How I Sent 20,000 Cold Emails Per Day (And Got 1,100 Clients)

So this is gonna be the story of how I sent 20,000 cold emails per day and got 1,100 B2B clients doing so. If you've never watched one of my videos before, my name is Matt. I'm 30 years old. I'm from Canada, but I've lived in Dubai for quite some time. I sold my first agency in 2017 and a second one in 2019. Those were essentially with the same group and basically two arms, basically one agency, but split into two. I was a minority partner in both. And then in 2023, I sold a CRO agency, which stands for conversion rate optimization, where I was 100% owner, which was my first big solo success. So if you ever watched my videos before, this is the system that I preach. This is the system that I've built over time in how to grow a marketing agency and really any service business. And This video is gonna be a story-based video going over real-world examples of scaling my outreach. And the goal of this is not to preach or to talk about, you know, you have to do X, Y, and Z. This is just gonna be a video about what worked and didn't work for me. Even when people you see on YouTube or Twitter, on the internet, and even if the end result was very successful, you don't really see all of the bullshit on the inside or during the process. So that's what I wanna show you. In this story-based video. So the table of contents, we're going to go break it down into about 15 parts. Some of them are going to be like 1 minute. Some of them are going to be probably a few, but things like I'm going to give you some background context and then this stuff about the setup. And then, you know, you see multiple setups because I kept improving it over time, but I'm not going to spoil that here. I'm just going to get to the background context. So I run a conversion rate optimization agency for e-commerce. If you don't know what that is, I'm not going to explain it. You can Google it. We sold two things. We sold landing page services, so $2,500 for one or $5,000 for three. The AOV on this was about $3,300, split very, very similar, 50/50, about just under 50/50 for who bought one and who bought three. And then our main recurring service was $8,000 to $15,000 per month site-wide SEO services. So before this story even takes place, my agency was already pretty— doing pretty well. I was already doing a great job with my paid ads, a great job with partnerships, and I would say a fair enough or okay job with content. So the way I acquired customers during this time period was I'd run paid ads for a digital product. So I would do 100 landing page templates for $97. They would build, or they were built in Webflow. If you bought them, you could essentially just customize them to fit your thing instead of paying Right. So they would buy them and I would break even on this cuz it was a self-liquidating offer. Even at the worst of times, my CPA was about $80 to $85 and I would get just under $97 minus payment processing fees from selling this. And then what I would do is I would upsell a percentage of them from this, I guess we'll call it digital product, to an actual service. I can't remember the exact percentage, but 2.1% keeps sticking in my mind for some reason, and it's probably about right. So about 1 in every 50 people who bought this pack of templates would just say, okay, I want you to do the service for me. I'd also post content, mostly YouTube videos. These got 10 to 200 views, and then I'd post on LinkedIn, Twitter, and my newsletter. I never did any short-form video. That terrifies me. I don't think I'd be very good at it. The content was mainly so that if someone clicks on my Instagram or Facebook ads and gets onto my email list one way or the other, because to buy the templates, you'd sign up for the email list first and like a popup thing, then they would see my content. Either they just get recommended it or they'd find it, or they would see it in my email list and then it would nurture them and make them more likely to buy. I also had a bunch of white label partnerships in this time, usually with e-commerce ad agencies. So Facebook, agencies is going to be most of them, but I also put TikTok, YouTube, and Google. Those white label partnerships were already earning me over $150K MRR. And I also wanted to expand my white label partnerships via cold email as well. So the story starts here in mid-2022. At that point, I was already about $320K in MRR and more in just one-time services. I wanted to expand my revenue. For obvious reasons, but mainly because I was already in initial talks to sell my agency and I wanted another, a better valuation. So I knew in my initial talks that probably take 6 months to a year to actually get anything done with that. But I had a lot of private equity contacts who were rolling up agencies at the time, and also the buyers from my previous agency had a lot of contacts from that. So I wanted a better valuation, but I also wanted to create urgency for the buyers since if I could get this and I would be growing so fast, it would push them to close the deal rather than dragging it out and renegotiating. Because for, if you haven't sold a business before, like really what they do is they will give you some offer and then they will just drag it out and say, like, they'll give you a letter of intent, an LOI it's called. You'll show them everything and they'll like hem and haw and drag it out so much and eventually just hope that you, you know, close the deal cuz you're tired of this bullshit process, right? But if you are growing really fast, that dynamic kind of switches and they want to close it as fast as can cuz they don't just want to pay more. The process of selling my agency, that's a video for another time. Maybe I'll make a video just like that for this at some point, but let's get into the part. So the first thing is this part 1 is the setup and I basically split it here, what I did and then what I would do differently now. 'Cause remember this, this process has already taken place. It was almost 3 years ago at this point. Uh, actually 2, 2 and a half years ago at this point. So I've had a lot of time to reflect and you should also note that in some, like cold email, for example, has evolved quite a bit since this. Happened. So just keep that in mind. So first things first, to do cold email, you need a cold email tool. You need your list, you need your script, and you need your offer. So right off the bat, I didn't even realize I needed a cold email offer. I obviously couldn't run the same offer from my landing page templates because buying a digital product is just not something that you would do in cold email. So, and for cold traffic, as far as that one, the landing page template was basically 100% of my traffic in my ads. I didn't really have another offer. I didn't have a true book-a-call funnel other than just my website. I didn't have a webinar, I didn't have anything. So basically the offer that was so successful thus far wasn't possible to use here. So for my tech stack, I bought 30 domains and email addresses from GoDaddy. Later I found out you could get it for like 5% of that price, but I didn't know that at the time. I used Instantly AI, and at the very start, I did not even scrape a list. Instead, I asked people in my network who also cold emailed e-commerce stores if they had a list. They just gave it to me and I took their word that it was good. I cleaned the list with MillionVerifier and then uploaded it. In terms of Instantly, there was a warmup period, so I basically warmed up my inboxes for 2 weeks, I believe, before I started emailing. After that, I Exported all the lists from MillionVerifier that I cleaned, and it looked like it was about 30,000 people. I still have that list, which is funny enough. It looked pretty good when I reviewed it quickly, and then I was ready to write my cold email script. It's pretty embarrassing, but my cold email script wasn't any good at this time. It was 500+ words, fairly arrogant, and read more like a marketing email flow than an actual sales-based cold email or conversation. Type email that you would do. And I quickly realized it was not the right approach. My metrics made that very clear, but I've never done cold emailing at scale before. And I sent one-off cold emails and manually copy and pasted that, but I never did it like this because apparently it wasn't new at the time, but this was a couple of years or 3 years after cool email tools like Instantly and that kind of stuff came out. But I never really did it like this, so I didn't really know. I'm really good at ads and the email flows for marketing and nurturing, and I mistakenly, or didn't know any better, but I treated my cold emailing the same way. So it was basically a 500-word-plus email with no spin tax and included my website link and more. So what I would do differently looking back is Pretty much everything like that is terrible. I will get to it throughout the rest of the story, but because I did learn from my mistakes, but obviously I would put no attachments, no links, and have at least 20 variables of spintax plus their first name so that no emails are the same and it doesn't get blocked. If you don't know, you don't have spintax and you just send a million emails, you know, the inboxes like Google. Outlook, you name it, they just see that all these emails are the same, so you're spamming. But if you have spintax and you have enough variables plus kind of like the infinite randomness of their first name and/or their company, you could send millions and millions and millions of emails and none would be the same. So that solves that problem. So what I would do is I would write about a 75-word kind of introductory cold email. Not including the spin text in that 75-word. And I quickly learned that, but that's later in the story. So part 2 here is called 6 Weeks of Failure. So this was an interesting time for me because like I said, I was, I said $320K, but when I first started, but it's going up and down at this period between $300K and $350K per month. And I was very excited to start cold emailing and building a list with it because so many people that I knew, so many of my peers were already using it. And it was, this was late 2022 and it felt a lot easier back then than it does now. Fewer people were cold emailing in general, I would say. And the infrastructure and filters and that kind of stuff was much less strict than it is now. Like today you get this stuff and it's, I don't know who even comes up with this stuff to make it work, but it's pretty, pretty autistic. So I was shocked to learn that for 6 weeks here, I didn't even get a single call. So I was sending so many cold emails, not one call. I got very few replies and even fewer positive ones. And this was very shocking to me because at this point with all the partnerships, all the ads, the content referrals, the networking, I was going to events. I was booking over 200 like qualified calls per month and to have this like such a failure was a big step back. And I initially went the, the very like cope NPC route and said cold email just doesn't work, or at the very least it doesn't work for me. I didn't receive a single call at this time. I was sending about 1,500 cold emails per weekday, so 7,500 cold emails per week for 6 weeks. I don't wanna do the math on video. I think it's $45K, but If it's not, whatever. And I didn't get a single call booked. And that was like really hard to deal with because at this time I was a lot more, um, sensitive than I am now. But everything in life is either cope or a skill issue. I didn't have that mindset back then, but I did keep going because, you know, I didn't really have anything to lose. It's not like. You know, cold emails going to people's inboxes. You might embarrass yourself for not getting replies, but there's very little consequence. So I really had to keep going because the early talks about selling my agency, they were kind of like roasting me. They're like, yeah, this is working for now, but you know, you've been at this for like 5 months, maybe even less. And this, this ad funnel eventually, like once there's no one left to buy templates in your ad funnel. Then how are you gonna get clients, right? So I like really, really needed this. And I needed it to work. So part number 3 was joining courses and paying consultants for it. So I'm the type of person who would never really, I would, I would never like hire a cold email agency. Maybe nowadays, 'cause I know how it works and just to save time, but At this point, never do that. I like to learn how to do it myself because I basically believe that if you can't do something yourself, how are you going to hold someone else accountable or even know if what they're doing is right? And I also am the type of person who likes to be in control and have access to everything. So I went through the course route and the consultant route. I did have money and I could pay for all of this kind of stuff, so I joined Um, basically a few things. So one of the things I joined was Client Ascension cuz I followed— you're watching, you probably know who it is, Daniel Fazio, called Cold Email Wizard. Looks like my voice note when I made this source material was really screwing up. And then I joined another one called Hyperinbox. I don't even know if Hyperinbox is a real thing anymore because I was researching it for this video and I can't even find anything about it. And I ended up meeting one of my top 3 best friends in real life through Client Ascension. So other than the cold email help, it was well worth it for me. I would say both programs are pretty good, but they're more about how to get from, you know, $5K to $30K per month as opposed to how to scale your cold email and sell your agency, right? That's probably the biggest person in there, not really their ICP, but I got value from both of them. So next I hired this guy. It was, I was in a group at this time called Hampton Founders. You might know it from this guy named Sam Parr, where he has a podcast called My First Million, one of my favorite ones. And he also started a newsletter company called The Hustle. So it's kind of like a community. I think you have to be over $3 million in revenue to join or something. But when, and then when you join, you get sorted into a core group. So it's a bunch of people. Who are kind of just like you, who sell kind of the same stuff as you. Nowadays, I think Hampton, I'm no longer in it. I think it's an in-person only thing, but at this point it was online. And there was this guy in my group who runs a business-to-business lending firm. I'm not going to say his name, but now it's like one of the biggest business-to-business lending firms. I think, you know, if you search Trustpilot, biggest business-to-business or B2B lending firms, it'd be one of the top. And basically, like, you meet with your core group once a month and everybody gets a certain amount of time. And basically what you do is you bitch to your core group about what's not going wrong or what's going wrong. So I was bitching to my core group about this and he's like, well, I get 100% of my clients from cold email. He said he basically sends like 3 million, 4 million cold emails per month and just spams everyone and then gets them on a call. So he helped me out basically after that call or following days. And you know, how much do I owe you? I said, and nothing. Like, I just want you to help me with my ads. So I helped him with my ads basically, or his ads, basically a barter or exchange of services. And then I was talking with another guy named Nick Abraham, who was a coach in Client Ascension, and he also runs a, what, a big cold email agency or service or whatever you want to call it. And I don't even know if it was part of Client Ascension or just like a random Zoom call, but we went through my script and basically said, yeah, like, this is all terrible. And I was like, yeah, I'm sure I can see that based on my 0.1% positive reply rate. Um, but we worked through it together. So I'm not sure like which Nick Abraham or this Hampton guy or Hyperinbox or Client Ascension, I don't know which one. You know, led to the biggest result. Maybe all 4 of them I learned pretty fast, but my cold emails were in a much better position than they were before. I had no links or attachments. They were shorter. They actually had an offer. And I learned to build and clean my own list. I also learned here that you shouldn't send someone your Calendly when they say sure. I didn't book a call up to this point anyway to give them a chance to do that. But first, I learned that you should send a Loom and then book a meeting for them. Basically go in your own Calendly and do it for them. I didn't know to do that, but now I did. So this is definitely the process that I needed to go through. I wouldn't do anything differently. Probably, maybe I would've done it before the 6 weeks, but 6 weeks isn't really that long of time to do like screw around, especially when I had a growing business already. So let's get to part 4, which is the offer and the setup. So what I did is I made my own list this time. I went to Apollo and pulled a list of about 110,000 people in the United States had 3 to 25 employees that use Shopify as a technology and who had a founder, CMO, or director of marketing, like job title. That 3 to 25 employees, under 3, like is a lot of dead stores with one email or two emails. Um, but to be quite honest, like e-commerce is, uh, one where like you could just have a couple of co-founders and, you know, a person that you outsource your customer support, you outsource your fulfillment, you outsource stuff, and like you could have a $10 million a year e-commerce store with like 3 employees. So like 3 to 25 is Basically, like, they had 20,000 employees. Sorry for yawning there. They're never gonna respond to my cold emails anyway, so that's what I was doing. Something like that. So I also paid full price to export this list from Apollo because either I was not listening when people told me, or I did not know that you could just scrape it for a fraction of the cost. Again, I cleaned it with MillionVerifier and ended up about 70,000 people in the green, which I think is considered a safe There's, 'cause there's 3, there's safe, risky, and bad leads. And I only emailed the safe leads. So when I was in this process, the thing that I need to do is create my offer, right? So I was actually just like searching, 'cause I, I don't know, I like didn't even really understand the concept of an offer at this point. I, it really was just buy my landing page. Back when I was in my previous agencies, we didn't really do that much cold traffic and Even when we did, the cost per call was like $1, cuz the CPMs were so cheap in 2017, in 2018. But so this is like the first time I actually had to make an offer. So I found Alex Hormozi's book, $100 Million Offers, while searching for offers online. It had been about like out or released for about a year, but I had not heard about him until then. I'm not sure how many other people learned about Alex Hormozi primarily through his first book or Maybe that just me, but that was literally the first time I ever heard of him. Never seen an interview, never saw a YouTube video, never saw his website. Like I literally was one of like the first time I heard about him was through Amazon, I guess. So after reading the book a few times and I read it all in one day, I really liked that one. And I also really love, you know, the offers, $100 Million Offers and Money Models, but I wasn't really blown away by the the leads one. But that's a story for another time. So after reading all of his examples and all of the stuff in the book, the offer that I came up with for my cold emails definitely needed some refinement because I had some ideas, but this really changed my perspective. So my offer was landing pages for e-commerce brands, right? So they always need that. They run their ads to a landing page and that landing page needs to convert and get a low CPA. So my offer was, I am going to make you a free landing page. And then you only pay if it beats your original by 10% in an A/B test. And if it doesn't, you owe me nothing. So that was a great front-end offer for cold email. But to claim it, they had to get on the call. And when they got on the call, they had to put down a $500 deposit and authorize their card. They didn't run the A/B test because I, you know, thought that a lot of people just would not even run the A/B test. I would charge them an extra $2K. But if they do run the A/B test and it fails, I give them their deposit back. Hopefully I explained that right. But it was to protect me against people who would just get a free landing page. They had to do a $500 deposit and authorize their card. So it wasn't really a free landing page. It was if it fails. But if they don't hold up their end of the bargain, I charge them full price. But as you can imagine, that sounds really good in a cold email. Some people on the calls, like I anticipated, cuz it is a little bit of a bait and switch. I really anticipated a lot more like negative response than I got, but getting into the story more and we'll keep going. I never got one negative response of like that kind of, oh, it's not actually free. You're putting a deposit down. I I never really got— no one really got angry at me for that. And I don't think anybody ever got angry at my closers, which we'll go over later. So if I could go back in time and apply what I know now, I'd probably still do the same thing. It led to 1,100 clients and 20,000 cold emails per day. It was the first cold email offer I ever made, and it was right on the money at the miss Enough bragging. So the next step is when I got my first call. So I got my first call the exact same day I launched that new offer. I cold emailed a guy, he had a bone broth brand, and he responded by saying, I have time on Tuesday at 3:00 PM. So my cold email was basically my offer, and then here's a Loom and let me know whatever day that is, you know, 3:00 PM works. And he said yes. Right. So. Um, that's so, that's a horrible explanation. So I said my offer, I had the Loom, and then I said, do you have time on like Tuesday at 3:00 PM? And then he said yes. And then I booked it in. So I put his email and phone number in my calendar and sent it to him. And that was my first call. It took about 6.5 to 7 weeks to get there, but the first call is always a good milestone and he ended up showing. So when he showed up, he knew absolutely nothing about me or my business or landing pages, like quite frankly, uh, all of his ads that he was running, which was not very much, were going right to his product page or maybe even his homepage. I can't remember. But in the time between when he booked a call and when the call happened, he would seem to forget what he agreed to, which quickly led me to learn that you want to book them the same day or the next day, I guess, especially on cold email. So he came on the call and I remember spending more time explaining the value of landing pages than actually doing the offer. It was a very terrible call. He was confused about why I need a landing page. So either my cold email copy was bad or he was just very, not very smart. So he basically thought that I was going to come in and do the testing on his product page, which that is kind of my main service, sitewide CRO, which I could have done, but judging by how the call went, I didn't really want to, and that's not what I was going to kind of really going for here. So overall, I didn't really even pitch the first call I had or make the offer because I didn't do well on the call and he probably wasn't the best fit for it. I guess you could say kind of dumb. So if I had to go back in time, I would not really do anything differently. The first call and every offer and any traffic source and any business is a big milestone. And you learn more from those first calls or first 10 calls than you would by thinking about it or researching or brainstorming for 10 years. So I just needed to get some. Regardless if this guy was qualified or not, or a good fit or not, I knew that I needed to do something to warm them up and try to do my best to explain what I was selling before the call. So if they came in from paid ads, I was using those landing page templates. So I had a pretty good email flow, text flow, appointment setting flow for that. I didn't really put much thought into warming people up from my paid-out funnel because they didn't really need it. They bought the landing page templates. Okay, this guy does landing page. I checked them out. They're gonna look like this. Yeah, sure. Like they had a lot of context on what they were coming into on those upsell calls, but I turned my cold emails off after the first call for a couple of days because I knew I needed to do something here. And, or all of the calls are going to be two, like two call closes at first call, having to explain what I even do. And then the second to hopefully even get them on the call and close them. And at a $2,500 price point, like that's definitely not the best use of the time. So I created an email flow and attached it to Calendly. And it started with 4 emails in the first 4 hours, what we do, why we do it, how we do it, and then a call to action, which was basically not really a call to action. It's like, show up to the call. I'll see you on the call. This is what I was doing for my email flows when someone joined my just lead magnet or newsletter or bought those ad templates. And I'm sure that you can kind of guess how that went. Not very well. So after the first 4 hours, I sent 1 email per day for 30 days, which isn't very logical for maximizing you know, how many people know what you're talking about for cold email, but I was learning. So one thing that I did that I think worked really well is in the confirmation email, which was sent by Calendly SMS and call, I sent them a link to a 1.5-hour video course on how to make a landing page. I've since like deleted that video from my channel because this was, you know, I've learned a lot since then and I'd be embarrassed by it now. But I was able to text them because I also exported their phone numbers from Apollo as well, at least the ones that were available. And I put that on the call book. So basically I said, thanks, we're going to call. Here's my philosophy on building landing pages. I didn't really expect them to watch the whole video, but I just wanted to show them that I have a big course, a big YouTube thing, and that I'm a real person more so than anything else. And then I also had my appointment setter call them on the morning of the appointment to confirm that they were gonna show up. So knowing what I know now, I definitely wouldn't be sending 4 emails in 4 hours to someone from cold email. People got very upset about that. A lot of them canceled their calls, uh, told me to stop, and I like basically did stop doing this for a while because people were so mad before I eventually changed up a little bit. I would still do the rest the same way. Nowadays, I'd probably send a selfie video to everybody, uh, whether it's prerecorded or not. Um, when they book a call, they get a text message with a selfie video of me so they can see that face, hear my voice, et cetera. I'd also have my closers do that, but I definitely wouldn't put the 4 emails in 4 hours there, cuz people were very annoyed and you can't really blame them. They don't really care that much. They just got cold emailed and now they're basically being spammed. I do that on some funnels still, but this is not one that I would recommend it. So the first sale that I made was on my third call with this new offer. First call was a bone broth one that I said before, and honestly, I can't remember what the second one was at all, but the third one was the first time I ever got someone to pay via cold email. Which is a tremendous milestone for anyone in any business, right? So my first sale was for a pre-revenue store that, um, I thought it was a makeup brand. It really wasn't a makeup brand. It was a makeup remover made from caviar or some shit like that, jelly. And I remember feeling so good when the PayPal payment came through because my Stripe was locked and I was using PayPal for like a 2-week period here. And when I saw that invoice, it was like getting the very first client again. It was very awesome. So I put that person through my normal onboarding process and it went very well. Uh, we had our onboarding call and then I talked to them again. They were just starting this brand, but they also owned another brand in the women's accessory space that does over 9 figures. So they're actually kind of well known. Uh, found out later. So they were not an amateur and just because it was pre-revenue doesn't mean It was a bad thing. As far as what I would do differently now, nothing. Only thing I'd like to do differently is get that first sale sooner. But part 8, now that I had made my first sale, my next goal was to turn it into a repeatable sales process. It was so different from the sales process in my paid ad funnel, uh, as well as the content funnel and obviously the partnership funnel. I've hired so many closers over the years and especially now. I know that you need a, you need a real sales process to plug someone into. They can't just come in and rely on their sales ability or do whatever they want, and they can't be really relied about to figure it out on their own. And this process was significantly colder than anything my sales team or I were used to up to that point. So I knew that I really had to kind of like dig deep into this. So basically I already had the same day confirmation call and a pre-call email flow. So what I did was the pre-call email flows all included a link to a case study or training, or basically a short audit video about, you know, this is what I would do for this brand and how I would just redesign it. And people were clicking on these links a lot and the links, because you can see, they would get between a 5% and 15% open rate in the pre-call flow, which is a great sign because at the very least they knew what we did and what our process was about. So in every one of these emails, I started with an objection at the top, then list the deliverables and the sales process in the middle. You know, the, the, the deliverables and the sales process. I just said like, this is what we're gonna talk about on the call. Like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then I included a unique link at the bottom, mixed it up. So I was fi— trying to focus on education in the flow. And at this stage, and even before it, like everything was set up to maximize the results. I, I was doing all that I could now, cuz when you're doing cold email, they're not going to a thank you page where you can show them some stuff. They're not being redirected anywhere. They're not, you know, doing all of this stuff. You're booking the call for them and all that you really have is an email flow and text and plus a little bit of appointment setting and it was all set up. So I knew that there was nothing better that I could really do. to set myself up or set my sales team up for success when I eventually pass it over to. So what I really wanted to do was focus on the on-call script or the on-call sales process, whatever you want to call it. And what I quickly realized doing a bunch of these calls is they literally have no idea who I am. That was a stark contrast in comparison to the other funnels. Content, obviously they know who you are. The landing page templates, a lot of education. There's a community element to that. So they knew who I was. And so when they went deep enough in the paid ad funnel, they knew all about me. They'd also spent $97 with me. So from some POV, they are a paying customer already, right? Through the partnerships, they already had the trust from the referral, or if it was a white label, they don't even know about me. So like, this was my first experience in my business career or adult life selling to people who were this cold. I sold the agency when I was younger, the Facebook ad agency, but that Facebook and Amazon agency were built almost entirely through referrals and a little bit of Facebook ads. So I never really did anything like this. So kind of the process, if you want to call it a process, is that I came up with was at the first 30 seconds of the call, I would introduce myself almost like a, like a movie trailer. We called it a highlight reel after reading a book, I believe called, um, I don't know, it was by Oren Klipping, the script maybe. Um, we had a 30-second highlight reel of myself and then I basically, I rewrote that 30-second script for my sales team or my eventual sales team who would use their own version of it and tried to draw from my authority. It was basically talking about how many brands I work with, name dropping a lot, some of the results, very like scripted. Like, I'm not gonna do it right now, but I probably could give you this 30-second highlight reel right now without a script, cuz I just repeated it so much. And then what I did after that was I got into this kind of framework, uh, that is an accumulation of something that I learned off this Twitter account named Bowtied Sales Guy, plus, um, something from a sales book called How to, um, what is it called? How I Raised Myself from Success to Failure at Sales. So basically we're asking 5 specific questions. So basically we get the 30-second highlight reel and like, nice to meet you. So what was, uh, what was an ideal, like, what is an ideal outcome for this call? And then they tell you and then like, okay, that sounds great. So do you mind if I ask you 5 questions to see how you compare to our most successful clients? And then they say yes. And then we got into it. And then these 5 questions are basically like, You know, variations of what is the goal? Okay, this is the goal. Okay, why can't you do that now? And they tell you, okay, like if we don't solve this problem, like what happens? And then you tell them, and then I can't remember what the fourth one was, but then the fifth one is, you know, this costs anywhere between $2,500 and $5,000 if it works, and if it doesn't work, it's free. Like, are you okay with that to proceed? And they say yes. And like, okay, if I, you know, go to the sales presentation next and then I show them— sales presentation is very built to Basically, sales presentation is built like the top 10 objections I heard on a call, basically built in the order of I hear them most. And then basically all I do is go over those objections, kind of preemptively doing that. And then we go to the objection phase for everything I didn't cover and then the close. So the really nice thing was I did a good job of like fleshing out the sales process, but the offer was so strong. That truly after a while, the only objection, because everything else was handled in the sales presentation. So the only objection would be that they have to put a $500 deposit down and the condition that they had to run the A/B test or I was gonna auto-charge them. And because we did pretty good job with the sales process and like the presentation, you really didn't hear many objections. Like the, all the objections were like, will this work for my brand? Will this work for my country? Will this work? For my language? How do you ensure it's the right tone of voice? How do you ensure it's branded to me? You know, like, how do I help you? How do you help me create an offer? Like, those are the kind of objections for this, and those were already handled preemptively. So it's always about basically like, you know, the deposit and what I'll get to next. So what I did here is I also had a two-part guarantee, a conditional guarantee that If they thought the landing page that we produced was so bad that they didn't even want to A/B test it and risk their ad spend, they could cancel all of this for just $250. So I'd give them half their deposit back. So like, you know, it's easy enough. Oh, I, I thought it was free. We didn't have to put a deposit down. Well, you know, like, how do I know you're not just not going to take it? It's a deposit and it's in the contract that I'll give it back if it doesn't work and whatever. Right. And then the next objection is like, you know, you're going to auto-charge me if I don't do this. Like, well, yeah, that's only fair. Like, or else you're basically scamming me. And they're like, okay, fair enough. But this, the last objection was like, what if you build a landing page that I think is so bad that I wouldn't even want to test it? And like, fair enough, right? So basically I came up with this, you can cancel it all for $250 and then I'll do it. So that $250 was essentially covering the cost of You know, it was intended to cost, cover the cost of all my appointment setters, all my cold email infrastructure, all my, that kind of stuff. But I didn't really track it too significantly. Like this didn't, this situation was more like an objection. It rarely ever happened. So I rarely even brought up that conditional guarantee, maybe 5, 10% of the time and rarely ever used it. But that is like kind of how you do it for that kind of stuff. And honestly, I had no problems with those two objections and the third one, 10, 15% of the time, 5%, and then that objection kind of handled it. I honestly don't know what I would do differently about this. The only thing that I probably would do is actually go over the call recordings and maybe have different ways to overcome each objection. I do that now cuz I'm older and wiser at this point. But at that time, my objection handling list or cheat sheet, there was only really one way to handle every objection. And if the context of that, the objection was not brought up, like in a specific way, it kind of felt pretty forced and awkward. Like, I don't know an example off the top of my head, but if you just only answer an objection with a certain way and it comes up awkwardly, it just, it feels kind of weird. So I would have multiple ways and use my closer's judgment. So part 9 is going to be sales 2 to 10. So with each new sales call, I was getting better and better. I was learning what the objections were that I went over and I was going to constantly tailor the pitch. So it took me almost no time at all to get sales 2 to 10. I think this was actually less than 2 weeks. I was getting a huge positive reply rate. I think it was like 7% because I had such a good offer. I said on the presentation that I don't want to make something up, but it was something like 7% and everything was going just great. Right? So at this point I was getting used to like the coldness of the sales process and the email flows and all the assets and the case studies definitely helped. And the 30-second highlight reel introduction helped as well, but it wasn't enough. Like the 5 questions really were where we flip the script and it's from a book called Flip the Script. Like no matter how much that I did the email flows and you know how much I hyped myself up, I really had a better result here when I started doing essentially being more aggressive with the questioning. So it was kind of like instead of just, can I have, uh, You know, can I ask you like 5 questions to see how you compare to our best client? Like, that's what I was doing before and it was very passive and I kind of changed the whole thing to really be like, you, these questions are to disqualify you. And when that happened, that was kind of the switch that went off for me, uh, in the success in how cold the sales process was. Now, you know, I wasn't bothering them. They were like giving me their time of day. Now it's like I am telling them that they can't have this unless they answer these 5 questions right. I have some call recordings of this and maybe I kind of can't imagine I put them on YouTube, but you can really see it in the call recordings. And I knew instantly when I did it the first time that it was money. And I instantly knew it the first time that I would have to get my eventual closers when I offloaded this to do the same thing. So I got to 10 sales and I specifically remember thinking to myself, Like, okay, now this is proven essentially. How do we just do more of this? Because, you know, this is when I started, you know, I got, I went from learning about Alex Hormozi from his book to actually watching on YouTube. And the phrase more, better, new is at this point, like beaten into my subconscious. So I settled on going up from 30 cold email domains, which I was still using to 480. Because quick math, I thought at the time I could send about 50 cold emails per day, per domain, Monday to Friday. So basically 480 times 50 is more than 20,000. So even if some get burned, I could always send 20,000. I would like to say that there's some more thought put into that than that, but not really. Basically knowing, looking back, I was getting about 2,500 Like I was having to send about 2,500 cold emails per qualified call. So that math kind of funnily works out if I wanted to get 8 calls a day, which is what I would give to a closer, but nothing changed about the offer. Nothing changed about the script. Nothing changed about the process. It was just sending more emails, going a wider TAM. I had a very strong positive reply rate, but so many of them are unqualified that the true, like qualified call basically took about 2,500 cold emails. So basically what I did was I got a new list. I basically, instead of 3 to 25 employees, I just basically, I think I did any Shopify store. I also added WooCommerce, also added some random funnel builders, which I quickly took off because most of the replies I was getting were from like scam affiliate marketers. So what I would do differently here. I don't know. I probably wouldn't do anything differently in that case. So now part 11, which is setters and closers. So I basically knew that I needed to hire the setters and closers fast. I had the sales process fairly dialed. I had the volume of calls. I was sending 20,000 a day, getting 8 calls per day, sometimes, sometimes even more. So what I did was I hired 2 closers and 4 setters for this. My thought process for the setters is there's going to be so much inbox management that, you know, which turned out to be the correct instinct that I just need like more setters than even closers. So I hired setters in South America, also in South Africa and also in the Philippines. So basically the purpose of this was to have, you know, 24/7 inbox coverage, no matter what time someone responds to a cold email. You know, someone in South America, someone in South Africa, someone in the Philippines, you know, time zone is going to be there to do it. I went on to hire people also to work on the weekend. So literally 24/7, there's someone always watching my inbox, trying to book the calls. My setup process at this time was really just a script. Basically, it's like, if, if they say this, send this, if they say this, send this, if they send this, send this, and like kind of just a tree two ways, not really sophisticated at all, nothing personalized. So for my closers, I took one, I hired two closers and I took one of the people from my paid ads offer and then placed them with one I hired and then put another one on the cold email. That was a mouthful, but I want to take my second best closer from my paid ads version of this, my paid ad funnel, and put them here. Because I wanted someone who is up to speed already on like what we're selling and how it works to actually see if this was viable to offload as opposed to trying from scratch. And he was kind of like not very happy about this because he thought it would not close it, but I gave him 20% commission instead of the 10% he was getting on the paid ads. And that was good. I wanted to kind of have someone who was already used to selling this to stabilize and balance it. And it's a lot cheaper than paid ads and stuff anyways. So It didn't really matter, um, the increase in commission to me. I just wanted to get someone who would do it properly and prove to myself mostly that I wasn't the only person who could close off cold email. So like, as you probably know, if you can do basic math, 20,000 cold emails per day, even when you're counting the follow-ups and other emails, quickly burns through basically every person in your target market very quickly. So like, probably I should have done this basic math, but I think there was about 113,000 qualified Shopify stores counting, or e-commerce stores counting Shopify and WooCommerce between that $3,000 and $25,000 mark. And then about 400,000 total that I exported. Like eventually I started just sending to this total 400,000, but the 113,000 were what really sticks in my mind for some reason for the size of the qualified list. And essentially spending 20,000 cold emails per day, even at 400,000, you're essentially just burning through the list every single month. And, you know, 287,000 of those probably weren't even going to buy anyways. So like if a store has no revenue, which most don't, like that's why I didn't export anybody under 3. And if they have 25+ employees, they're probably not going to hire me or they probably don't run ads. So. Was just kind of dumb that I sent, you know, 480 domains worth. I probably could have done the same thing with like 100 domains and got the same result. So it didn't really— going from that 30 to 480 didn't really expand, um, how many clients I was getting from cold email. Literally, it was like just a little step up, but, um, you know, anyways, I also remember around this time that we're getting so many unqualified people trying to book calls that I actually re-recorded the Loom and basically said, if this, if you don't meet all of these criteria, like don't even respond because it's not for you. That's basically how the Loom went. So it's, you run ads on Facebook, you're doing this much revenue, you know what A/B testing is, you, I, whatever they were, I can't remember. So basically that was the solution to the problem of unqualified people because even with all of those setters. It was literally just 20,000 cold emails with a great offer. Like the inbox was just basically being blasted and they couldn't keep up. So it's like, don't book a call. And let's just say it was, unless you're running Facebook ads, unless you're doing over $500K in revenue, unless you know how to set up A/B testing, unless you like, whatever it is, like that's what my Loom was like. But it was good. So at this stage, you know, like even if I did make the mistake of buying 480, I probably just wouldn't replace any of the cold email domains that I burned. You know, if we got to 100 to 200 cold email domains, like that would probably be enough for this. So especially in e-commerce where like 113,000 is a very good size for an active clean list. But if you're doing something like roofers or something like You know, local businesses definitely don't do this because you're going to burn through it even faster. So part 13 is called multi-channel. And what I did is I knew I couldn't really do any more volume. My offer was working. I wasn't really too keen on testing A/B test, like A/B testing copy. I thought that was kind of low leverage. So I thought the next step would go be like multi-channel on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. So there wasn't any fancy tools back then. At least I didn't know, or I wasn't aware of them. But what I would do is I just hired a bunch of people in India and Pakistan to go through my cold email list and basically manually enrich it. Nowadays you'd be using Clay, but they would just literally go to the website and try to find like their LinkedIn account first and then reverse engineer the founder's name, try to go find them on Twitter, try to go find them on Instagram and whatnot. And they would just put it in the spreadsheet, like basically the list spreadsheet. And then what I did was I eventually bought and rented about 20 active LinkedIn accounts. Eventually those started getting banned, so I kind of stopped with that strategy. But every time someone replied to the cold email, we had an automation that would look them up in our spreadsheet to see if they had a LinkedIn active. And if they did, my setter team would try to phone them and then try to connect with them and then try to DM them on LinkedIn. I tried to replicate this strategy for Twitter and I just found it very unscalable just because it's very hard to find profiles on Instagram, especially the founder profiles. Basically the only thing that I thought was good for doing this at the time, and I didn't get into this strategy before I sold, but what I did was I created a fake Twitter profile and then basically or a fake LinkedIn profile and basically set myself as working at Shopify. And then when you, back then at least, when you set yourself work at a company, you can actually export a clean list or see and scrape a clean list of everybody who follows your company. So that was a good way to do it. And then I scraped people who would follow kind of like obscure enterprise-level Shopify apps. So some like drop a name like Triple Whale, Gorgeous, um, like those kind of things. 'Cause if they're basically following, you know, very expensive Shopify SaaS that only someone who has a Shopify store would even know about, then I thought like that might be a good list, but it really didn't work. Like the problem that I found with e-commerce store owners on Twitter, like a lot of them aren't active or they go on a username on Instagram. They're private and on LinkedIn, it's just very hard to find them. 'Cause if you're like a dentist or a lawyer, your job title on LinkedIn is dentist or lawyer or realtor or doctor, right? But if you're an e-commerce store owner, like your job title is not e-commerce store owner, it's got probably founder at, you know, store name, right? So it's just very hard to find them for me at least. So maybe that there was an easier process back in the day, but I certainly wasn't aware of it. And even now I don't know if there's a good thing, but it was a lot lower scale, my multi-channel strategy than cold emails. And it basically didn't get any calls. It was basically kind of a failure. So today, probably much easier to do this, build a list with Clay, um, use HeyReach APIs, Unipyle, that kind of stuff. But I, if this stuff existed back then, I wasn't aware of it. So let's talk about the finished or the mature process. So like what I did was over this time period, I did get about 1,100 clients from cold email. The average ticket size was $3,300 going to the people who, you know, $2,500 or $3,000 for $5,000. Same with the entire process where they only pay if it works. A lot of people actually did the A/B test and some didn't, and I charged them. I never really had any negative feedback on doing that. If I charged them, most of the time it's like, oh my, yeah, my bad, man. We just didn't get around it. Like, thanks for doing that work. So we're spending 20,000 cold emails per day, Monday to Friday. I had around-the-clock appointment setters, 10 in total over the course of the entire time. Speed to lead in under 10 minutes on average, because we tracked it very, very specifically. We tracked it with a spreadsheet at this time, but and then I eventually had 3 full-time closers for this outreach process. I think it was about 27% close rate, rings a bell in my mind or something like that. It was very, very good and got me about 40% of the revenue in the business in the following months. And then my entire goal of this was to get another acquisition channel that, you know, I could say would work if and when my paid ad didn't. So it was really good for my exit. Nowadays, basically the only thing I would do different is the multichannel, and I would also call people who responded to my cold emails. I do that now in my cold email offers, but I didn't do that back then. But yeah, that is how I got 1,100 clients from cold email.