Agencies are brilliant at marketing everyone but themselves. Outbound gives you a steady, controlled flow of conversations with the marketing leaders you'd most like as clients, timed to product launches, new hires and budget cycles.
Hi Jonah,
You announced the spring hiking line for a February launch, and the ad library shows the same three static ads from last autumn still running. That usually means the in-house team is flat out on the product and the launch creative has not been started.
We did the launch campaign for a footwear brand last year, twelve pieces of video and static in six weeks, built to run across Meta, YouTube and retail screens. One example is linked below rather than a full deck.
If the February date is fixed, is a twenty-minute call this week worth it?
[Your name]
Agencies win work from referrals, from the client who moved to a new CMO job and brought you with them, and from the occasional RFP that eats a fortnight. It is a real pipeline and it is entirely reactive: nobody at the agency chooses which brands to go after, the brands choose you. That is why so many agencies have a portfolio of great work in one category and a new business list that is whoever emailed last month.
Agency outbound usually dies of embarrassment. The founder drafts something clever, the creative director rewrites it, the account director worries it is off-brand, and by the time it goes out the launch it was written for has happened. The other failure is the opposite: a junior with a sequencing tool and 'we help brands like yours'. Run properly the email reads like a piece of your work, names the launch, the rebrand or the marketing hire that makes the moment, and shows one relevant thing you made.
Agency emails have to be a small sample of the work: tight, specific, well written. We treat every email as a piece of copy the agency would be happy to have its name on.
We build the list from marketing moments, not category filters. Product launches and rebrands in the trade press, new head of marketing announcements on LinkedIn, paid campaigns in the Meta and Google ad libraries, funding rounds with a growth line in the announcement. We take the most senior marketing owner, CMO, VP or founder, and exclude brands in your CRM, your clients' competitors and anyone in an active pitch.
Before writing, our copywriters look at the brand the way a strategist would in the first hour of a pitch: the last three campaigns, the current ad creative in the ad library, the press release for the launch, the new hire's own background. We are looking for the gap between what the brand has announced and what its marketing looks like, because that gap is the brief.
An agency email is judged as a sample of the agency's writing, so it has to be good. It names the launch or the hire, says one sharp thing about the brand's current work, and points to one relevant piece you made. No 'full-service', no 'we help brands', no adjectives about the team. One case study link, not the portfolio, and a call at the end, not a deck.
Marketing leaders plan in quarters, so we send hardest in the six weeks before a quarter starts, when budgets are set, and in the fortnight after a new head of marketing is announced. We avoid launch week and the Black Friday run-up for retail brands. Sends go Tuesday to Thursday from dedicated domains we warm for three to four weeks, never your agency's own, and follow-ups stop on reply.
Interested replies from marketing leaders ask for a credentials deck or a case study, and arrive fast because the launch has a date. The portal sorts them into interested, not now and out of office, and a not now often carries the next planning cycle, which we diarise. You send the case study that day and offer the call. Every two weeks we tilt the list towards the moments replying.
The ad library is a public signal an in-house team forgets is visible, and pairing it with the announced launch date makes the gap obvious without saying anything unkind. The proof is one comparable launch with a scope and a timeline, and one link, not a portfolio. It leaves out the agency's awards, process and positioning line, because a VP of marketing reads the email as the work.
They see through bad cold email instantly, which is the point: a CMO reads the email as a sample of your writing and your judgement. That is why ours are short, name a real moment, and say one thing about the brand's current work that shows we looked. An email like that is not a trick, it is the first page of the pitch.
Yes, and you should. Before the first send you give us your client list and, for each, the competitors you would not pitch. We exclude those domains permanently and check every new batch against the list. If a client's competitor replies to something anyway, it stays in the portal for you to decide on, and we never follow up without your say-so.
It works better for specialists, because the moments are easier to see. A healthcare agency can write to the FDA clearance in the press release; a B2B software agency to the VP of marketing hired the week after the Series B. On the call we ask which category, which titles and which moments, and build the list from there.