How to Scale Your Cold Outreach to 500K SMBs | Cold To Close : Episode 2

Now, if I was a SaaS company, where am I going to screw up? So that stuff, you know, if you're trying to do any kind of volume that messes you up in shortest formats. What's changed in 2026 now in terms of what AI changed for us? Welcome, Abode Agriche. Finally. Finally. Good to have you here, man. How you going? Going well. Thanks so much for having me. The sun's getting a bit. It's nice and warm, but that's okay. So I want to just take a bit of a moment. We're going to spend the next 20, 30 minutes, talk about a few things. Perhaps the first thing, I want to go into your technicalities. I want to understand that because I know you're very unique for those who are watching this, at least amongst the very few agency owners who's actually been a software developer, he's worked at Amazon in the past and he scaled his business. But we'll get into that a bit later. Right now you're amongst the heavy users on the product, right? In shortest formats. What's changed in 2026 now in terms of what AI changed for us, in terms of our operations as an agency? It's made list building a lot easier. Like now it's a lot easier to build better lists, segment them better. And personally, I feel that all kinds of outreach, if you want to have success with outreach, especially with email, exclusively with email, it's a lot about who you reach out to and like a lot more about who you reach out to than about what it is that you say. And obviously what you say matters, right? Like, you can't. You can't just send them gibberish or like something completely nonsensical. But I feel when I speak to people, when I speak to, you know, potential customers, the thing that I see is they usually have the copywriting basics, okay? Not like it. Copywriting is not the blogger. And with AI, with cloud getting smarter, it's not difficult to write good copy. But what AI cannot do for you is it cannot build you good lists because it hallucinates. It might have the completely wrong idea on who your target audience is. So for those reasons, I feel like list building AI has helped a lot. In list building, we'll jump into the SMB space, right? I want to learn a bit more about your structure and then how you're actually doing the outband itself. Now, when I go into your structure, we'll break it down in two formats. One, this one you can be a little bleak about if you want what's your acquisition strategy for your own clients and then how do you acquire 50 plus customers? So majority of our own acquisition has been outreach. Like we just. And slowly I've started doing more content. So you know, late last year I've started doing more content. So we're getting some lead flow from that channel. But historically our most successful channel has been outbound and then referrals from customers. Adban alone works without any content. No. Like in the last six months I've seen a significant uptick in the quality of clients to attract. So even people that we reach out to. I found that, you know, we have better conversations on a SaaS calls. A lot of people check us out. You know, they've watched YouTube videos. I think if someone's watching this, there's absolutely no downside to doing content. You should probably be doing content. I was too late to realize this. So don't make the mistake I made. Put something out there, right? Like just, just document whatever you're doing. It's only going to help. Like I've seen that, like you know, I've seen material, like material a material difference in the quality of conversation. But I'm assuming timing few means, intense signals based off an action that's happened off platform. Like what would be we'll go to the general like job change or they've put the fundraise, what else? So you know, you mentioned the word signals and I feel that that word doesn't really tell you much. Right. Like when people talk about signals, it could mean anything. So internally when I'm trying to educate our team or even our clients, I like to break it down to saying behaviors or attributes that companies exhibit that you can confidently gather from their from publicly available information that makes it relevant for you to reach out to that business at that point of time. So it's two things, behaviors and attributes. Okay. Right. And now you can, now with these two categories you can break down the things that you look at. So behaviors could be things like you mentioned job posts, maybe they put out an rfp, maybe they hired a bunch of people for a certain department, maybe they were at an event, at a conference. Attributes could be using a tech stack being listed on a specific directory. Okay. So once you start to look at it from this lens, you can come up with a lot more things and then you don't have to like some signals that are super popular in the space are like scraping like software for LinkedIn is tracking data in SMB businesses. When you're serving SMB clients the same Meaning is it reply rate as the general metric? I know you do dialing and you're amongst the few that do it and you do it really well. We have a few others doing that too. I want to jump into that very quickly because that I think is a very interesting space with the way the world is going. But particular to you right now is is it per campaign? It might be a general question of is it per campaign that you do it? Is your offer always a reply rate driven campaign? What exactly is the clear measurement of a successful campaign? Here we just monitor one metric, we call it pcpl which is, you know, prospects contacted per lead. And the reason I love this so much is just by looking at that one number you can now, you know, I'll give you an example. So the pcpl, for anyone watching, obviously you want to get it as low as possible because that's the number of people you had to reach out to to get one positive response. So you want this number as low as possible. Now if the number is not low enough, now you can break it down. So now your reply rates and other metrics, those can now help you troubleshoot those parts are going to move the PCPL correctly. So now if your PCPL is not low enough and you see your reply rate is like.002%, you know, it's a deliverability problem. I see. Okay. So you know like now you go down the branch of the decision tree to figure out what's wrong. If Your reply rate is 3% but your PCPL is still too low, that means you're reaching out to the. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Like there's an offer and list fit. Very interesting. Means you're reaching out to the wrong people or you're making the wrong offer to the right people. So now you go down that decision tree and troubleshoot the next part of your business which is dialing. Very few people do it because I think is. And that's a unique selling point because with Outbound you can get anyone anywhere in the world to do that. Right. But for dialing you need to have a certain person. Right, Right. Accents also matter. Walk me through it. I'm very curious. I'm an open book. I want to know why did you add dialing number one? Who do you dialing for? Is there a particular type of Persona that it clicks you saying that they will only close if you do dialing? Let's go into that. I have a lot more to ask. Right. So the reason we did dialing again, a lot of the most of the things that we do, it always comes down to, you know, like just looking at the industry we're going after. Right. So a lot of the outreach we do, it's to local businesses. So you're looking at H VAC Plumbing, like these kinds of businesses. And if you don't call them on the phone, they're not looking the owners. Okay, okay. So you have to call them on the phone. And that's why we started introducing dialing. And when we did, the results were, you know, like we saw a massive improvement. Right. Oftentimes so we deliver appointments for some of our customers, not leads. How does the operations work? Where do you find these people? You don't give away secret sauce. But why? We know accents matter. We don't do sugar coated. Right. We know that you can't come from a different accent, whether it's European, Southeast Asian and sell to American. If you sell it to Americans. Right. How does that work? Are you using AI tools to sort of get people to convert their access across or are you finding people in other countries? If so, how so and what are the criteria you use to hire someone? So a lot of people think, and I think this is, this is a barrier that I had, you know, mental barrier that I had initially as well. A lot of people think that you cannot find people who have neutral accents, non US countries. But the truth is a lot of, there's a lot of talent in these countries that has dialed to the US that comes with experience and that does not have an accent. You just have to be like good enough at recruiting to find those people. Pay them, you know, pay them enough money so that they are willing to bring that experience to your team and then just happen dial. Like it's literally, it's, it's more, you know, if you say that I can't find people without accents, you're probably not either not paying enough or you're not. Yeah, fair enough. It's not that those people don't exist because companies like Amazon, there's massive corporations that outsource their customer support to these clients. Right. So if they're good enough for Amazon, they're good, you know, like, they're good enough for you. You just have to like match what they get paid there or offer them because that's the gap. Yeah, okay, fair play. That's a very interesting, I like the word neutral accents. I think that's a very interesting take up from the time you sign a client off. You said you interview them so that you understand pain points and trouble and so on. And so forth. But through that interview, do you actually find out who to target or is that targeting left to you? A lot of the times the client would just say, you know, we can work with any H vac. Okay, so you know, it's, it's a mix of the two. Some people are very articulate about who makes their best customers and some people, they, they just don't know, you know, like, and then you need to figure it out. So this is where, you know, if you've done similar campaigns in the past, you know, this is where it makes, you know, you can just draw on the data that you already have. Usually when it comes to lists, we try to look for directories. You know, again, just those two broad categories, behaviors and attributes. Try to look for directories, try to look for things that they haven't found. So we try to look for things that, you know, like just go by that list and then give ideas to the clients to see if they agree that that's going to make a good list. Right. And then I'll also touch upon your point. Can you explain data trees soon? So directories would be, you know, directories. No, no directories. So directories would just be, you know, like that are association directories that are often directories that people pay to get. Oh, so okay, you're not even talking about like run. Okay, associate. So these are paid directories that are niche and very driven in onux. Okay, so you're all right, interesting. Now if I was a SaaS company trying to go ahead and do my own artboard, right? Let's just call it a bit of a foot in mouth conversation for you. I come to you, I say, yeah, I can't afford you right now because I don't know, out by myself, I'm going to go try it. Where am I going to screw up that you know for a fact I'm going to screw up? Right. So, and then I come back to you. So usually that I'm sure this happened to you, they'll be like, ah, you're too expensive. You're like, don't worry, you're going to come back to me in a few months time. And then when they come back to, you know, this is the exact things that screwed up. Right. What are the things you think people are going to be doing? So again, I'll list the mistakes that we see the most often. First is deliverability. Okay. A lot of people love, for some reason they love tracking open rates. They are including the link to their website and the signature. So that Stuff, you know, if you're trying to do any kind of volume that messes you up, that's number one. If you get the deliverability right. A lot of people, they just buy Zubit for Apollo subscriptions and, you know, just like they hope that they'll apply filters and then, you know, that naturally might work. Yeah, doesn't work. You know, irrelevant leads are, you know, no replies at all. I want to jump back on the list building part, right? So I get the structure, I get how you use directories, your TAM structure in place, you interview your customers to figure out who to sell to. This is unique to you. But if I were to start, like, if I were to spend a day in your office. Right. Understand how you're doing this, which parts of your business, because you said AI is still not where it's let loose, it's still got an observability layer on top of it. What are the redundant activities that were redundant in 2025 you've automated right now? Specifically in the list building part, you can say, yeah, with the list building, I think like I mentioned earlier, we've expanded, so we started doing a lot more, but there's nothing that we really eliminated. Like, it helps us with scoping, it helps us kind of go in the. Right. So maybe the brainstorming is easier because now the AI can come up with ideas of, you know what, this could be a good segment. You don't have like segment mind blocks. I've thought blocks, yeah. So that is one thing. But, you know, it's mostly been with list building, it's mostly been expansion. Interesting, interesting. And that's probably attributional for those watching this, Right. AJI is amongst the highest reply raters in our business. It comes jokers. Clearly, when you're doing AI is good, but clearly seems like you've got the human loop a lot more dialed in than anyone else. But, Ajay, it's been fabulous having you here, man. We're going to do a bunch of cool stuff together. We're excited to have you. Thank you for being a supporter and. Yeah, absolutely, absolute pleasure. Thanks so much for this lovely conversation. I'll see you soon.