I offer sales systems email outreach as a service but struggle with delivery. Should I hand over the system to clients and let them generate leads, or should I manage it myself and keep the system? If I offer a free trial for testimonials, who should pay for domains, email sending software, and lead scrapers?
This is a great question. You're trying to sell email outreach systems as a service but struggling with delivery. The main thing you should do is get good at delivery. I would not hand over the systems; I would manage them entirely for the client because they are presumably paying for the software. Think of it as a free dojo for you. If you add a guarantee—as I usually recommend—you maximize upside with minimal downside; you could still end up making nearly 300% return. With a guarantee, it's a win‑win: you work in the background and may get paid out later. Just keep managing the systems yourself. Handing over the systems removes the perceived white‑glove service; clients then see you as a mere builder or contractor who does one small task, and they give the output to someone else on their team. You don't want that perception.
You need to charge more, proportional to the value you provide. If you solve a $10,000-per-month money need, you can reasonably charge 30%–50% of that, i.e., $3,000–$5,000 per month. From the business owner's perspective, this is a simple ROI: hiring you should yield about a 3x return, acknowledging some uncertainty between the $3,000 fee and the $10,000 value. You can charge a proportion of the value delivered. Focus on profitability by charging significantly more for your services. On the expense side, avoid accruing unnecessary liabilities. Many who sell cold email or lead generation merely wrap a cold email product with minor added value and then bundle in unnecessary costs like email inboxes, platform fees, and domains. Instead, have the client pay for some of those costs so you're not left liable if you don't deliver results or fulfill guarantees. For example, one consulting client guaranteed a client $10,000 but only sought payment after delivering that amount; due to a long sales cycle, the client didn't receive the $10,000 for four or five months, while the consultant's ongoing email costs were $600–$700 per month, totaling $2,400–$2,800 over that period, yielding a 76% margin after COGS. Don't put yourself in that situation.
I praised the stack and said the key is to treat outreach as a lever. Early months will have a low input‑to‑output ratio, but as you refine your process you’ll see massive leverage gains. I advised starting with Upwork to build credibility and earnings, then add cold‑email outreach in parallel. Don’t abandon the core lever (Upwork) while you experiment with outbound. Focus on improving average revenue per user—if you can tie your emails to an upsell or higher‑value service, you can justify higher pricing. Start with a modest package to get the first client, then increase rates as you accumulate case studies and results.
Great question. I should make it abundantly clear that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. My hammer is cold email, so I try to solve every problem with it. Cold email isn’t always the most effective marketing method, but it’s like a video game where you keep playing the main character because you’re best at it. I would definitely use cold email. I’d start by pitching these SMA agencies. I’d go to Apollo and filter for 1‑11 staff, looking for digital marketing, digital agency, or creative agency. I’d use the OR operator to pull as many as possible—probably a list of 30 k to 50 k in the United States alone. Then I’d blast out my offer with the software, giving a free demo. I’d position it as if I’d read the person’s whole life story and built the software just for them. I’d mention that I’ve been following what they’re doing at [their company] and that I used to run a digital marketing agency (maybe I still do). I’d share that I’m suffering from XYZ problem and that this software is the solution I came up with. I’d want to put it in front of them to see if it has value. I’m 100 % confident that running their clients through my system will generate outsized returns, so much that I’m willing to guarantee it and give it away for free just to hear their thoughts. If they’re open to a quick call, we could jump on it. I’d approach this at the higher‑agency level, positioning myself as an agency owner talking to agency owners, not as a SaaS person trying to sell something. I’d get on as many calls as possible and frame them almost as partnerships: give them a trial of the software, let them solve their current problems with it, then use that feedback to improve the software faster and better. Once I have a ready‑to‑go version, I’d charge premium prices. And yes, I’d go straight cold email, starting with agencies because they tend to have more money than SMBs.
He outlines a low‑cost cold‑email stack for a landing‑page agency. First, scrape leads on Appify (or similar) – a typical scraper costs about $150 for ~3,000 leads, though many are old or low quality, so expect roughly half to be usable. Next, run those leads through a verification service such as Million Verifier to weed out bad addresses; verifying ~10,000 emails costs around $20. Then set up mailboxes with a service like Airmail at $4 per mailbox; for ten mailboxes that’s $40/month, plus a growth/warm‑up tool (~$40/month). You’ll also need to warm up domains for about 21 days. Overall, you can expect to spend roughly $100 per month to run the outreach stack. The process is: acquire leads, verify them, configure mailboxes, send cold emails daily, and monitor deliverability.