I 4x'd my cold email replies
Tested an outbound play for the last 6 weeks. For each prospect I posted a small paid research task (~$80) on a crowdsourcing platform asking the community to surface 3 specific things their competitors had done in the last 90 days, then led the cold email with whatever came back. Got 6-12 submissions per prospect in 36-48h, picked the strongest 1-2 and paid those at $30-40 each. Reply rate went from ~2% on my last generic blast to ~9% on this 50-prospect list. ~$1900 total spend, 4 booked calls so far, 2 in late-stage. Avg deal size for me is ~$5K PIF so even one close pays me back ~2.5x, both close and it's closer to 5x. One thing I will say is that you need to really narrow the scope of what you are looking for. The first 5 attempts at this were trash because I wasn't specific with the scope of what I was looking for. Once I named specific axes (pricing, feature ships, hiring, recent press) the quality jumped immediately. I really reccomend!