Berman says volume beats hyper-enrichment, posts no test
The argument rests on a thought experiment about 8 enriched leads, not a side by side campaign.
Alex Berman says the enrichment wave in cold email shrinks lead lists to the point of uselessness. In a post on X, he describes operators starting with thousands of contacts scraped from Apollo or Google Maps, then applying filter after filter until what remains is "maybe 1% of the original list." His position is that the filters are not buying what people think they are buying.
The argument runs on a hypothetical. Say perfect enrichment identifies 8 businesses currently hiring marketing firms. Berman's claim is that a broad Apollo scrape already contains those same 8, plus thousands more, so the narrow list gives up reach without gaining accuracy.
What he says to do instead
Berman reduces cold email in 2026 to deliverability and offer clarity. On infrastructure he recommends custom SMTP setups over Google and Outlook, rotating IPs, custom domains, and running emails through a spam tester weekly. On copy he says state plainly who it is for, what they receive, and how fast they see results, and skip jargon like "no-brainer offers" and "de-risking." He also says not to name past clients unless they are famous, and to use case studies with revenue growth percentages or new sales acquired.
On spend, he argues for validating a scraped list once with an email verifier and putting the savings into more inboxes and more leads. The volume case is partly a testing case. Small lists, in his telling, make it impossible to split test messaging angles and find winners quickly.
He also repeats his line on personalized first-line compliments, calling the Twitter and favorite-song openers a waste, which tracks with what he said earlier about volume over restraint.
For people sending
There is no test attached. Berman posted no campaign comparing an enriched list against a broad one, no send counts and no reply rates, so this is a position rather than a finding. The post also names specific tools throughout, including ScraperCity for scraping and validation and EmailBison's built-in spam tester, and closes by pitching his own paid community. Weigh the argument on its logic, because the post does not offer numbers to weigh instead.
Who closes more deals: The person emailing a hyper-enriched list of 8, or someone emailing thousands, including those same 8 leads?
Know what is landing before you burn another domain
One email a day. Under three minutes. What the operators found out yesterday.