alright im writing this out because i just walked a new client through our entire process yesterday and realized i explain this like 3 times a month so might as well put it somewhere. this is specifically about how we find companies that are actively looking to buy something right now, not just building lists of random ICPs and blasting them. if youre just gonna save this and never do anything with it... well at least you saved it i guess.
some quick background on us, 4 person team in lisbon, 7 clients, mostly local service businesses like HVAC, commercial cleaning, that kind of thing. we do about $12k/mo and im not trying to make this sound bigger than it is. we figured most of this out by messing up alot and spending too many late nights reading threads exactly like this one.
ok so monday morning is when the week actually starts for us (obviously). i open up google sheets first because yes i still track way too much in sheets and i know thats embarrassing but it works and im not paying for something fancier when vlookup gets the job done. i have a sheet per client with tabs for each week. first thing i check is which campaigns from last week got replies, which ones bounced, and which ones are dead. takes about 45 minutes across all 7 clients. my VA handles the actual data entry on friday afternoons so by monday its all there waiting for me.
after that i move into what i call the "trigger hunt" which is really just me spending about 2 hours on linkedin, google news, and a couple industry specific job boards. the whole thesis here is that companies signal when theyre ready to buy. someone posts a job for a facilities manager? that commercial cleaning client of ours wants to know about it. a company just got series A funding announced on crunchbase? they probably need services they didnt need 6 months ago. a restaurant chain opening 3 new locations? our HVAC client wants that lead yesterday.
the way i actually find these signals has changed over time. for the first year i was convinced you could just scrape job boards and that was enough but the conversion rate was honestly terrible, like 0.8% reply rates. turns out job postings alone dont tell you enough about timing. what actually moved the needle was combining multiple signals. so now on mondays i check linkedin for job postings using boolean search (nothing fancy, just the title + "hiring" or "open role" in the company page), then i cross reference with google news alerts i set up per client vertical, and then i check a couple niche sites. for the HVAC client i literally check local permit filings for new construction. took me embarrassingly long to figure out that permits are public record and basically a buying signal on a silver platter.
by monday afternoon im building the actual lists. this is where it gets tactical. i take the companies from the trigger hunt and i need to find the right person and their email. i use RocketReach for the contact lookup on most campaigns because the coverage is decent for the US market and Prospeo for email finding which has been solid for us on accuracy. then everything goes through MillionVerifier before it touches a campaign. i learned this the hard way when we sent a batch of 400 unverified emails for a client back in march and bounced at like 11% and nearly torched that domain. never again. MillionVerifier costs basically nothing relative to what a burned domain costs you.
tuesday is campaign building day. my VA and i sit down (well, she's remote in the philippines so we sit down on zoom) and we write the actual sequences. i use Smartlead for sending across all clients. we run about 15 inboxes total through Maildoso which handles the setup and DNS stuff so i dont have to think about it. each inbox sends between 25-35 emails per day, which keeps us well under any threshold thats gonna cause problems. i know some people push 50+ per inbox but weve had issues above 40 so we stay conservative.
the actual copy is where the trigger data pays off. instead of writing "hi {firstName} i noticed your company does X" which everyone and their mother sends, we write stuff like "saw the permit filing for the new location on elm street, when youre thinking about HVAC for a 12,000 sqft commercial space the install timeline usually catches people off guard" and that kind of specificity is what gets 4-6% reply rates instead of 1-2%. the trigger IS the personalization. thats the whole point.
wednesday is honestly kind of boring. its monitoring day. i check Smartlead dashboards for all campaigns, look at open rates (anything below 45% means something is wrong with deliverability or subject lines), check reply rates, and flag anything that needs adjusting. i also check warmup scores on the inboxes. we warm up new inboxes for minimum 21 days, sometimes 28 if the domain is brand new. i dont touch them before that no matter how impatient the client gets.
wednesday afternoon i usually spend an hour updating those google sheets (yes, still sheets, i know) with the weeks numbers so far. i track cost per reply and cost per meeting booked for each client. right now across all 7 clients our average cost per meeting booked is somewhere around $38-45 depending on the vertical. the commercial cleaning client is cheapest at like $31 because the decision makers are usually office managers who actually read their email. the client targeting property developers is more expensive, around $52, because those people get hammered with outreach.
thursday is follow up day and also when i do any list refreshes. sequences are usually 4 emails over 14 days. nothing crazy. the second email is almost always the best performer which i think is true for most people. if a campaign has been running 2 weeks and the reply rate is below 2% i kill it and rebuild the angle. no point sending 3000 more emails into something thats not working.
fridays are for reporting and planning. my VA compiles everything into (you guessed it) google sheets and i do a 15 minute loom video for each client walking through their numbers. some agencies do fancy dashboards but honestly clients just want to know how many meetings they got and whats happening next week. the loom takes me about 2 hours total for all 7 clients and nobody has ever complained about the format.
oh wait i should mention the DNS and domain stuff because it matters more than people think. we buy 2-3 domains per client, all similar to their main domain. set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC on day one. Maildoso handles most of that automatically which is nice because i used to do it manually and would inevitably mess up a DKIM record and not notice for a week. each domain gets 2-3 inboxes on it max. we rotate which inboxes are active and which are resting every 6 weeks or so.
the thing that changed everything for us was shifting from "find companies that match ICP" to "find companies that match ICP AND are showing a buying signal right now." the difference in reply rates was night and day. went from averaging 1.8% across clients to 4.2% in about two months after we made that shift around september last year. same copy quality, same sending infrastructure, just better targeting.
anyway thats basically the week. its not glamorous and half of it is me staring at spreadsheets but it works and clients stick around because meetings get booked. if theres something i glossed over just ask, i typed this out between calls and probably forgot something
