In today's episode, I chat with Thomas McCourt, founder at CalendarInvite, about running a B2B lead generation agency focused on small to medium marketing agencies—helping them build outbound systems through cold email and cold calling for clients who are great at marketing everyone else but have no formal offer or sales process for their own services.
We explore his campaign for a non-agency client selling into care homes, construction, and schools—where Apollo couldn't build the list so they scraped an online care home directory, enriched the domains in Clay, used Clay's AI to find care home managers, and chained the whole workflow together—only to find the carefully segmented industry campaigns barely scraped 1% reply rates, until Thomas had a simple idea: drop the industry segmentation entirely, search Apollo by job title across all industries, use messaging that had already shown positive signals, and run one broad campaign—jumping to 3% overall reply rate and 10% positive reply rate overnight. The lesson: there's a time for creative workflows and a time to stop ignoring what's right in front of you. Thomas also shares his take on cold email deliverability: he started in 2022 when the channel was more forgiving—buying dodgy cheap domains, skipping warmup, ignoring bounce rates, sending seven-step sequences—and got away with it, but anyone starting today has to get everything right from day one because ESPs and AI spam filters have made the margin for error much thinner. His prediction: infrastructure will keep tightening, agencies that survive will be the ones building their own tools and software rather than depending entirely on third-party platforms, and adaptability at speed will be the defining skill. Thomas shares his path from a manual business development agency in 2022 working with creative agencies and brands, to moving in-house at a communications and events agency, to stumbling across an automated lead gen account on Instagram, discovering Smartlead, Clay, and the whole new wave of sales tech, running his first campaigns just to see what was possible, accidentally landing a client, and building CalendarInvite from there. His advice: follow the right voices on LinkedIn and podcasts, absorb everything, but more importantly put it into practice—and don't be afraid to cold message people you look up to and ask for advice, because most of them will say yes.
Enjoy 🙂
(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards
(00:20) What CalendarInvite Does: Lead Gen for Small to Medium Marketing Agencies
(01:20) How Thomas Chose His Niche: Comfort and Familiarity Over Grand Strategy
(03:48) First 30-60-90 Days: Auditing Current Sales Process and Building the Offer
(06:47) Care Home Campaign: Scraping Directories, Enriching in Clay, Chaining Workflows
(09:44) The Pivot That Worked: Drop the Segmentation, Search by Job Title, Watch Replies Jump
(11:02) When Simple Beats Creative: The Lesson Thomas Is Taking Forward
(12:15) Thomas's Journey: Manual Business Dev Agency to In-House to CalendarInvite
(14:44) Discovering Smartlead and Clay on Instagram and Accidentally Landing a First Client
(17:00) Why Starting in 2022 Was More Forgiving Than Starting Today
(19:24) Future Predictions: Infrastructure Tightening, Agencies Need to Build Their Own Tools
(22:14) Advice: Follow the Right Voices, Test Everything, Cold Message People You Admire
🔗 CONNECT WITH THOMAS
👥 LinkedIn
💻 Website
🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV
🎥 YouTube Channel
🐦 X (Twitter)
📸 Instagram
💻 Website
👥 LinkedIn
📧 Email - [email protected]
🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)
👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.