Illingworth: never pull from Apollo alone
Richard Illingworth says he has never seen a successful cold emailer running Apollo as the only source, and that pulling the same list from seven angles outperforms by 3 to 4x. The tools he names are cheap to test, the multiple is his alone.
Read the whole week in one goScore cold email tests on interest, not replies
Campaigns and numbers
Sabo claims 220 booked calls in two weeks at $18 a meeting
Sabo says he was testing a new offer, spent around $4K a month, and got 220+ booked calls in two weeks, which he puts at $18 a meeting. He names no list, no volume, no vertical and no tools, and says the stack is what mattered rather than the Google versus Outlook argument.
Everyone's still arguing about Google vs Outlook. I just picked the right stack and started printing.
Workflows and tooling
Illingworth says a seven-source list beats Apollo alone by 3 to 4x
Richard Illingworth says he has never seen a successful cold emailer who pulls only from Apollo, because the volume arrives with no intent signal behind it.
if you blast 5,000 contacts who have zero reason to care, you torch every inbox you spent 18 days warming up.
Where they disagree
Illingworth says the hands-off AI model in cold email is a dead end
Richard Illingworth says everyone in cold email is sprinting toward self-serve dashboards and AI that strips the human out, and that Premium Inboxes is going the other way. His version: one-to-one audits where a person reads your actual data, founder calls when something is broken, and client success managers instead of a help widget.
low-touch scales headcount, but it NEVER builds the trust that makes someone stay.