Michel Lieben, co-founder of ColdIQ, published a post on July 31 titled "The Funnel That Books Us 100+ Meetings Every Month." The headline reads like a cold outbound case study. The numbers inside it are not. A cold email agency just showed its work, and the work says cold email is the smallest channel it runs.
The Funnel a Cold Email Agency Published About Itself
Lieben's post is a straight breakdown of where ColdIQ's website traffic comes from, month over month, across five channels. It's the kind of post agency founders publish to prove their own product works on themselves — the classic "we drink our own champagne" move. What makes it worth a second read isn't the total. It's the mix.
ColdIQ's self-reported monthly website traffic by channel (Lieben's own breakdown, published July 31)
In raw numbers: about 12,000 visitors a month from organic search, about 10,000 from LinkedIn, 2,000 to 4,000 per event from YouTube and webinar content, and about 3,000 from six parallel cold-outbound campaigns running at the same time. The LinkedIn number isn't one founder posting daily — Lieben says it comes from 10-plus team members collectively publishing roughly 100 posts a month. That's a publishing operation with a headcount, not a side hustle.
| CHANNEL | MONTHLY VISITORS (SELF-REPORTED) | SHARE OF TOTAL |
|---|---|---|
| Organic search | ~12,000 | ~30% |
| LinkedIn (10+ team members, ~100 posts/mo) | ~10,000 | ~25% |
| YouTube / webinars | 2,000-4,000 per event | ~5-10% |
| Six parallel cold-outbound campaigns | ~3,000 | ~7.5% |
| Total across five channels | 40,000+ | 100% |
Nothing here is exotic. It's search content, LinkedIn posts, webinars, and outbound, run in parallel instead of in sequence. What's notable is which line item is smallest. If you asked most people to guess how a cold email agency fills its own pipeline, cold outbound would be the first answer, not the last. Ask a founder who's never built a demand-gen system and you'll get a version of "we send a lot of emails." Lieben's own numbers say the opposite: outbound is the one channel he runs that produces the least visible traffic, even though it's the service he sells. The bulk of it comes from the same content marketing engine most cold-outbound agencies treat as an afterthought.
That gap between what a company sells and what actually fills its pipeline isn't unique to ColdIQ. It shows up across the agency world constantly — SEO agencies that get most of their leads from referrals, paid media shops that book calls off a founder's newsletter, cold email agencies that grow off LinkedIn. What makes ColdIQ's version worth writing about is that it published the numbers instead of leaving the mismatch implicit.
Only 3,000 of 40,000 Visitors Come From Cold Outbound
Do the arithmetic and the headline stops matching the content. ColdIQ is one of the more recognizable names in cold outbound — Lieben writes about it constantly, and the agency's blog has published roughly ten posts between July 18 and July 31 alone, a near-daily cadence that's itself part of the content-and-personal-brand machine driving the LinkedIn and search numbers. But cold outbound generates about 3,000 of the 40,000-plus visitors the agency counts each month. That's roughly 7.5%. The other 92.5% comes from channels that have nothing to do with sending cold emails: search rankings, LinkedIn posts, and video content.
“This funnel has worked in the same shape for three years... took the agency to $7M in revenue.”
Lieben's own framing backs this up. He's not describing a cold-outbound funnel with search and LinkedIn as garnish. He's describing a demand-gen system where cold outbound is one of five roughly-equal-weighted channels — and, on his numbers, the smallest one. The three-year stability claim matters too: this isn't a funnel he built last quarter and is still tuning. It's the shape that took the business from wherever it started to $7M, held constant the whole way.
What ColdIQ's Channel Mix Means for Your Cold Email Agency
The lesson isn't that cold email doesn't work. ColdIQ still runs six outbound campaigns in parallel and books a real slice of pipeline from them. The lesson is what happens when you treat cold email deliverability as the whole strategy instead of one input into a bigger system. A single channel generating 7.5% of top-of-funnel traffic is not a growth engine on its own. It's a contributor.
This matters more now than it did two years ago because the cost of running cold outbound well has gone up, not down. Email deliverability has gotten harder to protect since Google and Yahoo tightened bulk-sender requirements — domain warmup, inbox rotation, list hygiene, and spam-complaint monitoring are now table stakes just to keep a campaign landing in the primary inbox, before you've booked a single meeting. Teams that pour their entire growth budget into more sending volume are optimizing the channel that, even for a company built on cold outbound, produces the smallest share of visibility. Reply rates have compressed industry-wide too — Belkins' 2025 dataset put the average at 0.45% across 7.5 million sends — which makes the case for diversification even stronger than it would have been a year ago.
The counterargument is obvious: LinkedIn and search take longer to compound than a cold email campaign you can launch this week. That's true, and it's exactly why the two need to run together instead of in sequence. ColdIQ's numbers show a company that didn't wait for content to work before it started outbound, and didn't stop outbound once content started working. Both ran the whole time. The debate over whether LinkedIn or cold email deserves the outreach budget treats them as competitors for the same dollar. ColdIQ's own funnel treats them as complements, and its revenue number is the argument for doing the same.
Read the Self-Reported Numbers Fairly
None of this is audited. Lieben's post is a founder's own account of his own agency's traffic, with no analytics screenshot, no third-party verification, and no independent confirmation that $7M in revenue actually traces back to this exact funnel shape rather than to referrals, expansion revenue, or anything else that doesn't show up in a website-traffic breakdown. We treat self-reported founder numbers the same way here regardless of who's publishing them: take the claim seriously, check what's checkable, and say plainly what isn't. That's the same standard behind our own stage-by-stage audit of this exact ColdIQ funnel, and the same standard we've applied to viral agency-math claims and rebuilt-from-a-tweet tool stacks before.
What's checkable here is the shape, not the total. The channel mix is internally consistent with what's publicly visible: ColdIQ's blog really has been publishing at a near-daily clip, the team really does show up across LinkedIn in volume, and none of that activity is invisible or fabricated — it's on the record, dated, and easy to spot-check. What isn't checkable is whether 40,000 is the real visitor count, whether 70% is the real close rate, or whether $7M is gross revenue, agency revenue net of ad spend, or something else entirely. Read the ratios as directionally credible and the absolute numbers as a founder's self-report. That's enough to draw a real conclusion from, as long as you don't pretend it's an audited case study.
It's also worth naming what this piece is not. It isn't a rerun of the operational audit we already ran on this same funnel, and it isn't the story of why ColdIQ pivoted its blog toward b2b data provider guides — both of those are about different questions. This one is narrower: given the mix Lieben published, what does it argue about where agency-level growth actually comes from in 2026. And on that question, the numbers argue against treating any single channel, cold email included, as sufficient on its own.
There's a version of this piece that just says "content wins, outbound is dead," and that version would be wrong. ColdIQ still runs six outbound campaigns every month, still counts them toward its total, and Lieben still writes about cold email as the agency's core discipline. Outbound didn't get cut. It got sized correctly relative to everything else running alongside it — which is a different claim than "stop sending cold email," and a more useful one for anyone deciding where to put next quarter's budget.
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Josh leads work at the intersection of SEO and generative engines at Something Inc., helping B2B brands get ranked and cited across every major AI engine.