Cold email has a reputation problem, mostly earned by agencies that blast a huge list with one generic pitch and send an invoice every month regardless of results.
Chukwuezugo Aronu and his co-founder Moyofade Ipadeola built Build n Booked to flip that arrangement. Clients pay a one-time setup fee, then a flat rate for every qualified lead, with no monthly retainer.
We asked Chukwuezugo about his niches, what counts as a qualified lead, where AI fits into the workflow, and what he’d tell anyone starting out in B2B lead gen.
Give us the quick intro: who are you, what is Build n Booked, and what do you do for clients?
Hey Chris, I’m Chukwuezugo. I run Build n Booked with my co-founder Moyofade Ipadeola. We do cold email for B2B businesses: we build the lists, write the emails, send them, and hand over booked sales calls. Our clients just show up to close the deals.
You focus on distributors in industrial and MRO, packaging, safety and PPE, and janitorial. Why those niches, and what makes them such a good fit for cold email?
Honestly, we’re not locked into one niche. We work with B2B businesses in general, and right now we’re testing consumable supply distributors. Industrial and MRO packaging are the ones featured on our site because they looked like a good place to start.
Generally, we try to target businesses where a new account can be worth $5k to $25k+ a year, so they can pay for leads and still come out ahead. We also consider sales cycles, since a shorter cycle means a booked call can turn into a deal fast.
Your pitch is “we book the calls, you close the deals”, and you charge per qualified lead with no retainers. What made you choose that model, and has it ever bitten you?
We wanted clients to take very little risk. Most B2B businesses have been burned by agencies that charge every month and don’t deliver deals. So we charge a one-time setup fee, then $300+ for each qualified lead, and there’s no monthly retainer.
How do you define a “qualified lead”, and how do you make sure clients only get genuinely interested prospects?
It’s a booked sales call, or a prospect who clearly said “yes, I’m interested.” Before we send anyone over, we also check that the company is the right type, the right size, and in the right country.
Cold email has a bad reputation these days. What do most people get wrong about it, and what do you do differently on lists, copy and deliverability?
Most people blast a giant list with one generic pitch. Our lists are small and tight, and we qualify each lead by checking the company’s description and website.
Our copy is short and plain, and the first email doesn’t pitch anything. It asks something like “Would it be helpful if I found a few prospects that look like a good fit for you?” and then we send real value first. For deliverability, we verify emails, warm up inboxes, and keep the volume low per inbox.
How are you using AI in your workflow, if at all, and where do you still insist on a human doing the work?
We use AI to sort lists. It reads each company’s description and gives a yes or no on fit, and it also helps us build the small custom icebreaker phrases we plug into our emails to tailor them to each prospect.
We still read and reply to every positive response manually, review the copy, talk to clients, and make the final call on who is a good fit. I think this works because we’re still small-scale, and once we grow we’d look into automating some parts.
If someone’s thinking about starting a service business or getting into B2B lead gen, what’s the one piece of advice you’d give them? And what’s next for Build n Booked?
I’d suggest learning in this order.
- Start with technical setup and deliverability. If your emails land in spam, nothing else you do will matter.
- Next comes your list. A targeted list of 1,000 beats a loose list of 10,000. Leads from databases like Apollo are barely targeted, even after you set the filters, so learn how to qualify your list and then use what you find in your copy.
- Last is the copy. Keep it simple and send only one or two follow-ups.
As for what’s next, we’re still testing consumable supply distributors. If the test goes well, we’ll add more types of distributors.
Have a look at Build and Booked, follow Chukwuezugo and Moyofade over on LinkedIn.
