who is going to be the first person to take every lead in their industry and add them to a newsletter and just email them everyday and nurture them that way?
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Pablo Milandu
44 posts
got some really cool stuff to talk about on YT this week.. looking forward to it
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If you want to see this entire system built live on screen — join me at the free AI Emailing Webinar.
Wednesday, April 22nd. 6 PM Eastern.
I'll walk through the full campaign live: list building, the actual emails, infrastructure setup, the sales call framework, and the close.
No theory. No fluff.
Two hours of the real system, start to finish. By the end you could have a functioning business ready to deploy.
Spots are capped at 100. Register now:
spectreconsulting.co/webinar
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THREE REPLIES. $103,000. HERE'S EXACTLY HOW.
No ad spend. No cold calls. No product. Just a system, a list, and an offer worth saying yes to.
Here's a full breakdown of a real campaign I ran for a staffing and recruitment client — the niche, the targeting, the emails, the infrastructure, and the close. Start to finish.
The numbers first.
2,400 leads contacted. 17 replies. 3 closed deals. $103,000 in revenue within 30 days of launch.
Most people look at 17 replies from 2,400 leads and call that a failure.
They're thinking about it completely wrong.
Divide $103,000 by the number of emails sent and you get roughly $41 generated per email. That's not a reply-rate game. That's a predictable revenue system. Once you understand that framing, everything about cold email starts to make sense differently.
Here's why three deals added up to six figures:
The client runs a staffing and recruitment firm in the tech space. They place high-paid engineers — the kind earning $300K+ a year. Their model: every successful placement earns them 10% of that engineer's first-year salary. Place someone earning $330K? That's a $33,000 payday from a single hire.
Deal 1 — ~$33,000 Deal 2 — ~$33,000 Deal 3 — ~$37,000
They didn't need hundreds of clients. They needed two or three. That's why niche selection is the most important decision you'll make.
Step 1: Pick the right niche.
This is where most people lose before they even start.
They pick an industry because it sounds familiar or because some YouTube video told them to. Wrong approach.
Pick a niche by asking yourself one question: how much is one client worth in this industry — roughly?
If you're doing AI emailing for a wellness studio where the average client is worth $500, you need hundreds of them to move the needle. That's brutal math. Compare that to staffing, enterprise SaaS, manufacturing, or financial services — where one client might be worth $30K or more.
Industries I like: staffing and recruitment, enterprise/high-ticket SaaS, corporate accounting, financial services, industrial and manufacturing.
One rule: don't marry your niche before you've made money from it. There's no reason to be loyal to a niche that hasn't paid you yet. Pick one, go deep, move on if it's not working.
Company size sweet spot: 10 to 500 employees. But don't be dogmatic about it.
Step 2: Build the right list.
A great email sent to the wrong person makes zero dollars. A decent email sent to the right person at the right time closes deals.
Targeting variables that matter: industry, employee count, country, job title.
That last one is critical — target the person who can say yes without asking anyone else.
No gatekeepers. Go for the decision-maker who owns a budget.
Tool stack: Apollo to scrape, Clay to enrich and personalize with AI. That's it.
Over-scrape your list. Then validate every email address before you send a single message. I use ZeroBounce. Bad addresses bounce, your bounce rate spikes, your deliverability tanks, and you end up in spam — where nobody sees your emails. Remove anything that isn't verified.
Step 3: Write emails that actually get replies.
Here's the truth about AI emailing in 2026: most emails are terrible. They're long, they're about the sender, and they read like a robot wrote them. That's good news for you — if your email is even halfway decent, you'll stand out immediately.
The anatomy of a cold email that works:
Relevance line — something specific to them. "Saw you're hiring three engineers right now" is a perfect example. AI writes this part using your Clay data.
Offer statement — what you do, for who, and what outcome it creates.
Social proof (optional) — one line is enough.
CTA — one clear, low-friction ask.
On personalization: I keep it minimal. I focus on geographic location, company-specific signals, and industry lingo. Enough that the email feels like it was written for them — not a blast. I don't go overboard because efficiency and volume matter.
Subject lines that convert: "Quick question regarding [topic]" "More leads, [First Name]" "[First Name] — got you some more leads"
Casual. Direct. Human-feeling. That's the formula.
Step 4: Follow up.
Sending one email and giving up is the single biggest mistake in cold outreach.
My follow-up approach: follow up 48 hours after the first email. Keep it short — one or two sentences. Either recap what was in email one, or expand with more context about why working together makes sense.
The seven-touch follow-up era is over. But two or three touchpoints? Absolutely still warranted. Don't ghost your own campaign.
Step 5: Infrastructure — the part nobody talks about properly.
Here's the advice that took me months to figure out: work with an inbox provider who sets up your infrastructure for you — and don't touch it.
I never set up my inboxes myself. I'd break something. Your inbox provider should be handling warm-up, DNS records, all of it. Let them do their job.
A few hard rules:
Sending limits — follow your provider's guidance. If you're going direct through Google or Microsoft, somewhere around 15–20 emails per inbox per day is safe.
Bounce rate — keep it below 3%. This rarely happens if you've validated your list properly. If it spikes, investigate before panicking — it's usually one company's spam filter.
Reply rate — 1–3% is solid. Anything above 3% is exceptional. But stop obsessing over reply rate in isolation. Do the revenue math first.
Deliverability test: if your reply rate looks unusually low, launch a second campaign to a completely unrelated niche using the same inboxes. If the rate is similarly low, you've got a deliverability issue. If it's normal, your list or messaging needs work — not your infrastructure.
Step 6: Close the client.
Getting the reply is just the start. What you do next is what actually gets you paid.
The biggest mistake rookies make on sales calls: they start talking about what they offer before the prospect has admitted they have a problem. They end up pitching into thin air.
Getting good at sales is getting good at listening. When you listen deeply enough, people tell you exactly what they want and what matters to them — in plain language. Your job is to respond, not react.
Open every call with something like this:
"My goal today is simple. I want to understand where you're at, what you're trying to do, and what's getting in the way. And if I'm the right person to help, then we'll talk about what that looks like. Sound good?"
That intro relaxes the person, positions you as selective and professional, and frames everything that follows as a real conversation — not a pitch.
Then ask the right questions:
What do you sell, and who do you sell it to?
How are you currently getting clients? How consistent is that?
Where do you want to be? Get a concrete number.
You're not gathering information to throw back at them. You're helping them hear their own problem out loud. When you ask the right questions and listen closely enough, people sell themselves.
Once you've established the problem, make the ROI obvious. Ask what their average client is worth. Let them say the number. Then anchor your pricing against a much bigger outcome:
"So if we help you close 10 clients over the next six months, that's [X] in revenue for you.
Our fee is a fraction of that. Does the math make sense?"
By the time they hear your price, they've already anchored it to a number three or four times bigger. Your fee looks small by comparison.
Final note: test your pricing aggressively. Charge up front. And never lower your prices. If someone asks if that's the best you can do, that's a red flag about who you're dealing with — not a negotiating signal.
Seven mistakes that will kill your results.
Picking a niche where clients are broke. Low-value deals mean you need massive volume just to break even. Solve this first.
Writing emails that could have been sent to anyone. Generic emails get deleted. Your relevance line should be specific enough that it couldn't apply to anyone else.
Sending one email and giving up. One touchpoint is not a campaign.
Skipping the technical setup. Bad deliverability means nobody ever sees your emails. Don't DIY this — let your inbox provider handle it.
Going after small deals. If one client is worth $500, no campaign can save you.
Pausing a campaign because the reply rate looks low. This campaign had a 0.69% reply rate and made $103K. Do the revenue math before you touch anything.
Being inconsistent. The people making real money with this aren't smarter than you. They're just sending emails every single day.
The bigger picture:
This isn't about working more hours. It's about building something that runs while you sleep and compounds every month you keep it going.
The market for AI emailing has never been bigger. Businesses need clients — that's not going away. And most people doing this are doing it completely wrong, which means there's enormous room for anyone willing to learn and actually execute.
You now have the full playbook.
Most people will read this and do nothing. Don't be that person.
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How I Flipped $25K Into $147,045 With Paid Ads On An AI Offer
I spent $25,600 on ads and brought back $147,045 selling a consulting offer.
That's a 5.7x return on ad spend. Better than the S&P.
Not bad for something I've started and stopped several times, across two different Stripe accounts, while running it alongside my other businesses.
But here's the thing — this wasn't clean. It wasn't a straight line.
It was months of testing, breaking things, rebuilding, and learning lessons that I didn't fully understand until I was deep in the trenches.
So let me walk you through what actually happened, what I changed, and why I think most people fail at this.
I was running two funnels in parallel for a while.
The first was an automated evergreen webinar funnel — ads to opt-in, waiting room, webinar, then application. Classic structure. And honestly, it was great for one thing: generating leads.
People who made it through the full hour-and-a-half webinar and then filled out an application were serious. You're filtering hard for intent with that setup.
But the conversion drop-off was brutal.
From opt-in to actually watching the webinar? Massive drop.
From watching the webinar to lasting the full session? Another cliff.
From finishing the webinar to completing the application? I was bleeding people at every stage.
And on top of that, there was a waiting room that was killing us.
Most people ended up catching the replay anyway, which made me question why the "live" component even mattered on an automated webinar.
So I made the switch to a VSL funnel. Ads straight to a flat-page VSL, then application, then call.
The results were immediate. Cost per call dropped from around $450 down to the $100–200 range almost overnight.
Removing the waiting room alone was a massive unlock. Fewer steps, less friction, more people getting to the application.
But there was a trade-off I didn't fully appreciate at first.
When you come from a webinar funnel to a VSL funnel, one thing smacks you in the face immediately: the people showing up to calls are way less informed.
With a webinar, they've spent 60–90 minutes with you. They understand the offer, they've heard the case studies, they know what they're getting into.
With a VSL — especially when the application sits right below the video — people are filling out applications after watching maybe a few minutes. They barely know what you're selling.
So I started getting more calls, but a lot of them were with the wrong people.
And if you've ever done sales calls, you know there's nothing more frustrating than a full calendar of unqualified prospects. It's worse than having no calls at all.
That forced me to make the application way tighter. More qualifying questions. Higher friction on purpose. I also started testing two specific things:
1. Putting pricing directly in the VSL. Most people in this space go from zero friction to maximum friction over time. I tend to go the other direction — I start with heavy friction and then selectively remove it. I'd rather have fewer, better calls than a packed calendar of tire-kickers.
2. Delaying the application. Instead of having the application visible immediately below the VSL, I started gatekeeping the button until the viewer reaches a certain point in the video.
Essentially recreating what the webinar was doing — forcing a minimum level of engagement before they can even apply — but without the waiting room and scheduling friction.
What I landed on is basically a hybrid: a longer-form VSL that functions like a short webinar, with a gated application on the next page. The best of both formats without the worst parts of either.
Here's something most people running paid funnels underestimate: the 80/20 of your entire funnel's success lives in the ad creatives. Not the landing page. Not the VSL script. Not the application questions. The ads.
Everything downstream is important, but the ads determine who enters your funnel in the first place. Get the messaging wrong and you'll attract the wrong people. Get it right and your close rate, show rate, and cash collected all improve — even if nothing else changes.
We've been running volume. Between 30 and 40 new creatives per week. Ten on a Saturday, thirty on a Friday.
Just constantly feeding the machine and watching what sticks.
The hardest discipline in all of this is leaving ad sets alone long enough to actually collect data.
The temptation to kill something after two days of mediocre performance is real. But you have to let Meta learn.
And you can't spread too little budget across too many ad sets. That's a recipe for never getting enough data on anything. Concentrated spend, high creative volume, patience. That's the formula.
This is probably the single biggest reason this has worked for me, and I think it's borderline necessary in 2026.
I have a YouTube channel with over a hundred videos on it. So here's what happens in my funnel that most people's funnels can't replicate:
when someone opts in, I'm sending them emails — but those emails contain my YouTube videos. The VSL itself mentions my channel.
Before the sales call, I send them a Gamma doc loaded with YouTube content and case studies.
We have Hyros tracking now, so I can actually see them going to the channel and binging content between opting in and getting on a call.
By the time they're on the phone with me, they've consumed hours of my content. They already trust me.
The sales conversation is completely different from someone who just watched a 10-minute VSL and filled out a form.
But it goes deeper than that. I've been posting short-form content on TikTok — anywhere from 10 to 30 clips a day, aiming for 40. Most of them do nothing.
But every now and then, one pops. I had a TikTok hit a million views last year.
What I do with those is run them as engagement ads. People who watch a certain percentage get added to a retargeting list. Then I run my actual offer ads to that warm audience.
So the traffic hitting my VSL funnel isn't completely cold. They've seen my face. They've watched my content.
They might have even gone to my YouTube channel already, found a hundred videos, and binged a few.
I've had multiple people tell me on sales calls that they found me through TikTok, went to YouTube, watched a bunch of videos, and then applied.
Now I'm just trying to engineer that path deliberately instead of letting it happen by accident.
One thing I picked up from Laurel Portier — she says this kind of warm-audience paid strategy takes a solid 90 days to really kick in. I'm still in month 1.5. But the early signals are strong.
The bigger takeaway is this: conversion windows on paid traffic have gotten longer. It's not like the old days where someone sees an ad, clicks through, and buys in the same session.
People need more touches, more trust, more familiarity. Organic content compresses that timeline.
Without it, you need way more ad spend to build the same level of trust — and even then, it might not be enough.
I was running a $2,000 offer on the automated webinar for a while. It worked. We were profitable. But at $2K, you're basically playing to break even on the front end and then profit on the back end through ascensions.
That's a fine model if you have the cash flow to support it and a backend offer ready to go.
But I wanted front-end profit. I wanted to collect real cash upfront, on the first transaction, without needing a second sale to make the economics work.
So the consulting offer is priced significantly higher. And the thing about sales calls is they let you collect more cash upfront than any self-serve checkout page will.
The conversation, the trust built on the call, the ability to handle objections in real time — that's what makes a $5K–$8K front-end offer viable through paid traffic.
The trade-off is you need a real sales infrastructure. Setters to qualify and confirm. A tighter application. Possibly a closer beyond yourself once you scale.
It's more labor-intensive than a webinar-to-checkout funnel, but the unit economics are significantly better if you can close.
Here's the part that catches people off guard, and honestly still catches me off guard sometimes.
Every element of this funnel is connected.
The ads, the opt-in page, the VSL, the application, the email sequence, the call booking process, the sales script — it's all one system. And if you change any single piece, it can pull the entire thing out of alignment.
It's like a Jenga tower. Everything is perfectly stacked and working. Then you swap out one ad creative, or tweak your application questions, or adjust your pricing — and suddenly your show rate drops, your close rate tanks, and you're staring at the numbers wondering what went wrong.
This is why testing needs to be methodical. Change one variable at a time. Give it enough time and spend to generate real data. And resist the urge to "optimize" three things simultaneously because you're impatient.
I've made that mistake more than once. Every time, it cost me weeks of clarity.
The plan from here is straightforward: build out the sales team. Bring on setters first to handle the increased call volume that the VSL funnel generates.
That alone should drive cost per call down even further while keeping lead quality high through better pre-call qualification.
I'm also continuing to test messaging alignment — making sure the promise in the ad matches the promise in the VSL, which matches the promise on the opt-in page.
Any mismatch there creates friction and confusion downstream. This stuff takes 3–4 months to really dial in, and I'm still in the middle of it.
But the foundation is there. 5.7x ROAS on a consulting offer, with clear levers to pull for improvement. The game now is scaling without breaking the Jenga tower.
If you're running paid ads on a high-ticket offer, here's what I'd leave you with: organic presence is no longer optional, your ad creatives matter more than anything else in your funnel, and front-end profit requires a real sales infrastructure behind it.
There are no shortcuts on any of those three.
More to come. I'm documenting all of it.
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The #1 reason agency & business owners don't scale isn't their offer.
It's not their niche.
It's accountability.
We're fixing that inside SPECTRE, and we need the right person to make it happen.
Success Coach role.
Open now.
Reply with "COACH" if you want the details.
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Everything I know about building, scaling, and getting clients, 100+ videos. all free.
@PabloMilandu1" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">youtube.com/@PabloMilandu1
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Who i'm looking for:
— You have business experience and or experience in client success. You know what it takes.
— You communicate with clarity. No fluff.
— You hold people accountable without making them feel small.
— You are genuinely invested in other people's outcomes. Actually. Not performatively.
— You are hungry.
We don't move slow when we find the right person.
Reply to this thread to apply!
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We're hiring Customer Success Coaches.
Here's why this role matters more than any other hire we've made.
I've built four companies.
Helped dozens of agency owners go from stuck to $30k, $40k, $50k a month.
And the one thing that separates the businesses that make it from the ones that don't, is what happens after someone says yes.
Our clients are agency owners betting on themselves. some of them are all in.
They need someone in their corner who actually gives a damn.
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@Abdul_Basil_0 Awesome - still open, application form here: yessir, forms.gle/kAvuJSgEWRNXMH…
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hiring for an appointment setter - need someone good who can work their but off
we'll be in the trenches together; hit me for details
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@Joshh2Great cool, application form here: forms.gle/kAvuJSgEWRNXMH…
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@PabloMilandu Hi Pablo, I'm interested in the appointment setter role.
I'm reliable on calls, disciplined, and ready to grind in the trenches. Happy to discuss details
Unable to send a DM please DM me
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@SammyTheScribe yessir, application form here: forms.gle/kAvuJSgEWRNXMH…
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i am of the belief that if you are hovering in a certain revenue band in your business it is because the unlock to the next level exists outside of what you are currently doing or how you are currently operating;
this may look like hiring,
or,
increased volume,
but,
the introduction of a completely new element into the business is what will take you there
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to lead is to admit when you are wrong and when you lack knowledge or understanding;
this activates the help around you and mobilizes your team to be resourceful;
this is how you stay moving and avoid stagnancy.
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