Frank Sondors on Building Salesforge and What Wins in Cold Email
Frank Sondors is the founder of Salesforge and its sister brands Mailforge, Infraforge and Warmforge. The video title says he grew them to $2M ARR in 11 months. Frank talks about why he believes in leaner sales teams, how the "Forge ecosystem" fits together, and what he sees in the cold email campaigns that perform best. He and Michael spend a good chunk of time on deliverability, which is where most cold email efforts quietly fail.
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Topics covered
- What Salesforge, Mailforge, Infraforge and Warmforge each do
- Why Frank thinks hiring more reps is a broken model
- Going from SMB and agencies to mid-market
- Copy and campaign habits behind winning campaigns
- Two-email sequences, multi-threading and lead recycling
- Why deliverability is the software's job
- Gmail and Outlook restrictions, and a future of AI agents
Key takeaways
- Keep subject lines to two or three words and first emails to about 50 to 60 words. Frank sees shorter emails perform better.
- Use a soft call to action rather than asking for time.
- Send plain-text emails without open or click tracking. Frank sees roughly a 10 to 20% lift in reply rates.
- Multi-thread: reach two or three people at the same account, each with a unique email, because people share emails internally.
- With a large TAM, Frank recommends just two emails per sequence. Each extra email raises the chance of a spam report.
- Recycle leads. Re-engage the same ICP list about once a quarter, three to four times a year, because timing is the hardest thing to predict.
- Don't send cold email from your primary domain. Set up secondary infrastructure.
Show notes
🔥 One company, four Forges
Frank explains that the Forges are one company with four brands.
- Salesforge sends a unique email in any language to each prospect, at any scale, by matching what you sell against data from the prospect's website, LinkedIn and other sources.
- Mailforge sets up domains and mailboxes on a shared IP pool in about five minutes.
- Infraforge does the same on dedicated IPs.
- Warmforge handles warm-up and checks DNS and blacklists.
His pitch is an "Apple-like" experience instead of the "Android experience" of stitching lots of tools together. You log in once with a Forge ID and the products work with each other.
👥 Leaner, meaner sales teams
Frank's motivation comes from leading large sales teams. He saw that the main lever for hitting targets was hiring more reps, and he thinks that model is broken. In his experience, out of every 10 hires, one is a natural and two or three can be trained up. The rest don't work out. He wants software to do the legwork, so companies need fewer reps who each produce far more.
Michael shares that he still sees enterprise clients with 30 or 40 reps handwriting emails from one domain, so there's plenty of change still to come.
🎯 Who Salesforge is for
Salesforge started with early-stage startups and the agencies and consultants who build pipeline for them, and it focused on email first. Email is the biggest market, and it also has the biggest problem: deliverability. Frank plans to move into mid-market and enterprise, which will need LinkedIn and calling too. He also sees demand for Salesforge as an add-on next to Outreach or SalesLoft, which he says don't focus on deliverability.
✉️ What winning campaigns have in common
Frank stresses that a lot depends on your ICP, but he gives every customer the same core advice. Keep it short and snappy, use a soft CTA and send plain text.
On sequences, he recommends two emails for large TAMs. Replies drop off sharply after the second email, and spam reports go up with every extra send. If someone doesn't reply or opt out, come back next quarter. Priorities change quarterly, so timing is the hardest part to get right.
Michael adds two tips of his own. The first is to write different scripts for different buyer avatars, such as tech, operations, sales and HR. The second is a follow-up that asks whether someone else on the team would be better to talk to, and names a couple of people.
“typically the shorter your email, the better performance that we see.”
Frank Sondors, 12:59
🛡️ Deliverability is where most people fail
Michael says that when he started doing cold email for clients, he expected to be solving copy and offer problems. Instead, the most common story he hears is that cold email worked for two weeks and then stopped, because the emails landed in spam.
Frank agrees. Deliverability became a big topic only in the last couple of years, and many companies have given up on cold email without realizing it can be fixed. His view is that most SDRs aren't deliverability experts, most companies shouldn't hire one, and engineers don't want the job. So the software has to solve it, along with agencies that specialize in it.
“the probability of receiving a spam report significantly increases with every additional email that you send”
Frank Sondors, 14:57
🔮 Where the landscape is heading
Frank expects Gmail and Outlook to add more restrictions, partly because of bad actors, not just volume. Michael's take: sending cold email used to be hard but deliverability wasn't an issue, and now sending is easy and deliverability is the issue. The people who keep experimenting will adapt.
Frank's long-term vision is to automate pipeline work, so sales teams need fewer people but produce more. He thinks that within five to ten years, AI agents may be talking to other AI agents on both the buyer and seller side.
“no one's offer goes from relevant to irrelevant in 2 months. It's deliverability.”
Michael Gardiner, 18:24
About Frank Sondors
Frank Sondors describes himself simply as "a sales guy". He started his career at Google selling advertising, then worked at SaaS companies including SimilarWeb. As VP of Sales at a startup, he grew the business from seed to Series A and led a sales team of around 50.
He then founded Salesforge. It has since grown into what he calls the Forge ecosystem, a set of brands under one company: Salesforge, Mailforge, Infraforge and Warmforge. He says he still onboards a lot of customers himself.
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