How Jan van Musscher Grew His Cold Email Agency to 25+ Clients
Jan van Musscher runs Cold Label, a cold email lead generation agency for B2B companies that the video description says has grown to 25+ clients. Michael and Jan first met in person in Chiang Mai. Here they talk about why bigger companies are easier to get results for, what it takes to look credible to an enterprise buyer, how content builds trust even when it doesn't bring in the leads, and why the offer drives deliverability more than most people think.
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Topics covered
- Moving from B2C affiliate lead generation into B2B cold email
- Why bigger clients with sales teams get better results
- Cold email as validation for beginners, and as an accelerant for established companies
- Giving campaigns enough time to work
- Looking like a big company to sell to big companies
- Proposals with video, and content as a trust builder
- Unusual campaign tactics, deliverability and tough niches
Key takeaways
- Bigger companies with an existing sales team are easier to get results for. They already have demand and positioning, and they know how to follow up.
- If you're just starting out, cold email is validation and market research, not marketing. Learn to do it yourself before hiring an agency.
- Jan's rule of thumb: two to four weeks after launch you'll know whether a campaign is good, and another two to four weeks before deals start closing.
- To sell to big companies, look like one: a proper website, a professional LinkedIn, a pitch deck and a real proposal.
- A proposal with a walkthrough video lets your contact pass the pitch to their boss without having to sell it themselves.
- Content may not bring many enterprise leads, but it builds trust. Speak to the buyer you want, not to the person you used to be.
- Most results still come from nailing the basics.
Show notes
🏢 Why bigger clients are easier
Michael has noticed a pattern among larger cold email agencies: they tend to work with larger companies. Jan agrees. Smaller companies can still work, but the offer has to be more spectacular. Bigger companies already have demand, positioning and marketing, so the agency speeds things up instead of starting from zero. Clients with even one sales rep pick up the phone, follow up better and know what the next step is. Cold email is only the first step in the funnel.
“it's just way easier to tap in as kind of like an accelerant as opposed to like starting the fire for someone”
Jan van Musscher, 4:05
🧪 Validation first, then acceleration
Michael says a lot of beginners think there's something magic about cold email. If you hire someone in your first months, you're really paying for product-market fit research. Once you're at something like half a million in revenue and know your customer, it becomes marketing. His advice for beginners is to learn the skill and do it themselves, then bring in an agency to accelerate.
Jan adds that an agency's real value is consistency. Many companies run campaigns internally, then let them slip when someone goes on holiday.
“you're not paying for marketing you're paying for validation and market research”
Michael Gardiner, 5:22
⏳ Give campaigns time
Michael rarely sees a broken campaign with three months of data behind it. It's usually two weeks, maybe a month. Results improve month over month, partly from iteration and partly from having a pipeline. Jan's rule of thumb is two to four weeks to see whether a campaign is good, then another two to four weeks before you start closing deals. Around eight weeks in, the first deals start to land.
💼 Be like them to sell to them
Jan says the move upmarket came from knowing he could deliver. He actually finds big companies easier to sell to, because they value expertise and know how to use agencies. Michael adds that big companies buy differently. Often a mid-level marketing employee has to justify the decision to a boss, so they need reasons: a pitch deck, reviews on Trustpilot and Clutch, podcast appearances. A one-page funnel site doesn't give them that.
Jan points out that the "one pager" advice you see on X works when you sell to people like you. Bigger companies expect a good website, a clean LinkedIn and a proper proposal.
“you need to be like them to to have them trust you”
Jan van Musscher, 11:16
📄 Proposals with video
Michael says one of the biggest boosts to his closing rate has been a professional proposal with a video walking through it. The contact doesn't have to be the salesperson for their boss. They can just play the video. Jan's team had tried both with and without proposals and was going back to proposals, and he says he'll add the video too.
📣 Content as a trust builder
Most inbound leads Jan gets from content aren't qualified for the agency. Companies with 50 or 100+ employees are the minority. He has had some good ones with 200 or 500+ employees, but they're harder to get consistently. Content still matters as a trust builder: prospects can scroll back and see months of posts on the same subject. One thing that helped was writing for the buyer, like the head of sales at a 200-person company, instead of the person who's just starting an agency. LinkedIn giveaways showing how they landed a call with a big company also attract the right people.
Michael shares how he handled the same problem. His agency clients are often at five or ten million a year, and they don't come in from social media. So he built a separate, beginner-focused consulting product for his social audience.
🧩 Campaign tactics and the offer behind deliverability
Jan shares two things that break the usual rules. His co-founder sometimes writes emails that simply pitch what they do in one sentence, which works when the service is unique enough. He's also gone back to putting his LinkedIn in the signature. He takes a deliverability hit, but gets more interesting responses because of the social proof.
Michael's big-picture view is that the offer is the biggest factor in deliverability. One client checks few of the deliverability boxes but consistently gets one meeting per 50 emails, because people want what they sell. Jan compares it to engagement scoring. Good campaigns spiral up and bad ones spiral down. They agree that ERC credits, email marketing for ecommerce and web design without an ROI angle are among the toughest offers.
“Google knows when people want the thing you're selling”
Michael Gardiner, 20:37
🚀 What's next for Jan
Jan wants real offices and people on the ground where most clients are. He'd like an office in Amsterdam again, and possibly London or Dubai, because it fits the "be like them" approach. He wants to grow the agency big and eventually use the profits to get into software.
About Jan van Musscher
Jan van Musscher runs Cold Label, a cold email agency that does lead generation for B2B companies. He says the agency is strongest in four industries, including corporate trainers, e-learning and agencies, and mostly goes after enterprise leads. At the time of recording he was adding LinkedIn and content marketing services.
Jan started in online lead generation about five years before the interview. He spent around two years doing B2C lead generation for companies like insurers on an affiliate model, much of it through email. When GDPR changed the rules in Europe, he moved into B2B. He started the agency about a year and a half before this conversation and runs it with a co-founder who writes a lot of the scripts.
Episode links
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