How we made a sale of $71,000 through cold email. - We recently took on a client who exports a commodity product wholesale. Initially they came to us because they were a bit lost on how to generate deals and demand for their products.

He was a friend and we hadn't had contact for a year or so. When we first met, we wanted to start a business, but the timing was never right and it fizzled out.

This March, we caught up, he was an SDR of a commodity export business, I was deep into cold email lead gen. One thing led to another and after a couple of calls we started working together on pay-per-call and commission basis.

To me it seemed as an easy win campaign. Not only the total addressable market was huge, but they had one of the lowest prices on the market. With the initial research done, it was time for technical setup. I bought 10 domains and setup 2 email address on each giving me sending volume of around 1k emails per day. At a very conservative 0.1% booked calls, that should give us 1 booked calls per day.

Next, I scraped close to 15k companies for the initial run, enriched them with personal info, verified the emails and wrote a simple sales copy offering samples.

To be honest, before going into this market, I had 0 knowledge, but I quickly learned that not a lot of people do cold email in this space.

For us, that meant reply rates of 20%. Typically, across all clients, we get 10% - 14% so this was a stark difference. What's more, most of the replies were positive and asking for the samples.

There was a call before they sent out the samples so they could screen the companies and see if they're potentially a serious buyer or just someone who's after free stuff.

After about a couple of weeks of me running the email systems and them hopping on calls and sending out samples, we generated a couple of very interested potential buyers, high-value industry contacts and a deal. Someone ordered a container worth of goods.

Now that I've validated the strategy, it's full steam ahead.

As I mentioned in my previous posts, it's all about the offer and not sounding like a robot. In this case, we offered samples and one of the lowest prices on the market. That and AI-generated first lines that are unique to each recipient.