New clients, found by name — before they start looking
Right now your pipeline is referrals plus whoever happens to find you. This is the third source: companies that just had a reason to buy what you sell, reached by name, in their own language, in an email that comes from your domain and carries your signature.
There is a fourth source, and it is the only one you can switch on deliberately.
Four ways to get new clients. One of them leaves something behind.
Every row below is a question you would ask a vendor anyway. Here they are answered side by side.
- Who gets a letter
- Whoever they get through this week
- What the letter says
- Their script, adjusted as they learn
- Time to the first real reply
- Three months of ramp, paid throughout
- What you are promised
- Activity targets
- What you sign up for
- A salary and a notice period
- What is left if you stop
- Nothing. The person left
- Who gets a letter
- A list from a data vendor, everyone in the sector
- What the letter says
- One template, a name merged in
- Time to the first real reply
- A month or two of setup first
- What you are promised
- Guaranteed meetings
- What you sign up for
- A 3–13-month contract
- What is left if you stop
- Nothing. The list was theirs
- Who gets a letter
- Whoever is already searching
- What the letter says
- The same banner for everyone
- Time to the first real reply
- Immediately, but only against active demand
- What you are promised
- Clicks and impressions
- What you sign up for
- A monthly budget
- What is left if you stop
- Nothing. Traffic ends with the budget
- Who gets a letter
- Each company read before the letter: its site shows it needs what you sell
- What the letter says
- What that company sells and how it differs from its neighbours
- Time to the first real reply
- Letters go out in week one; replies build across the four
- What you are promised
- A weekly report: companies, letters, replies
- What you sign up for
- Four weeks, stop before any week
- What is left if you stop
- The list of companies, the stop-list, the letters, the funnel stage by stage
Why the timing matters more than the pitch
By the time a company starts searching for a vendor, the shortlist is already written — mostly from names the buyer knew before the search began, and research on B2B buying keeps finding that the vendor who made contact first wins most of the time. Advertising cannot get you onto that list; it only appears after the search starts. This can, because it starts from the event that causes the search.
6sense, 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report
Every email has a reason attached to that company
Nothing goes out as a template. Something happened at that company, it is on public record, and the email is about that. Read the real email for any of these markets — or ask for the one written for yours.
Subject: Your May contract, before the steel is booked
Saw [Plant] won the [tender] in May — delivery falls on you by autumn, and the rolled steel is not booked yet.
We hold that grade in stock and can fix the price for the whole run, not per shipment.
Mill certificates go out with the first delivery, so acceptance does not stall.
Worth a price on your volume?
- 01One fact they can verify
- 02One specific offer
- 03One question, no pitch
- 04No attachment, no deck
Where the reason comes from
Where the companies come from
Every first line has to be traceable back to a source you could open yourself — most often the company's own site: what it sells, how it describes itself, where it is listed. An event makes the letter sharper, but a company is never written to on an event nobody can check. Registries refresh at different speeds, so a reason that appears on Monday is written to the same week. All of it is public record: nothing is bought from a list broker, and nothing comes from a scraped inbox.
Two formats. Pick by who is going to work the replies.
The work is the same up to the handover. The only question is whether you have someone free to take the conversation from there.
You have someone to work the replies
Leads
Selection, contact finding, emails, correspondence, qualification. You get a client who confirmed a need and is ready to talk terms. Your manager picks up a conversation that is already running.
You do not, and one more inbound only gets in the way
Leads + deal
All of the above plus the deal: pinning the specification, requesting terms from your suppliers, assembling the quote, and running the correspondence to an agreed price and lead time. Your account manager receives a finished order.
Nine stages, every company goes through them in order
Both formats include the correspondence with everyone who replies, and a weekly report on what went out, what came back and what I am changing because of it. Nothing is skipped in either — the second simply does not stop at the handover. Full stage-by-stage breakdown on request.
From a cold letter to a company asking for a price
The letter does not sell anything. Its whole job is to earn a reply from the person who decides, and it earns it by being about that company's business.
Two letters, exactly as they were sent
Hello team at [company],
I read that you work with independent retail as well as with e-commerce sellers.
Independent retail is a different buyer from an Amazon seller, and you take both.
Reaching the half you talk to less is the work I would take on.
I work as your outbound department: looking for companies, writing, answering, qualifying. The lower step is a client who has confirmed a need. The upper is the spec, your terms and the price.
Are you the right person to talk to about this, or should I write to someone else?
What in it is theirs: the half of their business most prep centres do not serve, taken from their own site.
Hello team at [company],
I read that you cover storage and kitting alongside the FBA and FBM prep.
Kitting inside a prep centre is unusual, which is why [company] stopped me.
Sellers who need it are exactly who I go after, and reaching them is my work.
Hand me the client search and you get companies that need your service. Two sizes: I stop when someone has confirmed what they need, or I carry on to your terms and an agreed price.
Is this of interest, and who is the right person to talk to?
What in it is theirs: the one service that sets them apart from the prep centre next door.
First letters from my own campaign, recipient hidden. Letters for you are built the same way, in your name, from your domain.
Two runs, two different markets
Sending logs, 19 September 2026. Email only.
Companies that reached a commercial step
Two to four times more companies reach a price or terms than the market gets positive replies. And a commercial step sits deeper than a positive reply, so the comparison is a conservative one.
Own campaign: 51 of 2,339 companies. Metals supplier: 55 of 4,531. Market, email to meeting: 0.5–1.5% of emails sent, LeadHaste, Cold email conversion rate benchmarks 2026. Market, positive reply: about 0.48% of recipients (3.43% average reply rate, Instantly, × 14.1% of replies that are genuinely positive, Sales.co, 2026). Market figures come mostly from sequences combining email, LinkedIn and calls; the pilots were email only. For the pilots the step is the company's next commercial move, for the market a meeting or a positive reply.
Where you come in
Not at the first email, and not at the tenth. You come in when a company has agreed on the substance and wants to talk terms. Everything before that point is mine.
The kind of company that answers
Metals trading, B2B, from a cold start:Want the rest of it — the funnel stage by stage, deliverability, cost per client, and which segments returned what? I send the full breakdown in writing on request, before you commit to anything.
Eight rules that protect your name
Writing to the wrong person or dropping into spam damages your brand, not mine. So the rules are fixed before the first send.
Your own clients never get a cold email
You set the exclusion list. Anything on it drops out of every send, permanently.
Unsubscribe is absolute
It blocks the company's whole domain, not one address. No exceptions.
One company, one email
Deduplicated across the whole database, so no one is contacted twice from two segments.
Competitors and middlemen are filtered out
They come out of the list before anything is sent, not after someone points it out.
Every address is verified before it is written to
An unverified address is a bounce, and bounces are what damage a domain.
Volume ramps in steps
Each step only after bounces are checked. Above the threshold, sending pauses on its own.
Every letter is written once
No two companies receive the same text. That is the work, and it is also what keeps the domain clean.
Positioning stays yours
Copy, prices and service wording are approved by you before the first send.
Why none of this is a target
Sending pauses itself before bounces can reach the domain. That is the whole point of the ramp — it is not a number to hit, it is a brake. The rest works the same way: each company is read before it is written to, the emails go to companies at business addresses, and an unsubscribe blocks a whole domain rather than one mailbox. None of it is checked after the fact. All of it is wired in before the first send.
Who this works for, and who it does not
It is a narrow channel on purpose. Below is the honest version of both lists — if the right column describes you, say so and I will tell you straight.
- You sell to businesses
- The purchase is considered, not impulsive
- The buyer is an identifiable legal entity
- The deal justifies a month of correspondence
- The buying event leaves a public trace
- You sell to consumers, or the decision is made by a person rather than a company
- The average deal is small enough that a month of correspondence costs more than it returns
- You need signed business this week. Letters go out in week one, but a considered purchase does not turn around that fast
- You want everyone who clicked. This channel is narrow by design and stays narrow
- Buying this needs vendor onboarding, a security questionnaire or a tender. You would be buying work from one contractor, and that process is not built for it
- A decision-maker's answer takes weeks to approve on your side. The company moves on before you reply
If you are not sure which column you are in, that is a two-message conversation, not a project. Write and I will tell you if it does not fit.
Four weeks, paid a week at a time, and you can stop before any week
Not a retainer that quietly renews. Each week is paid in advance, and before each one you decide whether to continue, so what you have at risk at any moment is one week of work.
How the four weeks are paid
Each week is paid before it starts, so there is a decision in front of every one of them. Stop before any week and the work stops there.
What you hold at week four
What you see, and when
Letters start going out
Not a month of preparation with nothing to show for it. The first letters leave inside the first week, from your own domain.
A report
Companies found, letters sent, who replied, who was handed over, and what I am changing because of it. Part of the service, not something you have to ask for.
The whole funnel
Your conversion at every step, the cost of a new client from this channel, and which segments returned what.
And if it does not work?
Then you have a documented answer for why not — which segment, which reason, which offer failed to earn a reply — plus the list, the letters and the stop-list, all of which keep working for whatever you do next. That is a cheaper way to find out than a year of guessing.
The seven things people ask before they say yes
Asked in these words, more or less, by everyone who got this far. Answered here so you can decide on the substance.
01Cold email does not work any more. Everyone gets two hundred of these.
Everyone gets two hundred templates. What is described on this page is one email per company, built on what that company sells and how it differs from its neighbours, sent from your domain under your signature. Nobody replies to a campaign. People do reply to someone who clearly looked.
02We tried an agency once. It burned a quarter and delivered nothing.
Usually because the list came from a data vendor, it was shared across their whole client roster, and the copy was a template with your name dropped into it. Here each company is read before it gets a letter, the list is built for you alone, and you approve every line before the first send. If we part ways, the list, the stop-list and the letters stay with you.
03Our product is too complex to sell over email.
The email does not sell it. Its job is to get an answer from the person who owns the budget. What follows is an ordinary conversation, in whichever format suits the two of you.
04Why not just hire an SDR?
Then you are paying three months of ramp with the salary running throughout, you are managing them yourself, and when they leave, their read on the market leaves with them. This is four weeks at a fixed fee, stoppable before any week, and the list and the letters stay on your side either way.
05What if the pilot brings no clients at all?
Then you keep the list, the letters, the stop-list and a number for every step of the funnel — enough to see exactly where it broke: the segment, the reason, or the offer. That is an answer too, and it costs less than a year of finding out slowly.
06How much is it?
One fixed price for the pilot, and the next section has how it is paid: week by week in advance, with a decision in front of every week. Two things move the number — how many segments you want running, and how many languages they run in. One segment in one language sits at the floor; four segments across three languages sits at the top. What happens after the four weeks gets settled at the end of them, on your own numbers, rather than guessed at now.
07Is this you, or a team?
Me. The selection, the copy and the correspondence are mine personally. That is also what limits how many clients I take at once, and I would rather say so now than after you have signed.
How the money works
One fixed price for the pilot, paid a week at a time, with a decision before every week.
One fixed price
Four weeks, each paid in advance. Setup, research, the letters, the correspondence and the weekly report are all inside it.
You decide before each week
Before each week you decide whether to pay for it. If you do not, the work stops there. At any moment what you have at risk is one week, not the whole pilot.
Settled at week four
By then you hold your own numbers for every step and you know what a client from this channel costs you. Terms for continuing are a conversation held on those numbers, not before them.
What stays with you
The list of companies, the stop-list, every letter and the funnel stage by stage — yours from day one.
How you pay
Bank transfer, USDT or USDC, or a proper invoice through an invoicing service if your accounting needs the paperwork. Contractor agreement either way. "We need an invoice" has never been the reason this did not happen.
Full contract terms — attribution, exit — on request before we start.
Three moves to the first email
You can start in writing today.
Ten questions
Which services are the priority, who your best client is, which markets are closed. You answer in writing.
A four-week plan
Concrete segments with volume estimates, launch order, correspondence language, and the first email drafts for approval.
We start
The first letters go out inside week one — not after a month of preparation. Your own numbers arrive in the report every week.
Paul Burg
Cold outbound for B2B · RU, EN, ESI find clients for B2B companies by writing to them, in Russian, English and Spanish. Every company is read by me before it gets a letter, and every reply is answered by me. My own projects since 2011, three years in Shenzhen inspecting factories for sellers shipping to Amazon, then managing a portfolio of those sellers, so I know physical goods from the factory end.
Tell me who your best client is
Two minutes. I answer personally, usually within a few hours.
What happens after you send
- 01I read it and answer in writing, usually within a few hours.
- 02If it does not fit, I say so in that first reply, and tell you what would.
- 03If it does, you get the ten questions and a four-week plan with segments and volumes.
You are answered by me, not by an assistant or a sequence.