When I started this newsletter, my promise to you was that I’d keep you up to date with major changes in the lead gen space.

Today I’m going to deliver on that promise.

When I stumbled across cold email 7 years ago, I felt like I’d stumbled into a gold mine.

It took me 20 minutes to scrape and send 100 cold emails, and that resulted in no less than THREE paying clients.

Today, we have to send nearly 8,000 cold emails to get one paying client.

Whilst we’re still able to get good open rates, virtually none of my marketing agency’s one hundred or so clients are getting a positive ROI from their cold email campaign.

Will that change?

Possibly, but not for a long time.

In 2018 we saw good results from sending cold DMs on LinkedIn. Then every caught onto it, abused the system, and people stopped checking their inbox and replying to messages. Plus LinkedIn introduced strict caps on how many connection requests you could send.

But in 2024, very few people are sending cold DMs on LinkedIn, and as such we’ve seen response rates increase slightly.

So I believe that the same is possible for cold email, but I think it’ll take years to come full circle.

For now, your only chance is to send a huge volume of cold emails to get a handful of results.

But that’s only possible if 1) you have a huge target market 2) you are one of the few that know how to send hundreds of thousands of cold emails and keep open rates high and 3) you have an offer that can break through the noise.

Even then, it’s expensive to do at scale, and with diminishing results, it won’t produce a positive ROI for some businesses.

So what next?

This month my agency Growth Yard made the huge decision to stop offering our done-for-you cold email service. Given that it represents the majority of our revenue, we didn’t make that decision lightly.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Very few agencies run as many multi-channel B2B marketing campaigns as Growth Yard. Plus we have been experimenting with virtually every B2B marketing channel to fill our own sales team’s calendars. So we have a unique insight into which channels are performing best.

Here are the top three ways we’re generating leads for our own sales team right now:

1) Telemarketing

To our surprise, last month we booked 42 sales demos for our sales team from just over 4,000 dials.

Turns out that cold calling has come full circle and is once again an effective marketing channel.

2) LinkedIn Ads

We have seen an increase in the cost per conversion, but LinkedIn Ads is still proving to be one of our best-performing B2B marketing channels.

In the past 30 days, our cost per sales call booked was $119. Plus, we find the quality of the calls to be far higher than any other platform.

3) Cold email at scale

Whilst it’s effectiveness has dropped significantly, we’re in the fortunate position where we have a large TAM, and we know how to send emails at scale. For our own sales team, we’re sending 200k emails per month.

For our clients, we’re helping them set up the same cold email infrastructure so they can replicate our results.

Summary

The B2B marketing space is changing rapidly.

What worked two months ago might not work today.

Spread your bets across multiple channels to avoid your sales pipeline drying up if one channel gets hit.

If you are drowning and need help, drop me a line and I’ll try to offer my best advice.

It’s hard out there.

Good luck!

Lee