Abraham says three agency switches failed on the offer

James Shields says the same two questions come up on 90% of his sales calls, while Matt blames underpriced retainers instead.

Cold Email Daily · November 4, 2026 · Campaigns and numbers

Nick Abraham posted a conversation with an agency owner who said they had switched cold email agencies three times in a year and got the same results every time. Abraham's first question was what the emails were offering. The answer was a 30 minute call to go over our services.

Abraham's argument is that fulfillment across cold email agencies is close to identical because they run the same tools and write copy in roughly the same way. He cited his own vantage point, saying that before he posted that he acquired Cleverly, he would watch clients move from Cleverly to Leadbird and from Leadbird to Cleverly with virtually the same results. What differentiates agencies, in his telling, is the experience, meaning communication, reports, campaign reviews and the account manager.

The fix he proposed is to change what the email asks for. Push prospects to a service lead magnet, do a piece of the work up front, then move them through the sales process. His worked example was a recruiting agency sending "Want me to send over 5 candidates who fit your open sales role?" instead of booking a call about services.

Shields hears the same two answers

James Shields replied that 90% of his sales calls open with the same line, that the prospect has been burned before. His response is to ask two things, what the offer was and what the agency charged. He said the answer is usually the same every time.

Matt points at price, not copy

@mattceras pushed back on the diagnosis. His read is that most companies burned by an outbound agency were not paying enough for anyone to care about the account. He described prospects telling him they paid something like a $500 a month tech fee plus $300 per call, and that at that price the data was not great, replies were not handled well, and the meetings that came in were not qualified. His list of what doing it properly involves includes mapping the addressable market and scoring every company that could be a customer, verifying contact data and titles, scraping websites, intent signals, LinkedIn profiles, competitor reviews and Reddit for angles, and keeping the data clean over time.

No reply rates are attached to either position. This is an argument about why campaigns fail, not evidence that a lead magnet offer beats a meeting request, and Abraham's Cleverly and Leadbird comparison is his own recollection rather than published numbers. Abraham has argued before that structural changes to the send, not vendor changes, move results.