Scaling B2B Growth In 2025: Lessons From The Trenches

Ryan Allis here. I’m writing today to share a behind-the-scenes look at some of the most valuable takeaways from our recent GrowthRise Mastermind call, where we explored what’s really working — and what’s not — in the trenches of B2B growth and customer acquisition in 2025.

If you’re a SaaS founder, B2B marketer, or fractional CMO trying to scale your pipeline with AI, outbound, cold email, or paid media, you’ll find tactical gold in what follows. We dug deep into Instantly, hypertargeted outbound infrastructure, retargeting strategies, cold email optimization, team building frameworks, and even AI-enhanced video content production.

Let’s dive in.

If you're not already a member of GrowthRise, apply to join us here on the next mastermind call, held every Tuesday at 2pm ET / 1pm Central.

1. The Truth About Cold Email at Scale in 2025

Let’s talk about the reality of cold email today — because it’s not what it was even 12 months ago.

During our most recent GrowthRise Mastermind, a member brought up a common but painful issue: all of their Instantly inboxes had suddenly burned out. Their cold outreach campaigns — previously humming along — dropped to zero overnight. When they reached out to support, Instantly acknowledged the issue and offered to replace the inboxes. It was a helpful gesture, but it highlighted something that a lot of growth marketers are still learning the hard way: this kind of deliverability fallout is not the exception — it’s the rule.

We’re still in the Wild West of cold email. Instantly, like many platforms, shows a red error banner when inboxes are failing, but provides little context or diagnostic guidance. That can be frustrating, especially when you're relying on outreach to drive pipeline.

What we’ve found over the years is that inbox burnouts are inevitable — and if you’re lucky, you’ll get a three-month run before things start to break down. Sometimes, you’ll only get a few weeks. And it usually takes just a handful of complaints — maybe five or ten — to cause issues with sending reputation. When that happens, Microsoft or Google may begin to rate-limit or block delivery altogether.

Here’s the key: plan for failure. Build it into your infrastructure. We advise always having more inboxes than you need. If you're sending from ten, you should have fifteen or twenty ready, with some at rest so you can rotate them in as needed. The goal isn’t to prevent burnout. The goal is to outmaneuver it.

Most teams try to create predictable monthly rotations — “we’ll cycle every 30 days” — but in truth, it's more reactive than that. You rotate when the data tells you to rotate. If your sending volume drops unexpectedly, or your placement tests show less than 60% inbox visibility, it’s time to swap them out.

Cold email in 2025 isn’t about set-it-and-forget-it. It’s about building a system that’s durable through volatility — and that means redundancy, monitoring, and quick response.

2. Our Cold Email Infrastructure: 1,500 Inboxes and 6,048 Emails a Day

We’ve taken this seriously in our own operations — which is why our current setup includes 1,500 separate inboxes, all sending just 4 emails per day. That adds up to 6,048 emails daily — precisely dialed in for both deliverability and scale.

This setup isn’t something we cobbled together. It’s intentionally designed using a third-party service called Hypertide. Each inbox is pre-warmed and clean, and the low daily volume helps us avoid blacklisting and maintain high inbox placement over time.

But the real cost isn’t just the $750/month we pay for the inboxes. The real cost is operational. It’s the time and attention it takes to:

• Load all 1,500 inboxes manually.
• Monitor deliverability signals daily.
• Rotate inboxes when performance drops.

To help manage this complexity, we use a third-party support agency called GetKen.ai. They handle a lot of the grunt work of inbox onboarding, error resolution, and swapping in new accounts. Without that layer of operational support, the scale we’ve achieved would be unmanageable.

Content Personalization at Scale: Spintax + Claude Sonnet 3.5

Now let’s talk about how we write the emails — because that’s just as important.

We use a technique called spintax, which involves inserting randomized variations into the copy. For example, instead of writing “Hi there, I wanted to reach out,” we might use:

{Hey|Hi|Hello} {there|friend|SaaS founder},

This allows us to generate hundreds of variations for each message, helping us evade spam filters and keep content feeling fresh.

On top of this, we layer in AI-generated personalization using Claude Sonnet 3.5. This tool helps us generate custom first lines and dynamic closing calls-to-action, based on LinkedIn data, company info, or custom buyer personas. The result? Each email feels personal, even at scale

3. Why We Prioritize Clicks Over Replies (And Why It Works)

This may go against some conventional wisdom, but we don’t optimize for replies in our cold email strategy.

Most B2B marketers do. And for good reason — replies are great signals. They keep your deliverability healthy, they create conversation, and they often lead directly to booked meetings.

But for our business model — where the average contract value (ACV) is between $1,200 and $2,400 per year — we care more about clicks. Here’s why:

1. Clicks Create Retargeting Opportunities

Every click means a website visit. Every website visit means a cookie. And that cookie drops prospects directly into our retargeting funnel. From that moment on, they’ll see our brand across LinkedIn, Meta, Google — everywhere they go. It’s like switching from fishing with a pole to fishing with a net.

2. Clicks Signal Intent for Lead Scoring

Once someone clicks, we move them into a new sequence — usually more educational, often on a different platform. From there, we track continued engagement: Did they click again? Did they spend time on page? Did they open multiple emails? Once we see a pattern of engagement, that contact is flagged as a warm lead and can be moved into a more targeted CRM workflow.

3. Clicks Scale More Efficiently

Typical reply rates might be 1–3%. Click rates, on the other hand, can hit 6–8%. That means 2–4x more engagement — which is ideal for low-ticket, high-volume businesses like ours. When you’re sending to 250,000 contacts over 6 months, that difference becomes massive in terms of pipeline potential.

Of course, there’s a tradeoff. Click-heavy emails usually include URLs, which lowers deliverability slightly. That’s why we use techniques like redirect domains (more on that in the next section) and always monitor placement scores. But we believe the gains in visibility and long-tail nurturing outweigh the short-term hit.

If we were selling $20k+ enterprise solutions, we’d probably lean more heavily into replies. But for us, the click is the conversion we care most about in cold outreach — because it fuels everything downstream.

4. Deliverability Strategies That Work (And What To Avoid)

Let’s be real: deliverability is the Achilles’ heel of any cold email strategy. You can have the best personalization, the cleanest copy, and a high-quality lead list — but if your emails aren’t landing in inboxes, none of it matters.

That’s why we’ve spent so much time dialing in our deliverability protocols. A lot of teams make the mistake of focusing only on open or reply rates without understanding the complex dance between email content, sending infrastructure, and domain health.

Here’s what’s working — and what’s not — from the trenches of our GrowthRise setup:

✅ What Works

• Low send volume per inbox: We cap at just 4 emails/day per inbox. It’s tedious to manage across 1,500 inboxes, but it keeps our spam scores low and extends inbox lifespan dramatically.
• Syntax and personalization: Every message we send uses AI-generated syntax structures and dynamic intros, powered by Claude Sonnet 3.5. This keeps each email fresh and unique, which improves placement and reduces Gmail flagging.
• No primary domains: Never, ever include your main company domain in cold emails. We learned this the hard way. After months of sending, our root domain got blacklisted, and it impacted our warm inboxes too. Our solution? Use redirect domains that route to the primary site but aren’t directly associated with our brand in email content.
• Monitoring inbox placement: We run placement tests regularly — if results dip below 60%, we know it’s time to rotate in fresh inboxes.

❌ What to Avoid

• Open and click tracking (if you’re optimizing for deliverability): Turning off tracking increases the odds of inbox placement — but it removes valuable behavioral data. It’s a tradeoff.
• Anchor text hyperlinks: If you’re sending in plain text, you can’t use “click here.” You need to use the full raw URL. Otherwise, your message can get flagged as suspicious.
• Overloading on links: We’ve seen that even one link too many can tank deliverability. We prefer 1 CTA per message max, ideally buried lower in the email to avoid triggering spam filters.

If deliverability is your number one concern, you may consider sending all messages as plain text and removing links entirely. This can improve placement — but limits your ability to measure clicks or drive traffic. Again, it’s a strategic trade.

5. The Rise of Vector.co for Website Visitor Intelligence

One of the biggest hidden wins in B2B marketing is the ability to deanonymize website visitors. That’s what tools like RB2B, Clearbit, and Instantly’s new feature aim to do — but they don’t always deliver.

On this week’s call, I shared that our go-to tool right now is Vector.co. Why? Because it’s not only free for core functionality, it’s also more accurate than the paid competitors in our tests.

Here’s how it works:

• Vector monitors your website and identifies up to 10–20% of anonymous traffic.
• That data flows into Slack, where your SDR or sales team can review and respond in real-time.
• For enterprise sales teams or high-ticket offers, it’s gold. You can follow up with key decision-makers before they ever fill out a form.

Of course, there are caveats.

We’ve seen weird false positives — like high school teachers in Kansas showing up as visiting our SaaS-focused funnel. Clearly not our ICP. In our experience, about half of the identifications are inaccurate — but the other half are worth gold if you’re selling products with an ACV of $10k+.

Bottom line? If you're in enterprise, use it. If you're in mid-market or SMB with low-touch sales, it might not be worth the noise.

6. Training, Hiring, and Scaling Your Marketing Team

One of the most actionable conversations we had this week was about building a high-performance marketing team on a budget.

A member shared how, as a fractional CMO, he struggles to find executional help that’s affordable, skilled, and aligned with modern growth methodologies. I totally get it — we’ve run into the same challenge.

So I shared our current model — one we’re actively deploying inside GrowthRise and SaaS Rise:

Step 1: Hire offshore, high-potential talent

We’ve had great success hiring from Recruit.com and similar platforms, particularly in South Africa and Latin America. These marketers typically cost $2,700/month or less, and many already have basic exposure to tools like Apollo, Instantly, and Meta Ads.

Step 2: Train them with our system

We give them:

• Access to our GrowthRise Mastermind calls (weekly)
• Our recorded 16-week training curriculum (over 32 hours of video)
• Playbooks on Clay, outbound sequencing, paid ads, ABM, and more

We used to spend $10k/month on a high-level U.S.-based CMO. Now, we can onboard someone globally, train them in 60–90 days, and get them running our full-stack marketing system at one-fifth the cost.

Step 3: Scale it like a product

We’re seriously considering productizing this. Imagine: vetted, trained marketers who already know how to execute the Growth System — ready to plug in as fractional hires to support busy CMOs or founders.

Would it work for everyone? No. But if you’re focused on repeatable, scalable, budget-conscious marketing execution, this is a playbook that delivers.

And if you're trying to scale your own team? We now offer the full GrowthRise curriculum — previously only live — in a recorded format for a one-time $5,000 investment. That means you can onboard and train your new hires without having to wait for the next live cohort.

It’s not just about hiring cheaper. It’s about hiring smarter — and training better.

7. Content Quality vs. Scale: The Video Conundrum

One of the more technical yet increasingly relevant challenges that came up on this week’s call was around video quality — specifically, how to scale high-quality video testimonials when you’re not in control of your client’s recording environment.

One member shared that they regularly record client interviews over Zoom, and then turn those recordings into marketing testimonial assets. The issue? Many clients are using outdated laptops, built-in webcams, or bad lighting. The result is poor-quality footage that doesn’t meet the production standards needed for modern digital marketing.

The natural question was: Can AI fix this?

Short answer: not yet — at least, not for full-length videos.

While AI has made impressive progress in upscaling short clips (10–20 seconds), it still struggles with longer formats. I explained that this isn’t a matter of software being behind — it’s a matter of raw processing complexity. Each second of video contains hundreds of thousands of pixels, and with video recorded at 30+ frames per second, that’s millions of data points per minute that need to be intelligently guessed and rebuilt by AI to improve clarity.

We’ve tested tools like Hippo, CapCut, and even Canva’s video features, but none of them deliver consistent results for 10-minute interview footage. One of our members even bought an annual subscription to one of these tools, only to find that it wasn’t worth it.

So what’s the solution?

For now, we recommend a low-tech workaround:

• Switch from Zoom to Riverside.fm for future interviews. Riverside records video locally on both sides, meaning you’ll get higher-quality raw footage — even if the client's internet connection is unstable.
• Physically mail clients a webcam kit if you're working with high-value testimonials. Include a return envelope and a gift card to incentivize sending it back. It’s a $200 investment that can save hours of post-production work.
• Prioritize quality over volume. Don’t try to fix bad video. Choose your top 10–20 clients and do what it takes to get it right the first time.

In a few years, AI may be able to take a grainy 30-minute Zoom call and render it in 4K — but we’re not there yet. Until then, proactive planning and tech-forward logistics remain your best options.

8. Strategic Hiring: What to Look For

Another core theme in this call was around hiring — particularly for marketers and growth operators who understand the current landscape.

A member posed a powerful question: how do you find people who don’t just know “marketing,” but are fluent in the specific systems we’re all using today — Clay, Instantly, Apollo, AI personalization tools, etc.? People who can come in and execute without needing a crash course in modern growth stack methodology?

Here’s how I broke it down:

Think in Functional Roles, Not Unicorns

When you’re hiring, divide your needs into four major categories:

1. Paid Ads Specialist – ideally someone who can do both paid social and paid search across platforms like Meta, Google, and LinkedIn.
2. Outbound Marketer / ABM List Builder – someone who knows tools like Apollo, Clay, and Instantly and can do lead scraping, list enrichment, and sequencing.
3. Content Creator – copywriters and strategists who can write blog posts, nurture emails, video scripts, and case studies.
4. Designer – for paid ad creative, funnel assets, and slide decks.

Don't try to hire someone who can do all four. Instead, assemble your marketing function like a fractional team, using global contractors or part-time experts depending on the project phase.

Go Global to Stretch Budget Without Sacrificing Skill

We’ve had great success hiring in South Africa and Latin America, where you can find marketers with solid English fluency and platform knowledge at $2,500–$3,500/month. These aren’t low-skill workers — many are ex-agency or in-house marketers looking for remote opportunities with meaningful brands.

Compare that to U.S. hires that cost $8,000–$12,000/month and often come with other consulting clients on the side.

If you’re on a budget, hire globally and train internally — which leads perfectly into the next section.

9. When Clicks Are Better Than Replies (And When They’re Not)

One of the more philosophical discussions on the call centered around the goal of cold email. Should you optimize for replies, or for clicks?

Most cold outreach playbooks today suggest going for replies. It makes sense — a reply opens a conversation, which might lead to a call, demo, or sale. It also boosts your deliverability metrics, signaling to inbox providers that your content is legit.

But in our campaigns, we deliberately optimize for clicks instead. Here’s why:

• Clicks tell us who’s interested. When someone clicks, they’re engaging with our brand. That puts them in our retargeting funnel, where we can follow them with ads, emails, and personalized journeys across channels.
• Clicks scale better than replies. While replies tend to hover around 1–2%, we regularly hit 6–8% click rates. That’s 3x more data, more reach, and more top-of-funnel volume — critical for our lower-ticket offers ($1–3k ACV).
• Clicks create an educational nurture path. Once someone clicks, we drop them into a longer sequence. If they engage again, we elevate them into our newsletter. If they keep engaging, they’re flagged as warm leads and may eventually be contacted by sales — but only after demonstrating consistent interest.

That’s not to say replies aren’t valuable. If you’re selling a $20k SaaS product and need to book 1:1 demos, optimize for replies. But if you’re building an automated, scalable system to warm up hundreds or thousands of prospects monthly? Clicks win.

And one bonus insight: if you're putting links in cold emails (as we do), make sure you're not using your primary domain. Use redirect domains to avoid blacklisting and protect your core deliverability. We learned this one the hard way, too.

10. When Cold Email Fails: How to Know It's Time to Rotate

Cold email is a powerful channel — but it’s also delicate. Even with the most refined systems in place, things can break. Deliverability can tank. Campaigns can drop to zero. And if you don’t have monitoring in place, you might not even realize it until a week (or a month) has gone by without meaningful reach.

That’s exactly what happened to one of our members this week. They had several inboxes running inside Instantly, pushing out a few thousand emails a week across multiple campaigns. Then suddenly, their entire campaign flatlined. All inboxes showed as inactive, and sending stopped completely.

Instantly’s support response was casual — “Oopsie poopsie, send us new URLs and we’ll replace the inboxes.” But the takeaway here isn’t the customer service interaction. It’s this:

Inbox degradation is not a bug. It’s a built-in feature of cold outreach.

That’s why we recommend:

• Running 50% more inboxes than you need. If you send from 10, keep 15–20 warmed and on standby.
• Monitoring volume and bounce rates daily. If your sending volume drops but you haven’t run out of leads, it’s likely you’ve been rate-limited or blocked.
• Running inbox placement tests monthly. If your deliverability is under 60%, rotate in new inboxes.

We use a tool called Hypertide to maintain 1,500 inboxes across our cold outreach infrastructure, sending only 4 emails per inbox per day. This low send rate helps extend inbox life, but nothing lasts forever — and when one starts to falter, we don’t wait. We rotate.

The cold email pros are not the ones who avoid burnouts entirely — they’re the ones who plan for them, spot them early, and recover quickly.

11. The Future of Marketing: Speed of Change is the Only Constant

One of the closing themes I emphasized on the call is a simple but profound truth for all of us in growth:

“If you’re not executing on what’s working this month, you’re already behind.”

That’s especially true in 2025.

The tools we use today weren’t on the radar a year ago. Platforms like Clay and Claude Sonnet 3.5 are now staples in our stack — but just 6 months ago, ChatGPT was still outperforming everything else.

Today, that’s changed.

• AI personalization? Claude outperforms GPT on tone and variability.
• List building? Clay + LinkedIn enrichments still work — but we’re watching that change.
• Cold outreach strategy? What worked in January (like link tracking or certain spintax formats) may be hurting deliverability today.

We’ve seen this time and again: the email deliverability best practices of six months ago are now liabilities. Domains that used to perform well suddenly land in spam folders. Tools that were top-of-the-line in 2024 are already getting beat by new players.

That’s why we no longer rely solely on pre-recorded training or static SOPs. Our weekly GrowthRise Mastermind calls are designed to deliver what’s working right now. It’s also why we’ve launched a recorded version of our 16-week Growth System training — so you can onboard new team members quickly, even if they’re overseas or starting mid-quarter.

Bottom line: if you’re in B2B marketing and growth, your biggest competitive advantage isn’t tooling or even team — it’s responsiveness. Your ability to stay close to what’s changing, iterate fast, and deploy with precision is what keeps your funnel full and your CAC low.

🚀 Ready to Scale? Here Are Two Ways We Can Support.

If you've made it this far, you're clearly committed to scaling your B2B SaaS company with precision, performance, and purpose.

And we’re here to help you do exactly that.

Below are the two ways we can support you:

🎓 Option 1: Apply to Join the GrowthRise Membership

The GrowthRise Membership is built for Marketing Leaders across any industry who are scaling their organization from $1M to $100M in ARR — and want to surround themselves with a growth-minded community of professionals.

Inside the membership, you’ll get:

💬 Private Slack + WhatsApp groups with access to 130+ CMOs & Marketing Leaders
🔁 Weekly Mastermind Calls to solve real-time growth challenges
📚 Access to our B2B Growth Course Slides
🎯 Member Directory to connect by industry and revenue stage
🎁 Perks and discounts on vetted tools and vendors
🧠 Weekly support from Ryan Allis and the GrowthRise coaching team

👉 Apply here to join the GrowthRise community and start your free 14-day trial.

🎯 Option 2: Apply for the Upcoming B2B SaaS Growth Program Cohort

If you’re looking for deeper implementation support to actually build and launch your growth engine step-by-step — the B2B SaaS Growth Program is your next move.

This 16-week, done-with-you accelerator helps you:

✅ Build a laser-targeted ABM lead list using Clay, Apollo, ListKit & Instantly
🚀 Launch digital ads across Meta, LinkedIn, Google, Bing & AdRoll
🧪 Optimize funnel conversion rates with proven CRO frameworks
✉️ Deploy AI-powered outbound campaigns that generate real results
📈 Track CAC, CPL, ROI, and KPIs across the full funnel
🔄 Scale your system using real-time data and weekly feedback

You’ll get live coaching, funnel reviews, campaign builds, and Slack/email support — all directly from the SaasRise and GrowthRise team (Ryan, David, Salman).

🧠 If you represent a $1M–$100M ARR B2B company ready to build a repeatable revenue engine, this is your moment.

👉 Apply here to join the next B2B SaaS Growth Program starting soon.

The future of growth is here — and it's human-first, AI-powered, and founder-led.

All the best,

Ryan Allis, CEO & Founder
GrowthRise | The Community for B2B Marketing Leaders