🚨💬 After 100+ Hours Testing Cold Email Tools and Systems 🧠💻 Here’s What I’ve Learned 👇
I’ve spent the last several months deep in outbound. Tried every tool that promised replies on autopilot. Some worked. Most didn’t. Here’s what I used: 🔹 Apollo — fast setup, questionable quality data, 🔹 Instantly — a bit of a learning curve but efficient, but speed alone doesn’t get replies 🔹 Clay — powerful, very in-depth lead tailored information, enrichment, and nourishment Apollo gave me the volume. But success came only after figuring out deliverability, warming, and how to write like a human instead of a bot. Instantly helped me move fast, but I quickly learned that automating bad copy just leads to more silence and eventually I realized cold emails won’t work unless they’re genuinely tailored. Not fake personalization. Not {{firstName}} and {{Company}}. Real insight. Real relevance. Clay was genuinely impressive. The flexibility, enrichment options, and integrations were on another level compared to most tools. You could build some serious logic into your outreach process. But it came with a tradeoff, it was definitely harder to learn than Apollo or Instantly. The potential was huge, but it took more time, more testing, and more technical thinking to get results. Even then, I found that while Clay could gather incredible data, but it still needed something else. to me. A strategy to turn that data into a real, personal reason to start a conversation. That’s when I started building AI-powered icebreakers. Automated flows that scrape actual context —> job changes, recent posts, company shifts —> and use that to open a real conversation. Now I use Make.com and n8n to fully automate the process : 🔹 From research 🔹 To writing 🔹 To sending 🔹 To follow-ups And if I’ve learned one thing that applies no matter what tools you’re using: 👉 Remember, it’s all about THEM, not YOUR product. That shift in mindset made the biggest difference. If you're trying to make outbound work but keep hitting a wall, drop a comment I’ll share what’s worked and what definitely didn’t.