Recap: If you’ve gone through Part I, you should have your cold emailing domain with Google Workspace setup, fully authenticated, and warmed up to start reaching new customers.

In this part, we’ll go deep into leads. As before, we’ll also make quick comparisons of tools along with my recommendations.

A 10-second glossary before we begin —

If we can crack a repeatable, scalable system for lead gen, we’re already halfway to hear the sound of new revenue flooding the company’s bank account.

I’ll say it once more, lead generation is the most crucial step for any successful outbound email flywheel. It’s so vital that some cold email pros will tell you upfront that who you target is even more important than your email copy.

It is critical to identify who exactly needs what you’re selling and consistently get in front of them. Even poorly written emails can get surprisingly good results when someone has a hair-on-fire problem.

Before we can do that, we need to answer the following questions:

As we address these questions in a second, also keep in mind the 4 steps in the lead generation process:

Output: CSV files with leads that we can import into any SEP.

This is too vast to be covered in this guide. In case you need a little help here, feel free to reach out to me. The gist is to identify parameters by which we can segment and pattern-match our ideal company profile.

For example, let’s assume we’re a FinTech that does corporate cards and expense management.

Relevant filters here include geography, funding, headcount, and estimated revenue. The best way to discover these is to talk to as many (potential) and existing customers as possible to zero in on where the demand is.

Now we move on to our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). If you’re Pre-seed/Seed stage, I’d recommend starting out with 2-3 different personas until you find the segments with the most market pull.

In our example, this could be CEOs, CROs, VP of Finance, Finance managers, or accountants. The desired end state is to have multiple segmented lists of prospects to contact, with verified emails enriched with various personalized fields.

I recommend that founders do this themselves first to get a feel for the process. There’s a fair bit of experimentation and iteration involved initially. Once you have a repeatable process, lead gen should be delegated or outsourced. You can do this with interns, VAs, or freelancing lead generation experts.

Another popular way of doing lead gen is to buy ready-made lists (look under Email Audience Development on Upwork). Do keep in mind that this has become a gray area (illegal in some jurisdictions) concerning privacy laws — sending marketing messages to individuals who haven’t explicitly opted in — caveat emptor.

We’ll work backward from our target email volume to set a lead generation goal. Let’s assume we want to send 200 emails / day. It’s conservative to take that 40-50% of leads at this stage won’t clear verification. Keeping this in mind, generate 2-3x the target email volume. For our case, we’ll set a daily lead gen target of 400 leads.

As we build our company’s outbound playbook, we can more accurately estimate the lead efficacy %, depending on the accounts type and ICP we’re targeting.

There are so many email search providers, with seemingly little variation in terms of the offering but widely varying costs. With our clients, we most frequently recommend starting with Apollo to baseline coverage (can find a lead) and efficacy (the email passes verification).

This is a crucial step in the cold emailing process. From first principles, verification means sending an email to a given lead’s address, seeing if it delivers or bounces, and checking for a catch-all account — a user inbox or domain setup that will capture emails sent to any invalid addresses on the domain. Catch-all accounts make it impossible to guess email addresses by permuting prospect names (john@example.com, john.smith@example.com, etc.) Why does everybody want to make our job harder? 🤷🏽

Worry not because a good verification tool will ingest a list of emails (the CSV we prepared earlier) and weed out all the invalid and catch-all addresses for us.

Many lead generation platforms claim their emails are verified or provide confidence scores for each email. Don’t trust them. Verify your leads on your own. Your domain’s reputation is too precious to leave in another’s hands. So, run all leads through a dedicated verification service.

A perfectly personalized email will make a prospect feel understood and appreciated and that you wrote a whole email just for them. Think of personalization as the proof-of-work for outbound emails. Reciprocity suggests that your prospect is more likely to reply if they feel you invested time and effort in crafting an email for them. However, we’re chasing results and not perfection, so we need to hack it somehow to speed up the process.

A mental model we’ve used with great success is to score each element we can personalize. Aim for a personalization score of 3+ for your opening paragraph. We’ll explore this in more depth in the next issue of the email guide.

For now, consider the following:

In general, higher is better, but a score of 2 should be enough to start getting replies. At the bare minimum, we should add their first name and company name somewhere in the email.

I was recently consulting with a founder who had acquired 3 domains, with 5 email accounts set up on each. So naturally, I asked him:

It’s only too common to see companies going overkill on the email setup, but having extremely weak follow-through and daily emailing discipline. Don’t let this happen to your company. Use the lead gen process below. It only takes 20 min.

If you’re getting more than 3-4% bounces despite verifying the emails, switch to a different lead source. Once you discover a lead source and ICP that is predictably bringing you new customers, it’s time to delegate this step.

Congratulations! You are ready to start sending out emails and landing more customers. Just remember to set up a system so you consistently hit your target for lead generation every day.

If you need help with any of the above steps, we’re just a calendar link away. We’ve done this for multiple YC and non-YC companies, who’ve gone on to generated $100K+ in new revenue from outbound emails.

We’ll be releasing part III of this guide shortly, which will cover the best SEPs, copywriting guidelines for a 10%+ reply rate, and A/B testing.