[Blog category]
Outbound, ads and funnel playbooks with the numbers behind them.
102 articles · Page 1 of 5
We built three outbound campaigns in one hour with Claude Code for a hotel and tech marketing agency. Each one starts from a live situation: a hotel opening soon, a B2B launch that underperformed, or a competitor's launch. Here are the triggers, the exact emails, and what we fixed after reading them.
Michel Lieben
This 6-step ABM motion brought one client more than $2M in closed-won. It grades every account on fit, tracks intent signals to decide timing, tiers accounts on both, and warms them up with ads and content before the first email lands.
Michel Lieben
Mapping your total addressable market (TAM) starts in your CRM, where closed-won and closed-lost deals define your ICP. From there you build a wide account list, segment it, pick a path per segment, and score every account into a tiered target account list (TAL) before finding three personas per account.
Michel Lieben
Cold email, LinkedIn DMs and cold calling do not compete for the same accounts, and ranking them in the abstract falls apart the moment you look at a real target list. The variable that decides the channel is account tier: cold email is limited only by infrastructure and covers thousands of Tier 2 and Tier 3 contacts where a direct pitch costs you nothing, while LinkedIn DMs and cold calling both hit hard ceilings and belong on the Tier 1 accounts you cannot afford to burn. Each channel also fails in its own predictable way, through platform restrictions, the spam folder, or the time cost of dialing without direct mobile numbers, and the teams that get all three working tier the list first and assign channels to tiers rather than picking a channel and building a list to fit it.
Michel Lieben
Multichannel outreach gets two to four times more replies than email alone. One high-ticket client went from 1.8% to 4.3% positive replies in two months, without touching their targeting or their offer. Five decisions did it, and the biggest was putting the LinkedIn profile view and invite before the first email.
Michel Lieben
ColdIQ books more than 100 meetings a month through a funnel that has kept the same three-stage shape for three years, generating 40,000 monthly website visitors from search, LinkedIn, cold outbound, YouTube and webinars, capturing them through contextual lead magnets, email sequences, newsletter CTAs and visitor de-anonymization, then converting 70% of deals through one or two sales-led calls on Google Meet. The tool list turned over repeatedly across those three years while the structure stayed fixed, and the same funnel is now being used to take the new ColdIQ platform to $1M ARR.
Michel Lieben
B2B data breaks into 8 distinct layers, each with specialized providers: TAM mapping (Apollo.io, AI Ark, DiscoLike), lookalikes (CompanyEnrich), local business data (Openmart), people enrichment waterfalls (FullEnrich, Prospeo, BlitzAPI), buying signals (PredictLeads, TheirStack), technographics (BuiltWith, TheirStack, Sumble), and live web discovery (Exa, Limadata, Serper). Missing a layer creates a specific blind spot, from undercounted markets to unreachable contacts to late timing. The eighth layer is orchestration: the ColdIQ API Marketplace integrates 40+ providers under one API key so teams can waterfall across every layer and swap providers without code changes.
Michel Lieben
Cold email fails when it is sent to a static list where everyone gets the same message on the same day, regardless of whether they are in-market. Buying signals fix the timing by telling you who is in motion, so your outreach carries a real reason instead of a generic hook. Signals come from three sources: first-party behavior in your own ecosystem like product usage, website visits, engagement, and call transcripts; second-party intent shared by partners through champion tracking, affinity overlap, and marketplaces; and third-party data from external providers covering technographics, funding, job openings, news, and firmographics. Each source has tools that capture it, from Clay and Common Room to PredictLeads, Apify, and Prospeo. Put the signals to work by picking one that maps to your offer, qualifying it against firmographics, finding the person and a verified email, then writing the opening around the trigger itself.
Michel Lieben
Learn AI-powered enrichment strategies, cost-saving API integrations, and expert GTM tips. Discover how to use Clay to scale smarter without overspending.
Michel Lieben
A prospecting list is a compilation of potential buyers who fit your ideal customer profile (ICP), organized in a database. Think of it as a key to unlocking your cold outreach efforts. Without it, you don’t know who to reach and how to contact them.
Funmito Obafemi
Discover the 4-channel ABM strategy that generated $7.8M in pipeline. Learn how LinkedIn ads, content, tracking, and outbound work together to convert.
Alex Vacca
Learn how to scrape website data into Excel automatically with the Clay scraper! Save time and boost productivity with this easy step-by-step guide.
Michel Lieben
Learn how to use Clay’s AI Agent (Claygent) to automate research, enrich data, and streamline workflows. Step-by-step guide to getting more from your outbound process.
Michel Lieben
Learn how to spot LinkedIn buyer signals and use them to connect with the right people. From my experience, it’s a game changer for sales success!
Michel Lieben
Find out how to find phone number using FullEnrich, including proven enrichment strategies to uncover direct dials and improve sales outreach efficiency.
Michel Lieben
Ivan Falco's LinkedIn Ads + outbound workflow generates $3.28 for every $1 spent by combining department-level ad targeting with outbound outreach to engaged accounts. The system uses Fibbler for company engagement tracking, Clay for qualification and scoring, a three-provider waterfall for contact
Ivan Falco
Cold email automation explained: how to grow your outreach at scale while keeping messages personalized, targeted, and effective for modern B2B sales.
Funmito Obafemi
Your lead list matters more than your email copy. Hyper-specific targeting based on buying signals like job postings, tech stack gaps, and funding rounds consistently outperforms beautifully written emails sent to generic lists. Real personalization requires real data. Dropping first name and compan
Michel Lieben
ColdIQ's two-agent Claude Code system runs ICP research, company/contact list building, ad concept generation, and live campaign deployment from a single terminal. The workflow produced 1,300 target companies, 3,000+ enriched contacts, 30 ad concepts with rendered images, and live campaigns on both
Michel Lieben
Snowflake built 60% of their pipeline through SDRs at $4B ARR, not by scaling headcount, but by unifying Marketing, SDRs, and Sales under one team. Here is how they did it and how smaller teams can run the same plays.
Michel Lieben
We generated 25,000+ leads in 2026 using a 6-step cold outreach process that helped the agency reach $7M ARR. The system starts with audience segmentation, moves through TAM mapping and account tiering, then applies different outreach intensity to each tier. Speed on replies and deliverability setup are the two most underrated factors that determine whether a campaign succeeds or fails.
Michel Lieben
I sat down with Charles Tenot, CEO of lempire ($29M+ ARR), at their Paris office. He shared how lemlist, Taplio, Tweet Hunter, and lemcal work together as a product ecosystem, why the volume-based cold email playbook is destroying itself, and his honest take on AI SDRs (he has not found a single happy customer yet). Plus his thesis on why brand likeability beats features in B2B SaaS.
Michel Lieben
Cold email books meetings from day one with 1:1 personalization at $500 to $1,000 per 10,000 prospects, but deliverability sits at 60 to 70 percent and requires constant infrastructure management. LinkedIn Ads deliver at 95 to 99 percent and build brand awareness that compounds over time, but cost $500 to $1,500 and take weeks to optimize. The highest-performing B2B teams run both channels together, using LinkedIn Ads to warm prospects before cold email converts them, increasing outbound reply rates by 25 to 40 percent.
Michel Lieben
WhatsApp outreach delivers 30% reply rates and near-perfect deliverability, but it does not scale beyond a few hundred warm leads without heavy manual work. Cold email reaches thousands of prospects per month at lower cost per contact, but reply rates sit between 1-10% and deliverability requires constant maintenance. The strongest outreach teams use cold email for top-of-funnel prospecting and WhatsApp as a warm follow-up layer to convert engaged leads.
Michel Lieben
