Cold Email as a GTM Engine, Not a Volume Play

Machine-generated transcript from the episode video. Speaker labels are not included and some names and product terms may be transcribed phonetically.

[0:00] I've learned that the best founders are always selling. Welcome to the GTM Vault podcast hosted by Rick Kleta. We uncover the strategies, the pivots, and the breakthroughs turning startups into giants. Let's crack open the vault and find out how. Welcome to the GTM Vault podcast, where top growth operators reveal the systems behind explosive pipeline growth. I'm your host Rick Kleta and today we're exposing how one founder is turning podcast appearances and cold email into a predictable high ticket client machine. Our guest is Charles Cormier, a growth operator who's launched 10,000 plus cold email campaigns, interviewed more than two and a half thousand founders, and built systems that consistently generate 50 plus qualified meetings per month through PodPire and persona leads. He's cracked the code on turning podcast leads into 10 high ticket clients monthly while most treat podcasts as just branding. But here's what's wild.

[1:08] Charles claims 90% of founders over complicate lead genen and his zero fluff approach using clay AI agents and post call conversion systems is outperforming bloated tech stacks. Is this the future of lean execution focus GTM? Today, we'll unpack how to structure a 2025 cold email system that bypasses spam filters and gets replies, why podcasts are his number one lead source, and how to qualify. Show the post call conversion engine most teams miss after booking the meetings, how AI agents are replacing 80% of manual outreach without sounding robotic. If you're in B2B growth and tired of vanity metrics, this episode is your playbook. Let's dive in.

[1:57] Charles, you've said most founders over complicate growth. What's the number one mistake you see in GTM stacks today? At first, most founders don't even think about growth. That's that's dramatic. That's pretty bad. Like they they start a company, they focus on building the best product ever, just like I did with my first neutropic company in 2010ish. and we never got off the ground because we didn't have more sales. We didn't have a sales system. And that happened with probably the first five companies that I ever launched. When it comes to people that think of growth and think of sales, yeah, they think of ads, right? Like they'll invest money on LinkedIn, pay 250 bucks per lead. They'll go in directions that are quote unquote legit, right? that are uh used by uh 10,000 other founders, but they won't think about the one thing that can get them a very low cost per lead, which is cold email, right? Cold email is still the number one lead genen factor if you do it well. If you know deliverability, if you know copywriting, if you know product market fit, if you know how to target your ICP, if you know how to analyze results, right? So it's a complex stack of skills that most people

[3:09] do not have and that's why they they bring me in to to help them with that. Now a brief word on podcasting cold email still very good right if you know infrastructure if you know deliverability and so forth but most of people the mistake that they do once they start a cold email campaign they get in the spam. So some time ago probably uh four years ago I launched an agency that's fully about podcasting right so we bring podcast uh to these founders they interviewed their ICP on a podcast and with that they can get 30 uh discovery sales calls on a weekly base which is pretty intense and they can get that forever without ever hurting their royalty. So long answer short. What do you say about podcasting is often seen as brand building. How do you systemize it into a predictable lead gen engine with Podpie? Yeah, I guess I said Brandon, you know, like 95% plus podcast fail before uh 12 months, I believe, is the stat because people think they're going to be the next Joe Rogan because people invest like 200 500 bucks per episode. This is crazy, right? They and they're not systematized. they they don't know that they can cold email their ICP, get them on a show, uh use AI

[4:23] tools to presend them the questions, for example, and just systematize the whole process so that all they need to do is hop on a 30-minute call and build a relationship with their ideal customer persona. They think of a podcast monetization as sponsors or adsets revenue, which is great, right? I do that as well. But we need to start with lead genen. When it comes to podcast, we need to start with closing clients. That's the fastest way to monetize a podcast. You get 10 per week and include your sales cycle in there. Mine is around uh 14 to 28 days. In two to four weeks time, I'm closing uh 5k deals, you know, like if I got 10 podcast per day, that's at least one client a day. So, I'll be tempted to redo the podcast experience again, right? If I can close deal every day and that's Mr. I want to do that podcast again. Most people uh they don't have any direction. They want to be like a radio broadcast or something and they fail because they just realize that this is so much work.

[5:25] I need to pay for that. Sometimes I get crappy guests on the pod that don't any that drop that do not drop any type of value. They drop on the pod and and then you're like why am I even doing this? You know, I'm just wasting my time here. So, they stop podcasting. So podcasting is not a brand play. Uh if you're in B2B, right, B2B is my audience. Podcasting is a lead genen play. Walk us through your 2025 cold email stack. What's your reply rate secret? Yeah, I'll try to keep it short uh because it's somewhat complex. So I start on NameCheep. I bought five.coms as all domains, right? I host them on uh shared plan teller plus it's called. So I'm paying like $8 per domain times five, that's 40 bucks. 35 bucks a year for hosting. We're at 75 bucks here.

[6:12] Then I sent through Sang Grid Essentials 50K plan. That's 20 bucks uh per month. And then I use Instantly. Instantly is yeah 80 bucks per month and that will allow you to send you to 25K contacts. They also do the warm-ups, right? I use my contacts for a bunch of sources. Apollo contact out, Marina, and a bunch of other tools. I scrape a lot as well with Apify. Aify is quite good for that. And I use Clay, but I use Persona more because I'm affiliated with Persona, which is a YC company that does the same as Clay, right? And I'm sort of advising them. So, uh quite bullish on these. So, that's my stack. I don't track opens anymore, but it's around 50%, and my reply rate usually for the bot is around uh 3 to 4%. If it's a direct sales campaign, it will be more around 1% the reply rate. uh call it uh 2% direct conversion rate on any campaigns that I start which is pretty good right that's great can how do you qualify podcast appearances that actually drive deals versus just vanity metric my ICP so in my case for example yesterday I was launching very filtered uh campaigns of

[7:22] uh ex palunteer founders for example uh that have gone uh to a certain uh headcount their headcount growth is more than 25%. Uh they're funded, for example, they have more than uh two sales members in their team, right? And a bunch of other filters like that. Revenue, not much because uh Pablo's revenue is is not too incredible. And then I add AI filters on top of that, right? So who do they target? Are they B2B? Are they SAS? Right? Because I want B2B SAS in the end. Have they hired experts in the the last couple of months? And then I can put triggers on top of that. And in the end, I get a very qualified list of let's say uh 97 individual. I'll invite them to podcast at first and then if they don't react to that one, I'll directly pitch them saying that hey, you're exaler and so forth. So yeah, that's pretty much how I do it. From 2500 interviews, what do high converting guests do differently before, during, and after shows? So you mean like people that would become my clients, right?

[8:25] They are similar to me. They have similar values to me. They have similar mindsets to me. They're very ambitious. They're business killers, right? They're relentless. They're very intense. They're tech first. They're AI first, right? They're as nerdy as I am with text. Just that they don't have time, right? They're super busy. They drop top knowledge on the podcast. They're an open book, right? So, they're learning machines. They they do physical activity to increase their pain thresholds. So, usually they're very similar to to myself, right? And uh that's why I know that there's chemistry here and um I auto follow up with them after they become clients. You built multiple ventures. What's the hardest lesson about scaling lead genen systems? Yeah.

[9:11] The number one lesson as I started with the the in the podcast is that if you don't have sales, you don't have a freaking business. You know, my all my first businesses fell for one reason. I wasn't good enough at sales and and marketing. Now when you actually become good at lead gen it's a a whole other rabbit hole as you know right you need to be very good at copyrightiting I just use a wellprompted chat GPD and shout out to me after the episode if any of you need such a a good uh cold email writer I have a GP that I built that I can give for free then yeah ICPN targeting are you obsessed enough about your ICP do you know who they are you know how they think you know their psychology you know what they're driven about do you analyze constantly how they're thinking in new eras in the AI era in the tariffs era do you constantly revisit their mindset and think for them right we like Chad Gypt so much because it's a prediction machine right it can predict stuff and that's a a very strong determinant of intelligence so you as a as a an entrepreneur as a founder you need to predict where your market is

[10:20] going what they're going to think and why they're going to need your product So PMF product market fit obsession I I think is is the great greatest lesson out there if you want to have a great startup that scales. You need to constantly obsess about PMF. And is there any type of system that you use to move leads down the funnel after a meeting? Yeah. So I have a closed GPD. My closed GPD it's after they replied to my email, right? After we had a pod, I feed all their uh data in there and then it replies with like a closing email. And the closing email, what is it? It's a plan with a timeline with a with KPIs and ROI of if we would work together, right? And I also have it on Rails. So on a Zap year, right? So after the the podcast call ends, I'm actually sending that email with a clos algorithm. So yeah, and it can be as simple as a calendarly follow-up. obviously won't be able to include AI into that, but you can go real fancy and use your CRM. I have a bunch of my clients that use go high level. I don't use any uh CRM, Open AI and try to use my CRM. I could double click on that later because that's quite

[11:30] interesting. But I do send them a personalized email. Hey, we could work together. Um, and it's super personalized to them, right? So, I mention their ICP in the email. I mention what type of business they are. I mentioned competitors, for example. So I I can get really deep in that. But after the bot is done, I'm sending such an email. If you hadn't K to rebuild your GTM stack from scratch today, where would you invest first? Yeah, I'd only need like uh 200 bucks a month, which is the beauty with my system, right? Um if I'd have 10K, just scale it, right? I'd just hypers scale it. So I'd buy the instantly the 357 bucks agency plan that gives me 2K leads per month. I would use a a send grids, a dedicated IPA that uh would spill me less per email sent and I could send 250k emails per month. I would just overscale it that way. I would invest it in the exact same text tag that I mentioned, right? Instantly, Send Grid, NameCheep, I'd buy shitloads of domain. I'd buy like, yeah, with 10K, I'd buy at least 100 domains, 100 domains, and I have at least 10 uh mailboxes per domain, not more because that can get you flagged. each mailbox they're sending 20 emails per day, right? And for every 20 cold email that

[12:45] we're sending, we're sending at least 100 warm-up emails. So that's pretty much how I how I would do it. You mentioned post conversion some AI that you're using. Can you talk about injecting GPT agents into this process without losing the human touch? Yeah, I mean the human touch is uh is greatly hyped, right? like GPT has better human touch than most humans. Um so yeah, I described a closed GPT but um after a call maybe I can talk about uh some other GPTs that uh that I use to to help me close them after the call. For example, I have a a painoint GPT, right? That really helps me understand what is their current pain point. Granted the market condition, right? It's live plugged in um in everything that's happening in the market and that may help shape shape the next email that I send them. I'll follow up a couple of times with a couple of emails, but after that it's like, okay, uh are you convinced or not by what I do? Then I'll connect with them on LinkedIn, on Twitter, on YouTube. So technically they should see my content there. I'll drop a couple of remarketing campaigns every now and then. But yeah, I've been more

[13:57] bullish about LinkedIn that I am right now because they suspended my account not so long ago from running a humoristic newsletter. More on that later. But yeah, like I'm not so bullish anymore about like pouring your heart into LinkedIn balls to follow up with clients because yeah, if they're just going to suspend me then then why stay there, right? So I'd say like newsletter is a way stronger one. I mean newsletter is like a cold email but they agreed to receive your newsletter. In my case, it's every day, right? I'm relentless. And yeah, at one point or the next, they're going to convert because on my newsletter, I'm also sending them my GPTs for free. I'm sending I'm sending them list for free. I'm dropping top value uh on them, right? So that the newsletter is really like a free value type of content. And after uh receiving that for a while, they they should eventually close. Uh that is 15% uh to 30% in my best seasons of them. That's a wrap on a master class in execution first GTM with Charles Coroner. If you take one thing away, lead genen isn't about more tools. It's about systems that work whether you're motivated or not. Want Charles's exact cold email templates or podcast follow-up playbook.

[15:09] Grab them in our show notes. For more proven GTM strategies, subscribe on YouTube at GTM Vault and join our free Substack where we break down episodes like this. If you're ready to turn your podcast appearances into pipeline, check out Podpire link below. Until next time, build systems, execute relentlessly, and remember, growth isn't complicated until we make it that way. See you in the next episode. Tech founders and VCs, careers, lessons, GTM.