Has cold emailing been effective for you?

searcher profile

September 13, 2025

by a searcher in Austin, TX, USA

I'm looking for advice on finding new business prospects. What services do you recommend for finding email addresses, and has cold emailing been effective for you? I'm also curious about what other platforms you use for lead generation.
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Reply by a professional
in Karachi, Pakistan
Hi Sandeep, while working for multiple search funds and helping them with their lead generation efforts here the platforms/tools that are generally used 1. Business Prospects: Grata, Inven, Sourcescrub and simple web scrapping 2. Finding email addresses: Zoominfo, Apollo, Hunter.io , Seamless,ai, Clay As far as effective of cold emailing is concerned; there is significant drop in response rate in cold emailing unless you are really standing out in terms of your industry experience or something else
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Reply by a searcher
from Technische Universität München in New York, NY, USA
Hi ^redacted‌, I've led SDR and Sales teams for the past couple of years and have tested my fair share of solutions. (I) Finding email addresses Zoominfo is still the gold standard but can get very pricey. Apollo.io, Cognism, and Lusha can be good alternatives that offer similar results depending on geo and target industry and size. (II) Sequencing and customization The key will be to have a solution to run somewhat customized email campaigns. Generally, AI solutions perform very poorly, so depending on how many leads you reach out to, you might want to have an intern customize at least the initial emails. (III) Outreach email domain Don't use your primary domain. Especially starting out, there is a significant risk of burning your domain. (IV) Email warmup Before ramping up send-out you want to warm up your domains so it doesn't look like spam. You can do this manually but most teams use services like Lemwarm which simulate email traffic. Ultimately, as with every outreach, you'll have most success with multi-channel outreach -> email + phone + linkedin (if applicable). Happy to share more insights if that's relevant.
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