You're Targeting People Who Want Your Job

The Problem With Your List Isn't Your Copy

I was on a coaching call not long ago with a guy who had everything set up right. He had 196 sending accounts. He was running campaigns through Smartlead. He had close to 10,000 contacts in his list. He was sending roughly 980 emails a day. On paper, his infrastructure was solid.

And he'd booked two calls from the whole thing.

He came in thinking the problem was his email copy, or maybe his offer positioning. We got into both of those things, and yeah, there was work to do there. But when I dug into exactly who he was targeting, that's when I found the real problem. He was pulling LinkedIn followers of Nick Abraham and Oscar Moen - two of the most well-known names in the cold email space.

Think about that for a second. Nick Abraham is a practitioner running a cold email agency. Oscar Moen is a cold email practitioner. The people following them on LinkedIn are other cold email practitioners. They're people trying to learn the craft, people building their own agencies, people who want to do what this guy does - not hire someone to do it for them.

He was emailing his own competition and wondering why nobody was buying.

Follower Behavior Is Identity Signaling, Not Purchase Intent

This is a mistake I see constantly, and it makes total logical sense on the surface. You're selling cold email services, so you find a big cold email account, scrape their followers, and send your pitch. The logic is: these people care about cold email, therefore they're a potential customer.

But following someone on LinkedIn or Twitter isn't a purchase signal. It's an identity signal. People follow the accounts that represent who they want to become.

Someone who follows a cold email influencer is signaling that they want to be a cold email expert. They're consuming that content because they want to learn the skill, build the system themselves, or eventually run their own agency. The last thing they want to do is pay someone else to do it - because the whole point is that they want to be the one doing it.

Flip it around. Who actually needs to hire a cold email expert? The VP of Sales at a $10M software company who's tried to build an outbound system twice and it never worked. The founder of a mid-size B2B company who knows they should be doing outbound but has no idea how. The sales director at a manufacturing firm who's been living off referrals and just watched their pipeline dry up.

Those people aren't following Nick Abraham. They're following traditional sales leaders, industry publications, and business growth accounts. They're not obsessed with the mechanics of cold email - they're just frustrated that they don't have enough new clients.

That frustration is the signal you're looking for. Not the enthusiasm.

What This Guy Was Actually Selling

Before we even got to the targeting problem, we had to sort out the offer. He was describing himself as a funnel builder. He'd tripled the revenue of an Amazon agency he'd worked with - taking them from around 15 clients to 47 - by building out their entire go-to-market: outreach systems, content systems, newsletters, communities, appointment setting frameworks, VSLs, partnerships, paid ads. The full stack.

The problem was that the word "funnels" was dragging the whole thing into the wrong mental category. The second you say "funnel," I think Russell Brunson. I think ClickFunnels. I think info product people and course sellers and new entrepreneurs trying to get their first client. That is not the buyer for a $10K/month retainer.

What he was actually describing was an outsourced CMO. Someone who comes in, takes full ownership of a company's growth, and just makes the number go up. That's a Silicon Valley framing. That's how you get in front of agency owners and B2B companies with real budgets.

I told him: if you position yourself as the growth-focused CMO for agencies - someone who comes in on a flat fee and makes them money without them having to think about it - then all the stuff you described (the content, the outbound, the paid ads, the partnerships) becomes a coherent package. It stops looking like a menu and starts looking like a system. The offer was: I added 1.5 million in attributed revenue for a B2B company in under a year. Same thing I can do for you. Hands-off. You pay me, I grow you.

That's a clean pitch. That's something a real buyer can say yes or no to.

But even with a sharper offer, you still need to be pointing it at the right people.

Stop Asking Who's Interested in the Topic. Ask Who's Suffering From the Problem.

This is the targeting reframe that matters. When you're building a prospect list, most people default to interest-based signals. Who's talking about this? Who's engaging with this content? Who cares about this subject?

That gives you a list of enthusiasts and practitioners. It does not give you a list of buyers.

Buyers are defined by pain, not passion. They don't necessarily follow the thought leaders in your space. They might not even know who those people are. What they know is that their pipeline is thin, or their revenue is flat, or they've tried twice to fix something and it hasn't worked. They're not reading the playbooks - they're the ones who need someone else to run the play for them.

When I originally started my agency, I helped a company in New York City grow their revenue. And then I did something simple: I emailed all their competitors. I said, hey, I helped this agency add a million dollars in revenue - do you want to do the same thing? Of course they did. That was the entire offer. No complex targeting. No scraping interest graphs. Just: I did this for someone like you, and I can do it for you too.

That's what a targeting strategy should look like. You find the people who look like the client you already helped - same industry, same size, same problem - and you prove you've solved it before. That combination of the right audience and the right proof is what actually converts.

How to Fix Your Targeting

Here's the practical version of what I told him to do.

He had a list of 10,000 agencies and was capping out there. The first move is expanding the total addressable market by going after any B2B company that has the same underlying problem - not enough new clients, not enough pipeline, not enough revenue growth. That means SaaS companies. Software companies. Manufacturing businesses. Logistics companies. Credit card processing companies. Anyone doing B2B with revenue above a certain threshold who needs to grow further.

At a $10K/month price point, I told him to filter for companies doing at least $50K/month in revenue. That's not a massive bar, but it's enough to confirm the company can actually write the check. And it opens the list from 10,000 to potentially hundreds of thousands of potential targets.

To actually build that list, I had him use the Apollo scraper inside ScraperCity - set your filters by industry, company size, and revenue range, pull the titles you want, run it through validation, and you've got clean data ready to send. You can also use the ScraperCity B2B database to cross-reference and pull any gaps. The point is: your targeting criteria should be built around company characteristics and role-level pain - not around who they follow online.

With 196 sending accounts at roughly 5 emails per domain per day, this guy had the capacity to send close to 980 emails a day - about 30,000 a month. To max that out while accounting for validation losses, he needed to scrape roughly 60,000 contacts. That's a lot, but it's doable in a day with the right tools. And filling the pipe completely means you get data faster, which means you can optimize faster. At 1,000 emails sent, you have enough data to know what's working. With 30K sends per month, that's 30 optimization points per month instead of 3.

Speed of data is speed of learning. The faster you fill your sending capacity, the faster you know whether your offer, targeting, and copy are working.

The Case Study Problem (And How to Fix That Too)

Even with the right targeting and a clean offer, this guy had another issue. He had a great case study - he'd tripled an agency's revenue, worked with some genuinely massive brands - but the CEO of that company was ghosting him on the testimonial. He'd shot a full walkthrough video, written a 60-70 page case study doc, documented everything. But without a quote, he felt like he couldn't use it.

That's wrong. You don't need a formal interview to use a result.

If you've got a result, you write it up. You describe the company - what kind of agency they were, what they sold, roughly what size they were - and you lead with the number. If the founder gave you any kind of positive feedback in writing, even in a Slack message, that's a testimonial. You can write the words and attribute them correctly as long as they're accurate. If they ever come back and say they don't want to be named, you change the attribution to "an Amazon management agency we worked with." But you don't hide the result because someone hasn't shown up for a Zoom call.

The case study is the asset that makes cold email work. Without it, you're asking someone to take a leap of faith. With it - especially when you're targeting companies that look like the one you already helped - you're just connecting a problem they recognize to a result they want. That's not a hard sell. That's a conversation.

If you want a framework for how to write case studies and build cold email copy that actually converts, the Cold Email Manifesto covers this in depth. The short version: lead with what you did, who you did it for, and what the result was. Every word is doing a job. Nothing is filler.

LinkedIn Signals Work - But Only If You're Reading Them Right

I want to be fair here: LinkedIn signal scraping isn't inherently bad. It's actually a solid strategy when you apply it correctly. The mistake isn't using engagement or follower data - it's using it without asking what does this signal actually mean about this person's intent?

If you're targeting people who engage with Neil Patel or traditional marketing content - people who are trying to figure out how to grow their business but aren't already deep in the cold email practitioner world - that's a meaningful signal. Those people might genuinely be looking for help with growth. They're consuming marketing education because they want a result, not because they want to become a practitioner themselves.

That's a fundamentally different person than someone who's following the cold email operator accounts and watching 30-tweet threads about deliverability infrastructure. Those people are building. They're not buying.

The question to ask before building any signal-based list: is this person following this account because they want to solve a problem, or because they want to become an expert in this domain? If the answer is the latter, they're not your buyer.

Your Next Steps Are Simple

Here's what I told this guy at the end of the call, and it applies to almost everyone reading this who's running a cold email campaign that's underperforming:

First, get your website and offer right. If the language is off - if you're using words like "funnel" when you mean "growth system" - fix it now. That's a couple hours of work, not a week. Do it before you send another email.

Second, expand your target market beyond the obvious. If you're only going after agencies and you've got 10,000 of them, you're going to run out fast. Any B2B company with revenue and a growth problem is a potential buyer. Widen the criteria.

Third, stop filtering by topic interest and start filtering by company profile and pain proximity. The person who needs what you sell isn't reading the same blogs you are. They're the ones who've tried to solve the problem and failed, or the ones who know they have a problem but haven't started yet. Find them through revenue range, company type, and job title - not through who they follow.

Fourth, don't optimize until you've sent 1,000 emails. I know it's tempting to tweak after 50 sends. Don't. You need statistically meaningful data before you start changing things. Send your thousand, post your results somewhere with actual feedback (a real community, not a chatbot), and make one change at a time.

Fifth, don't wait for the perfect moment. This guy wanted to know if he should pause campaigns over a holiday weekend. I told him no. You send through the weekend, you get your system configured for the whole next month, and you capture the buyers who are actually at their desks and looking to spend budget before it expires. The buyers are out there every day. You don't stop.

If you're still figuring out the fundamentals of list building and targeting, start with the Best Lead Strategy Guide - it'll show you how to structure your targeting criteria before you scrape a single contact. And if you want to see the email frameworks that work once your list is clean, grab the Top 5 Cold Email Scripts.

The infrastructure matters. The copy matters. But nothing matters more than whether you're talking to the right person. Build your list around buyers, not believers.