The Modern Outbound Team Structure For Faster Pipeline | AJ Cassata

The era of 'spray and pray' cold emailing is over, but outbound isn't dead—it just requires a smarter, more targeted approach. A.J. Cassata, CEO of Revenue Boost, breaks down why pattern interrupts, genuine value-adds, and rigorous testing are essential to bypassing spam filters and cutting through the noise of crowded B2B inboxes. A modern outbound strategy blends high-volume automated email with highly targeted LinkedIn outreach. By targeting the top 5% of your TAM on LinkedIn and scaling automated email for the rest, you can maximize reach without sacrificing deliverability. Furthermore, AI tools like Clay should do the heavy lifting for list building and deep enrichment, leaving SDRs to handle warm replies, multi-channel ABM, and personal brand building. The ultimate metric for outbound success isn't open or click rates—it's the number of positive replies per lead. By treating outbound as a scientific process, testing multiple value propositions simultaneously, and offering true lead magnets like personalized Loom audits, go-to-market teams can build a sustainable pipeline that consistently converts without burning out their reps.

Discussed in this episode

• Why open and click rates are unreliable metrics and what you should track instead.
• How to build an omnichannel approach using automated email and targeted LinkedIn outreach.
• The importance of testing at least 30 different value propositions when launching new campaigns.
• Using AI tools like Clay for list enrichment and dynamic personalization without sounding robotic.
• Why SDRs should focus exclusively on warm leads and enterprise ABM instead of manual list building.
• The role of a 'GTM Engineer' in orchestrating highly automated, intelligent outbound sequences.
• Using high-value lead magnets, like customized Loom video audits, to secure initial meetings.
• Why avoiding calendar links in the first cold email is crucial for maintaining a conversational tone.

Episode highlights

1. 0:00 — Why personalizing just to personalize fails
2. 2:15 — The biggest misconception about lead generation today
3. 4:30 — Using pattern interrupts to stand out in the inbox
4. 7:45 — The only outbound metric that actually matters
5. 10:20 — Blending LinkedIn and cold email effectively
6. 13:00 — Using Clay for AI-driven list enrichment and scoring
7. 16:45 — The biggest outbound mistakes founders make
8. 20:30 — The modern GTM outbound team structure
9. 24:15 — A.J.'s recommended outbound tech stack
10. 28:00 — Why cold calling is poised to make a comeback

Key takeaways

• Track positive replies per 300 contacts, ignoring vanity metrics like open rates.
• Target your top 5% on LinkedIn, and use cold email for the rest.
• Automate the initial contact so SDRs can exclusively work warm leads.
• Test at least 30 variations of your value proposition to find what converts.
• Stop putting calendar links in your first cold email outreach.

Transcript

Yeah, I think if you just personalize for the sake of personalizing just to say something then you're doing it wrong. and a lot of people can see through it. It's the only metric that matters. Open rates are bullshit.

click rates are bullshit. all of your spam checkers, all of your email tools do that automatically. If you're a website company, send them a website audit or a loom video, right? Um or a competitor analysis or something along the story.

Welcome back to another episode of The Bridge the Gap podcast powered by revenue Reimagine. This is a road show episode. You'll notice different backgrounds. Dale and I are in California.

I'm sitting in the lobby of a hotel. Dale's in the room. Different room, we're not in the same room, but Dale's in his room. Uh, but nonetheless, today's guest is A.

J. Casada, who is the co-founder and CEO of Revenue Boost, where he has helped more than 440 agencies and SAS companies grow using LinkedIn, cold email, and omnichannel outbound systems. Yes, we're going to talk about outbound. It is not broken as everyone likes to say.

A.J.'s frameworks have been featured on Founder's Digital Marketer and Ad World, and their clients have generated millions in pipeline by focusing on one thing. Outbound that actually converts.

No spam cannons here, y'all. Outbound that actually converts. This episode's going to be about simplifying sales growth, how to build a repeatable outbound engine, balance automation with authenticity and scale revenue without burning out your team. And A.

J. just happens to have the coolest name cuz his initials match my name. So we had to have him on the show. A.

J., thanks for joining us, man. Thanks for having me. Hey, A.

J., thanks for joining. Appreciate it. Is Adam was not as loud as he usually is, so you won't be able to use that intro as we walk out because because he's in the middle of the lobby, but it was okay.

It's like it's like a seven out of ten. So we may have we may have to record another episode. So A.J.

, let's um let's dive in. Outbound that actually works like we hear all the time Outbound's dead. It is very difficult, but you've helped 400 companies fix outbound. What's the biggest misconception teams have about lead generation today?

Yeah, I think um one of the biggest misconceptions is that you can just basically take one email template, load up a list of 20,000 contacts and just fill your calendar with meetings. Uh and honestly a lot of people think that because that really did work well like two to three years ago. Um and I I think I sent my first cold email maybe seven years ago. And uh I think it gave everyone like a very false expectation of how that channel should work if you've been doing it for that long.

Um but really it's it's just not that easy anymore. I would say it's definitely gotten harder but it's still very very viable. It just it's just gotten I don't want to say saturated because I think people say think saturated is a bad thing but saturated to me is a good thing because it means if a lot of people are doing it, it's because it works and it makes money. It just means now you have to approach it a lot differently and really focus on like standing out in the inbox, right?

And we can talk about that what that means, but it's definitely not just, you know, spray and pray approach anymore. One template to 10,000 people. Uh that that can that still works if you really have like some amazing product market fit or if you're targeting a niche or an ICP that's just not very um like does just isn't cold email a lot, right? Like we had one client that was targeting real estate appraisers.

And like one client over all the years I've been doing this, targeting real estate appraisers. So, just because that's an industry that doesn't really get prospected a lot, uh it just worked really well. We didn't really have to try very hard on the copy or the personalization or segmentation or any of that. So, um but other than that, unless you're in one of those scenarios, you really have to be a lot more thoughtful and creative with your campaigns, just because everyone's doing it nowadays.

So Yeah, I agree with that. I think that that's a great point. Everyone is doing that and everyone also, one of the things I see is structuring their emails exactly the same, right? I was talking to a sales leader about this yesterday that regardless of how relevant the email might be and listen, relevance is in my opinion one of the one of if not the most important thing.

When you're all following the same, you know, 50 words or less, short sentences, you know, pain, problem, etcetera, etcetera. I think we're all desensitized down to up, just another cold email and I'm going to delete it. How do you get around that? Yeah, definitely.

So um we like to try pattern interrupts, just complete different, you know, types of copy. Um we still always will run those, you know, 50 to 60 email as well, but we just try to like one thing I try to do is I always read every cold email I get. Um which nowadays it's quite a lot of them, right? But I try to just get a sense for like what everyone else is saying so that I can make sure when we're writing copy, it's not exactly that, right?

Um but anything you can do just to stand out or be different, like nowadays we're even trying more longer emails, even though that's like historically what we've never done, just something to just not look like everything else. Cuz like it's exactly what you said, people have that mental filter of like, oh, another cold email, let me let me delete it. Um so like, yeah, we've tried to use humor on some. Um we also do a lot of lead magnets, just giving free value rather than asking for the meeting right away.

Um but ultimately you have to have some kind of way of just breaking the mold and that's why I always say the first thing you should do is start reading the cold emails you get, so you have a sense for it and you don't say the same thing everyone else is saying. And also I think it's even getting more like everyone's doing the same thing nowadays just because of A.I. So if you go to ChatGPT and say, write me a cold email, it's going to write you the same cold email it's writing for everyone else because it's scraping blog posts of other B2B sales leaders that have shared their cold email templates and everyone's sharing their templates on LinkedIn, etc.

, right? So, um, 100% of doing the same the same thing. How many of the cold emails you get and I probably get, I don't know, 10 to 15 a day. How many would you say are good?

And when I say good, like if you were, if you were in the need for that product that you would at least respond, what percentage are good cold emails? Yeah, I would say like definitely less than 20%, maybe 10 or 20%. And then also there's probably even 10 times more that are in my spam folder. So if you really think about it, it's probably like 1%, right?

Um, but uh, they they I'm always amazed, I'm always amazed when I go to clean up my spam folder, the volume in there that I don't that never even makes it to me. Yeah, I I feel bad when I see it, I'm like all these people are just talking. All all of Dale's emails from for somehow in spam folder. 100%.

No wonder why he never gets back to me. Yeah, yeah, it's a lot of them though and I think it's just because of like what we said, everyone's doing it and everyone's following the same playbook, right? They they go buy a course, they go look what other people are posting on LinkedIn, they ask ChatGBT and that's really like everyone's circling around the same uh the same templates, right? Um So, what what are the key signals or metrics that tell you your outbound's truly working?

Like or that's repeatable. What are those metrics? Cuz everyone's like, oh, open rates, right? That's not a good metric.

Yeah, there's really only one metric we like my team and I really measure for our clients and it's uh how many contacts per positive reply. That's to me like the truest metric, right? Um That's the only metric that matters. Open rates are bullshit.

Click rates are bullshit. All of your spam checkers, all of your email tools do that automatically. Thank you. Yes.

Yeah, exactly. Like you nailed that, you hit the nail on the head. Most I think it's Apple Mail opens every email for you, so you're saying you're getting 80% open rates, you're probably you're probably getting like 30%. Um We still kind of we'll look at it a little bit for deliverability cuz if we see that there's like a 5% open rate, well then then we know that something's completely like awful, right?

Uh with our deliverability. But um everything else is pretty much just a measure of deliverability, like our reply rate, um reply rate is okay to measure but it's really just to tell us if if people are replying, then we know that we're not landing in spam, right? So um all the metrics we just use to look to see if we're actually uh bypassing spam and if everything's okay with our technical setup. But other than that, the actual performance is just one like uh one lead per positive reply.

Usually every 300 or so. Uh we've we've measured this across a lot of industries and we've found one lead per 300 um to be pretty much like the like the average, I would say. And that's just for cold email and that's just for doing more of like a high volume cold email to small businesses or mid-market. If you're doing like enterprise outreach like very targeted, um then that would be a little bit different or if you're doing multi-channel, but most of our clients we're just doing high volume uh SMB mid-market cold email and one in 300 is pretty much our KPI.

So let let's shift gears a little from cold email. Um we all know that you can't just have one system that you use and hope that, you know, your emails or your phone calls or your LinkedIn's are going to convert. The best way to drive top of funnel in my opinion is through an omnichannel approach. And you call Revenue Boost an omnichannel lead generation system.

How do in the clients you're working with and your strategies, A.J., how do LinkedIn, cold email, automation, how does all of that fit together effectively? Like where do you start?

Yeah, for sure. So um we we blend together LinkedIn and cold email and usually take kind of a different approach on each channel. So with LinkedIn, um you only can message 100, 150 people a week without getting blocked by LinkedIn's limitation and risking your account, right? Um whereas with cold email you have pretty much like unlimited unlimited scale.

Um so what we do is, you know, we'll look at a client's TAM and we'll try to identify the top 5% uh of of accounts, whether it's by company size or similar similarity to some of their best clients or case studies, or maybe just intense signals like companies that just got funding or companies that are currently hiring for for jobs related to whatever their tool is. Um we typically take the best accounts and then go for that very targeted LinkedIn uh outreach. LinkedIn you'll see like 10, 20% response rates where cold email like 1%, 2% is pretty standard, right? Um so we'll essentially take the best the best uh accounts from their TAM, reach out to them on LinkedIn and have that be sequenced with, you know, not just pitching but also commenting, liking, uh following them, you know, profile business, etc.

, to kind of warm them up. Uh and then, you know, first step is a LinkedIn connect, second step is a LinkedIn message. If that hasn't replied, then email and etc. So we'll always go LinkedIn email just because you might actually have the right accounts on LinkedIn but not everyone uses LinkedIn or not everyone logs in like every every day or even every week.

Um and then from there once we once we have the best accounts with that omnichannel approach, we'll then and we've maxed out their LinkedIn accounts, then we'll take the rest of the TAM and go for a more automated um automated cold email approach. And we'll still use personalization there. So we're using a lot of AI and maybe you guys are familiar with Clay as a way to make those high volume emails still sound very curated and personalized and and still kind of break through the noise. So happy to dive into that as well.

So you guys, you guys leveraged Clay underneath the covers on some of the stuff that you're delivering? Yeah, Clay is like pretty central for our agency. Um, I think it's uh, it definitely like I hear the complaint from a lot of people that there's a huge learning curve, which there definitely is. Um but it's kind of like I remember when I first started using it for the first three months, I was just frustrated with it.

But then there was a point where I was like, oh, now I get it. Now I see all the things it can do and it could really do a lot. Uh but the thing we use it for the most is just personalizing outreach and also qualifying leads. Um so really like we just, you know, you can have a you can have a list of 100,000 leads and have Clay in there to filter for who might the best leads be.

You can score them. You can check if they're B2B or versus B2C or let's say you sell to e-commerce companies and your best clients are e-commerce companies that have a subscription um type service like a subscription box or something, right? There's really no other way to tell that other than manual research unless you're using AI agents to qualify that. So, Clay just makes it really easy to kind of call your lead list and um also actually personalize the messaging based on whatever you've had its agents research about the company.

So, we um yeah, we do a lot of personalization not just because it stands out, but also it helps with deliverability because when you're sending the same email over and over again, then that's what gets Google and Outlook to put you on their on their naughty list, right? So, just the dynamic content helps a lot too with breaking through. Where do you see most teams waste time or money when they're trying to go Omni channel? Uh like just wasting time and money with their campaigns or like barking up the wrong tree?

Yeah, just anywhere. Where where where do you see them waste the most time and money in that place? Like is it you know, they're they're spamming the same email. They're like they're not doing calls like they they say they have an omnichannel approach and we see this a lot with our clients.

They're like, yeah, we'll do that but they'll they'll do like 80% email, like 10% calls and like 10% LinkedIn. Yeah, good question. I think the biggest time waster is people that are doing email, but they're still doing too much manual effort around email like manual list building, manual emails, even manual personalization at this point. So, you know, like for most of our clients, email is the majority of the of the focus, but it's not the majority of the time spent because it's the most easy to it's like the easiest to automate, right?

Like we're not really at the point where you can automate cold calls. Um I know that there's like these AI callers, but I don't I don't really see that. They all suck. They all suck.

Exactly. That's that's been my experience too. And I don't think it's legal. I'm pretty sure it's still like not really allowed to just outbound cold call people with uh with a robot.

Um but uh yeah, like to me there's still so many so many companies that are having their sales reps pull lists and send out emails one by one or personalize them. And um again, if you're doing SMB mid-market outbound email, you should automate everything up until a lead comes in and then you actually, like we still have a human at that point take over to move them to uh to the next phase. How do you how do you do that and and still be personalized or is personalization the scam that we don't really need? Because the typical way that I hear or see of people using clay is certainly using it for list building and enrichment, which I think is probably the number one most important use case.

To your point, no person should be manually building a list and manually enriching unless we're double triple checking things in an enterprise market and using some sales now filters, etc., etc. But by and large, I agree with you. But then where I'm seeing clay is going in and putting, you know, the same bullshit, you know, value prop fake personalization, um, hey, A.

J., I see you have the same initials as me, blah, blah, or, you know, hey, A.J., I I see that you went to, you know, University of Miami.

That is not personalization. Is personalization is personalization needed this day and age? People buy from people. That's why companies who invest in meaningful connections win.

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Trust me, I led sales for a Sendoso competitor, and I can tell you, no one does gifting better than Sendoso. If you're looking for a proven way to win and retain more customers, visit Sendoso.com. I would say it's definitely not needed, but it's an enhancer.

And then there's definitely a right way to do it and a wrong way. Because, yeah, it's funny, like we talked about earlier, looking at cold emails you receive to see how you can write better ones yourself. And after Clay became popular, I started to also see the same emails in my inbox, like the same templated, you know, LLM written first lines and um, yeah, hey, I saw you went to college here, or one I see a lot is they'll like call out a restaurant in my town, which is kind of cool, but then I see everyone doing it and they're like, oh, have you been to this restaurant uh in my hometown or whatever? Um and they're like, I love the steak there.

And I'm like, you definitely haven't eaten the steak there. I live in like I grew up in a small town of like 2,000 people. You probably haven't been there. No one's been there.

Um it's kind of funny though. It's like novel it it usually catches my attention at least. But, yeah, I think if you just personalize for the sake of personalizing just to say something, then you're doing it wrong and a lot of people can see through it. And if you do too much of it, the thing is A.

I. is always going to hallucinate a little bit. So, if you do too much personalization, you're just creating more opportunities for A.I.

to say something wrong but then it's going to break it. Yeah. Yeah, 100%. Um A.

J., a lot of our founders a lot of our clients are founders, um doing their own sales. What's the what's the most common mistake um when they're doing when they're trying to scale outbound? I would say assume like a solo founder and they're they're they're founder led sales and they're trying to build than subs.

Or, yeah, I mean, we're trying to sell that, you know, they're going from zero to a million and a half A.O. Now they're trying to like hire a team and scale. Or, you know, they they're resetting everything and they're rebuilding sales team and they haven't done outbound before.

Now all of a sudden they're trying to do outbound. Uh what's the most common mistake people are making in that space? I think one of the most common mistakes I see is definitely not testing enough. Like when we're running cold email campaigns, we might test 30 different campaigns in the first few months.

And we're just measuring that metric of how many leads am I getting per positive reply. Because again, you know, like we all know, years ago, you could just have one campaign and people didn't receive a lot of cold emails, so you could just get lucky on the first try. Um but I think people underestimate how much testing and how scientific you need to be around testing lists, testing job titles, company types, whatever you can play around with there, and just testing a lot of copy. Um because when you're building your outbound motion from scratch like you mentioned, or maybe you've done a little bit before, like most founder led sales teams are usually getting most of their leads originally from inbound or maybe referrals or their network or they go to events.

But once you shift to outbound, like a lot of times you don't actually know what messaging is going to work and you're really having to reinvent that because you don't know what's going to work with a cold audience, right? So a lot of times the messaging you might have for your warm audience is very different than when you're reaching out to a stranger who doesn't know you, doesn't trust you, and isn't looking for what you sell. And often you're trying to maybe position your offer in a different way or you're trying to create demand versus kind of capture that that inbound demand, right? So it's kind of like the messaging changes as you're talking to people up the funnel who are problem aware, but not yet already solution aware and looking for what you sell.

And the only way you figure that out, like, yeah, of course you can do customer interviews, that's always very useful, but to me the best thing is just doing a lot of testing, Um and just really reading the data to see what's actually bringing me the most leads per every 500 emails I send, right? So, what I would do is I would take, like especially if you're building it from scratch like you mentioned, I would take I would take my offer, I would even just plug it into ChatGPT or Claude and say, hey, write me 30 different value propositions. Maybe some focusing on pain, some focusing on social proof, some focusing on uh benefits, some focusing on explaining how it works, some focusing on keeping it vague and talking about the outcome. And just have a lot of different ways of explaining and positioning your offer.

Uh and then just get that out there and it's like the tools nowadays make it really easy to AB test and read the data to see what's working or not. But I think that's one one thing I I very rarely see when I'm auditing someone else's campaigns. So, you talk about tools and I want to get back to that in a second. Is there a need in today's sales world to have an outbound team?

So, historically, right, you have a team of whatever, three, four, five, 10, 15, 100 BDRs. Um that all log in to outreach or sales loft or whatever tool has ruined outbound for all of us. Um and and they go in and they send their outbound, and they cold call all day. Like what does the modern go-to-market outbound team look like?

Yeah, I would say, so uh starting first with as much automation as possible, because you can get quite far, like we maybe you guys have seen there's like a new role that's become popular, the GTM engineer, right? Engineer. Yep. Yeah.

So uh someone that can, you know, build the lists, orchestrate the campaigns, automate the cold email, automate the email, et cetera. Um, I think the biggest leverage you'll get if you're not doing any outbound and you're building this out, best leverage you'll get is just by having that automated outbound and doing it in a very smart intelligent way where you're still having high quality lists, you're still segmenting them, and you're still doing, you know, smart personalization, which which we can talk about some examples as well. But that's going to be the best leverage because you can typically one one one person who's running, you know, outbound campaigns at scale, maybe sending 10, 20, 30,000 emails a month, um that can usually get more than like a couple SDRs, right? Where I see SDRs coming in is really to work best case is SDRs are working warm leads, they're doing ABM outreach, right?

Like working the highest quality accounts with that cold call, LinkedIn, email follow up, right? Uh and then nowadays I even think SDRs should be doing some more content and actually building a little bit more of a personal brand because LinkedIn's just become such a powerful tool nowadays, right? Like I've seen a lot of companies in my industry where they have um their whole sales team actually starts to become like mini thought leaders on LinkedIn, which I think is really really cool. But uh basically, yeah, automate as much as you can to get that first contact, and then have SDRs just work the warm leads and focus more on nurturing them from that point, as well as creating new top of funnel but more from the, you know, enterprise or ABM outreach uh and so on.

So, I agree. I I think that the the whole team has to be shifted, right? We have to have the right people in the right role, doing the right task. I we talk about GTM engineer a lot.

Um I think it is an overused term, but an important role. I don't know if I necessarily agree with the term, um but I definitely think what that role does is super important versus the traditional, you know, role that we had. I think when you have too many teams playing in these systems, like I don't want every BDR in clay, right? I don't want every BDR in whatever my cold email tool is.

I want one person setting that up and I want that information then coming back into whatever the system of record is that I have my BDRs in. When we talk about tools and I'm going to put you on the spot here, there's a lot of outbound tools right now, right? You know, you have clay, which I think everyone's using, there's freckle which I, you know, is trying to come in and take over clay. But, you have Lemlist, you have Smartlead, you have uh instantly, you know, there's there's no shortage on them.

Talk to me about the best tech stack. Yeah, there are so many tools and we've tried uh all of them. Um, or definitely all the all the main ones, yeah. We like we always try to we whenever there's a new tool that comes out, we always like to test it because if it can help us get a even like a 5% edge in our campaigns, right?

It's worth it. Um, but uh, what we use, I was just talking about what we use. We use Instantly for our sending and just for our email warming. I've been using them just since they launched and honestly, I think Instantly, Smartlead, Lemlist, they're all quite similar.

Like they're not really doing anything magically different. Like at the end of the day, they're connecting you to email accounts and sending them, right? So they all have their different, you know, slight nuances, but I don't think you can really go wrong if you use any of those when it comes to sending. Uh, Instantly is our favorite, though, just because it's um, definitely has the most features in terms of deliverability, which I think whatever tool is going to be on top of that is just going to be the most like the most uh powerful tool, like that's where everyone that's what these tools need to be focusing on because that's only going to get harder.

And uh also, I think it's just the easiest to use. Like you like I could show someone in an hour how to use it, build a list, set up campaigns, send out send out emails, right? So if you ideally you don't have SDRs in there, but if you do, at least it's something that they could learn in like half an hour or an hour, so. And are you are you tying Instantly back to the CRM whether that be Salesforce or HubSpot to get that data in there for the SDRs?

How do you how do you bring it full circle when you start adding in things like LinkedIn and cold calling and making sure that these SDRs or BDRs are effective? Yeah, that's that's where it gets tricky, right? Um cuz Instantly does also just cold email. So if we use if we're when we're doing omnichannel, we need something else for that, right?

Yeah. Um but ultimately we use bring everything back to our CRM. We use uh Go High Level. Um but we have clients with HubSpot and Salesforce and all that.

Um, basically, yeah, Go High Level. I've never heard of it. Go High Level is really the new Yeah, it's like uh it's like a marketing campaign program with a bunch of like we use as a CRM, but it's like a little bit of everything. Yeah, it's like newer, but it I guess newer maybe start five years ago, but it's already had like it's already I think it's already had a billion dollars in month it just came on the scene and grew like really quickly.

But it's more popular in like I I thought it was just called High Level. Uh KD, Kevin Dorsey talks about this one a lot. I didn't realize it was the same one. Yeah.

Super cool. It it actually might be called High Level. They changed their name I think and I might be getting it uh wrong. But um I I actually I I have a browser tab for them open in like I haven't looked at it in like a month and a half.

Glad glad to hear it works. It's it's good yeah. It's kind of more marketing friendly. So like you can build funnels and landing pages and like schedule social media posts.

So it has more of a like marketing functionality than being like a true just sales CRM but its CRM is also good too. But uh yeah, when we have clients that also work in HubSpot and what not and we just have everything once once someone's become a lead in Instantly and they've just replied positively, then everything pushes to the CRM. And then ideally from that point in SDR is working it. So, um, like yeah, the best case is SDRs are maybe calling the open leads as well as the positive replies.

That's really where we want to use uh use them. Nice. I love it. So, outbound I think is going to continue to change, right?

There's so many A.I. tools out there. There's so many ways to do data enrichment, personalization, automation.

Um and I think we're already seeing teams shrink down. Uh we're seeing a big focus on A.I. When you look at the next, call it 12 to 24 months.

Where where do you think that's going? What's going to get more automated versus what's going to get pulled back into this spectrum of more manual? Yeah, good question. Yeah, definitely.

I think um I think definitely cold calling is going to become more and more valuable and uh I guess uh like maybe maybe even more of a maybe now it's even more of a rare skill than it was a couple years ago because I think uh as it became much more easy to automate all of your outbound, then a lot of people are like, okay, cool, that's an excuse to not be on the not be on the phone anymore, right? Um so I think that's never really going to change and never really going to go away. I mean, I think maybe who knows, maybe robo callers eventually becomes a thing. I don't really see it happening that way and I think definitely not in like more sophisticated markets.

Like I would never talk to an A.I. that called me. Um but uh who knows, who knows what could happen in 10, 20 years, right?

Not yet, yeah. Um yeah, maybe yeah, maybe in the current day and age, but I can always tell. But I don't know, I've I've haven't seen some recent examples of where you can like barely tell and it's it is pretty scary. But um yeah, I think I think cold calling will definitely make more of a comeback.

Um I think in terms of email, LinkedIn, all these channels, I think it's definitely I have seen the cold emails I receive get a little bit better recently. So I think more people are becoming aware of these tools like Clay and how they can personalize in a better way. Um but uh that just going to means that it's going to take that much more effort then to be creative and stand out and be different and just really try like very different things in the email inbox. Like what what one thing we're we're doing a lot this past six months or so is just lead magnets and free value.

And I would I don't just mean like here's a PDF or here's an ebook, but actually doing something for the client like if you're a website company, send them a website audit or a loom video, right? Um or a competitor analysis or something along the sorts, right? Um and uh if you just give free value, like that's one thing that'll always help stand out because most people aren't willing to do that, right? Um you know, and no matter what you are, like no matter what kind of company you are, you can always give something away up front for free.

Usually it's like the first step of your process or like everyone can at least share insights or like analyze someone's business and share, hey, here's three ways I think I can help you, right? But uh that's one thing we found to work really well because I I very rarely receive lead magnets uh or at least good ones. And with everything that's going to change with tech and A.I.

and automation, one thing that won't change is people always love free stuff, right? And that's always a great way to actually show people you can help them by actually helping them. Cool. As we wrap up a little bit, we like to do some rapid fire, so you know, five words, ten words or less.

Adam likes to go on and on about lots of stuff. So, let's just uh let's just see if we can do some rapid fire. What's your favorite what's your favorite cold email subject line of all time? My favorite cold email subject line.

Hmm. Thoughts. Thoughts, yeah. I would say um I'm actually going to pull up my email real quick.

I save all the best ones I get. I'm going to pull up let's let's see what actually pops up. I would say the one I use the most, and you guys are probably going to hate this. Uh the one I use the most is the classic quick question or company question.

And it's just because it's boring, I know it's overused, but it just works because it's uh it builds it builds a lot of curiosity. So I think the worst subject lines are the ones where you you know, give away that you're selling something because then people just scroll past, but something that's just like uh two, three words, very quick is usually what we find to work the best. And I don't know why, I know that quick quick question it is over very overused, but it always ends up being one of our top performers. That's good.

It if it works, it works. It's like I talk about when it comes to design, like whether I like it or not doesn't matter. Like as long as it works, that's all that matters. What uh A.

J., what's the one thing you would banned, ban, fully ban from every cold email starting tomorrow? Fully ban from every cold email. Yep, never say or do it again.

These are some good questions. These are juicy. Um, I would say definitely giving like a calendar link in the first email cuz to me it's just like that's just like coming out way too strong, right? It's like, hey, I just met you, by the way, here's a link, now I want you to do work and fill out a form or book on my calendar, right?

Yeah, hi nice nice to meet you. My email was so good that you just want to give me 30 minutes of your time. Exactly. Um One daily habit that keeps you sharp as a founder?

Um I think yeah, for the first hour and a half of my day, I'm like completely off screens. So, I wake up, meditate, usually work out, and then just chill for a few. I know it's a couple habits, but I say the central habit is I'm just not on my phone. I'm not on my computer.

I'm not opening email, going into reactor mode. I think just having that like hour and a half where I kind of take control of my day and I have some quiet. Um I notice whenever I like whenever I don't do that, the quality of my day is like so so different. So, definitely some peace and quiet in the morning and starting slow.

I love that. A.J., what's the biggest mistake you see in LinkedIn messaging?

And mouse? Yeah. Um I think the same thing the same thing as email, where just people are sending links and PDFs too much. Like I'm like when I open my inbox and I just see a bunch of links to click on, it's just like, I don't even I can't even read your message now, right?

Um And then also I think too long, like people have to people kind of use LinkedIn more like they use text messaging. So, uh if it's too long, it definitely just seems too formal and too salesy. Last question, as we wrap this up. Favorite uh vacation destination.

Vacation destination. Definitely uh definitely Japan. Best food ever. Uh, I went there last year.

I'm going there again this winter for snowboarding. So if you like skiing or snowboarding, it's perfect for that. And uh yeah, Japan is like I've been to a lot of countries, but I think Japan was just one of those places where I'm like, whoa, this is just so so different like just the whole culture and the way the the way the people are. Yeah, it's uh Japan's on my list.

I actually have a flight alert set. Dale loves it when I disappear for two or three weeks. So I have a flight alert set for uh next year to see. There was a period this year where you could get Miami to Tokyo for like 500 bucks.

I missed that. Oh yeah, it was like dirt cheap. I'm very sad that I missed it. Um A.

J. Casada, Revenue Boost. Thank you so much for joining the show for sharing all of your tips. Y'all, go check out Revenue Boost.

There are a lot of folks who claim to do outbound right. There are very few that can actually do outbound right. Um based on what we've heard today, sounds like you know what you're doing. Um excited to check it out and excited for the listeners to check it out as well.

Yeah, thanks guys for having me. Thanks a lot.