a piece of the pie and if they do, they probably don't want to pay anything upfront. So we're kind of just working on the balance there and I think it could definitely be something that happens eventually.

As a cold email agency, are you primarily using cold email to acquire clients?

Funny enough, like I, I've talked to a lot of other agencies that don't. Right. Like they get their clients through YouTube, they get their clients through LinkedIn, but we actually like, we are cold email through and through in terms of acquisition up until this point. We're going to dabble in ads here starting next week. But like I would say 95% of the leads that come through the door right now are via cold email. It's such a scalable mechanism. And as much as people are saying like cold email is dead, I'm still booking 40 to 50 calls a month from it. So I'm really not sure that's the case.

If you're watching this, you probably run an agency that's not making as much money as you'd like. And that's probably because you're selling an.

Offer with zero front end cold traffic.

Demand and you fail to integrate AI into that offer so that you can scale without hiring a giant team of people. If that is you, I'll show you what to sell, who to sell it to, what deliverables to do for the clients, then give you all of the AI tools you need to automate 90% of the client fulfillment with AI. This is literally giving you a new offer to sell. So if you want to scale significantly faster than you are right now and actually get calls, book, you need to sell a better offer and you need to fulfill 90% of the client work with AI. If you want to see how that works, click the first link in the Description. Go. Client ascension.

I walk me through, like, the stats of that. Like, how many emails do you have to send in order to book a single call? A single qualified call?

I feel like that varies a lot. We're sending like 150,000 cold emails per month, if that kind of allows us to do the backwards math. So, you know, if we're booking 50 calls from 150,000 cold emails, it's like 1 in 3,000.

Similar statistics for your clients. Like, you need to send that much volume.

I would say, truthfully, it's easier for some of our clients, people who have less commoditized offers. It's not to say that, like, our offer is incredibly commoditized, but there's a lot of competition out there. The ideal customer that we go towards, we go towards because of how easy it is to get results for them. And maybe not necessarily like how easy, but just like the landscape that they play within, we find is much more beneficial for cold email. So they'll probably get something closer to like one meeting for every 1,000, where we get one meeting for every 3,000. But we've learned as someone who runs a cold email agency that if our Reply rate is 1.5% versus what we like to see with some of our clients, which is like 3 to 6%, all we have to do is send three times more to accommodate for that. And we have the TAM that makes that possible. There's so many different metrics and so many different levers that you can lean on. We're happy to do whichever one gets us results.

So walk me through the sales process.

Of like, okay, you're sending cold emails and, like, you get a positive response. And like, just.

Just all this stuff from you sending.

Your cold emails to acquiring the client from cold emails. Like, can you just walk me through that?

And that's another thing that's changed a ton. It used to just be like, you know, we send cold emails, someone shows interest, we put them into calendly, have a call, try and close them on the first call, and that's it. But it's changed so, so much. I would say, in the last year, like, now pretty Much what the flow looks like. Obviously we're sending our outbound campaigns. We'll have somebody pre qualify with calendly, so they'll basically fill out a form prior to booking in with us. If they don't meet standards, we cancel the call. Same as you would with like an ad funnel on the back end. Like we've taken a lot of pointers from ad agencies and people who are running ad funnels to be able to kind of like bridge the gap in trust. Once somebody books into calendly, they're getting pushed to a confirmation page. We have your typical like confirmation video, breakout videos, a bunch of case studies. We're sending email flows that like overcome objections, probably like maybe seven or eight emails that they get between when they book in and the call itself. They have all the breakout videos that they can check out. Then you know, obviously they're leading up to the first call. We do a bunch of reminders, bunch of like texts, emails to just let them know that the call is happening. Usually send a couple manual texts as well. Depending on, you know, how much time I have that day. We'll take the first call. First call is going to be discovery, usually just trying to see if it's a fit. And then oftentimes we'll have a more tax practical like strategy based call after that just so we can make things a little bit more tangible, leverage things like ROI calculators, get into a little bit of what like the preliminary strategy could look like and just make it look like something that they can actually hold on to. Before we were running discovery it just felt very rushed for somebody that's coming from completely cold traffic and we can't bridge that gap a lot with a lot of the pre call nurture. Just showing them what you can accomplish. I would say from both a strategy perspective and then also like an ROI past client perspective is super helpful as well.

What do you find? What industries or niches are working for cold email right now?

I like finance. Like we found a strategy that works really well in that space and we're able to replicate that across clients. But truthfully, like if a client comes to us with I guess like an open mind and they're willing to create a front end offer that you know is actually desirable to cool traffic and they have a large tam, I'm of the opinion that industry doesn't even really matter. Marketing agencies that are some of the most like saturated offers out there, if you position the front end offer something like unique and super desirable and rip it to a hundred Thousand people, you're going to get results. If you took something that's super desirable and you put it in front of all those people that are a potential ideal customer, there's no reason why you wouldn't get results. So I think some people are afraid of some things that could actually make them a lot of money. I almost look at the opposite a little bit more like the industries that I like to avoid. And a lot of those are just the ones that are like things like SaaS are a little bit harder. I find anything that's lower ticket is usually harder. Yeah, that's generally how I looked at it. I also find like some of the lesser traditional industries, like if you get into like manufacturing or logistics, those things are usually like cake.

How many people are on your team and like how does fulfillment work? Like how have you structured that?

Yeah, so that I keep going back to this like whole frame of like thinking about how much it's changed since the beginning. Went from just being me to being me. We have a, we call them like the go to market strategist. So this is almost like your equivalent of a client success manager. They're handling everything from onboarding to the client success calls to. We call them like retention calls, which is basically upsells from the original trial to the core offer. Any sort of client management and just generally like managing the fulfillment team to the go to market engineer who's doing a lot of the stuff in like clay. They'll do a lot of the lead list building, a lot of the copywriting. Now we even have one person under him who's just ripping lists consistently for each one of the clients and just making it super easy. And then we have an SDR who does all the inbox management. They do some warm calling, some cold calling, kind of depending on where things are at with all the clients.

What had to change here? Because obviously at some point you were at 5k a month, 10k a month.

Month.

And like you're at 32 now. I know we've obviously spoken that you're trying to get to 50 and ideally 100.

What was holding you back from going.

Considerably faster when you were at 5k a month or 10k a month? Because like that's a point where a lot of people tend to get stuck. Like what needed to happen here?

Like what do you think? Yeah, so when I originally joined Client Ascension, I think I was actually like bobbling between 0 and 3k a month. Like we had people just on performance. So there were some months where we did make like, zero. And there were some that we were at about three. I think the biggest thing that we implemented, there's probably like three things. So the first was obviously pricing structure. Like, we had to get off that performance model, at least have something that covered our cost, that got us out of the, like, scarcity mindset of, like, oh, man, like, we need to make this work, this needs to happen. Like, blah, blah, blah, blah. Shifting from that to the tech fee plus performance helped a ton. There was a lot of, like, mindset stuff that I did with both David and Mario. I think that helped a lot. Just generally, like, being less attached to outcomes and like, kind of blaming myself for how things happened, talking to a bunch of the coaches, just knowing that, like, to some degree there is this almost like fallacy at the beginning of starting an agency where you're going to naturally attract shitty clients. And, like, because you're attracting those shitty clients, you're going to blame the results on yourself. And it's just this cycle of despair. So I think once I realized that it wasn't necessarily, like my fault that the results weren't coming, there is some degree of blame on the client. I kind of shifted away and I was able to detach emotionally from the outcome and realize that it was just a matter of doing more, do more outreach, get more clients. The more clients that you're going to get, the higher the odds of you coming across those that are one, good clients to work with, two, those that are, I would say, easy to get results for, and then three, those that maybe appreciate you as a agency provider to some degree. And then the last thing that I probably attribute to the breakthrough was just one going full time. So getting out of my current 9 to 5 and putting all of my energy into the business gave me the capacity from a strategic perspective to zoom out and just really look at everything like a CEO rather than someone who's just kind of dwindling in the business. And then obviously, as soon as I made my first hire, really building out the team, getting out of fulfillment, and just focusing on sales and growth, I feel like that was kind of like the explosion point.

What's the best performing cold email strategy?

There's two, and I talk about these all the time in all my content and whatnot. But the first one I call the Trojan Horse strategy. The Trojan Horse strategy is essentially reaching out to somebody with a question that you know is true. Super conversational. Looks like it's a text coming from a friend. You're basically just trying to get them to reply to you. And then after you get in, you know, similar to like the Trojan horse, that's when you drop the pitch. So you validated the problem, you got them to answer your question. And at that point too, like you can leverage whatever you want. You know, once you get that reply, you can shoot them a loom, you could shoot them a sales asset, you could shoot them your vsl, you could shoot them, whatever. So that's one. And then I think the second one, which is basically a staple in all of our campaigns is the one liner plus. P.S. so it's pretty much just the offer and usually it's going to be like the offer or front end offer, like probably bonus points if it is a front end offer. But it's like first name. Like if we could do X, Y and Z for you, you could throw an objection in there too. Like without having to do X, Y and Z. Would that be worth a quick chat? P.S. like we just implemented this exact same thing for X, Y and Z company and X, Y and Z industry and they ended up getting X, Y and zed results. Say those two are like absolute bangers. If you're not running those right now. Missing out on money. What about subject lines? What kind of subject lines do you use? Oh, I hate this conversation. But it's like this one thing that everybody thinks is such a high leverage like concept, but the idea is just like being curiosity inducing without giving away exactly what it is that the thing is about. We do a few different things. So I personally love things like FYI first name, just like super redundant, could be internal. But then I also found like what's a little bit better is like something that has to do with the topic a little bit like if you, I don't know if it's a email about like finance or capital or something. You could run like capital question or finance question or Finance idea Capital idea. Just like something that doesn't lay out everything all at once but gives them a taste of what it's about, makes them want to open up the email. Because that's literally the whole point of subject is just to get them into that first line.

If you had to give a piece.

Of advice to somebody who's at like 5k 10k a month in their agency right now and they want to grow much faster, what would you tell them?

There's literally only one answer to this question and it is do more. If you're getting X, Y and Z result from doing whatever KPI you're doing. If you're like you know, posting five posts a week or you're doing one YouTube video a week, you're sending 10,000 cold emails a week, whatever it is, just 10x that no matter like how afraid you are of whatever's gonna happen, like if you're afraid of client delivery, if you're afraid of like, like how people are going to perceive you on YouTube or whatever, just literally just 10x everything that you're doing and worry about whatever happens as a result after, odds are you're going to run into a bunch of problems. You're going to learn from all of those issues really quickly and you're going to fix them fast because like there's a fire on your ass to get shit working and you're either going to come out of it with like, you know, a ton of results, ton of money, a ton of authority, if it's on the content side, sales calls if it's on the outbound side, or you're going to get data and you're going to know what works better, you know, going into the next phase of doing that. That's all I would say.

All right, appreciate you coming on. I'm going to leave the links to.

All your social stuff inside of the.

Description so everybody wants to connect with Aaron. You can do so inside there and appreciate you, bro.

Yes, sir. Appreciate having me on.

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