Most cold email programmes fail on infrastructure, not copy. They send from the company domain, skip authentication, buy an unverified list, and burn the deliverability the rest of the business depends on. Ultima runs cold email on separate, authenticated sending domains, against lists we verify, with volume held where Google's own guidance says it should be.
Cold email outreach for US B2B companies. Reported on replies and meetings held, never on open rates, which stopped meaning anything years ago.
Prospecting, qualification, and closing, run by one team that owns the number rather than the activity log.
Every inbound lead contacted inside a defined response window, so demand your marketing paid for does not decay in a queue.
One written bar covering role, need, authority, and timing, applied the same way to inbound and outbound alike.
Phone, email, and LinkedIn run as one cadence per account, so a buying group gets reached rather than one contact emailed five times.
Pipeline stages, fields, and automations configured in your system of record, with reps logging activity as they work.
Where the scope runs past the booked meeting, our closers work the deal through negotiation to signature alongside your team.
Meetings held, opportunities created, and conversion by stage and source, plus what we are changing next week and why.
One bad campaign and your invoices, contracts, and support replies start landing in spam. We send from separate domains that are warmed and authenticated, so an experiment can never take the business email down with it.
Google asks senders to stay below a 0.10% spam rate and never reach 0.30%. Past that, classification changes and recovery is slow. We monitor the rate in Postmaster Tools and cut volume before it becomes a reputation problem.
Purchased lists carry dead addresses and spam traps, and a bounce spike is one of the fastest ways to lose a sending domain. Every address is verified before it is used, and the list is built to your ICP rather than bought by industry code.
CAN-SPAM penalties reach $53,088 per email. Accurate headers, no deceptive subject lines, a valid postal address, and a working opt-out honoured inside 10 business days are non-negotiable parts of every send we run.
Privacy features pre-load images, so opens are inflated and effectively meaningless. We report replies, positive replies, meetings booked, and meetings held, which are the only numbers that connect to revenue.
Volume without segmentation is why cold email earned its reputation. Sequences are written per segment, tested against reply quality, and retired when they stop working rather than sent until the list is exhausted.
So the commitments below are structural rather than promises: they change who does the work, what counts as qualified, and what you keep afterwards.
Your reps work your account only. They learn the product, sit on your calls, and introduce themselves as part of your team.
Role, need, authority, and timing defined with your closers during onboarding, then applied to every booking without exception.
Phone, email, and LinkedIn run as one cadence against the same account, because a buying group is not reachable one way.
Lists, scripts, sequences, and call notes live in your systems throughout, so bringing the function in-house later starts from a working process.
Meetings held, opportunities created, and conversion by stage. Dial counts are available, but they are not how we ask to be judged.
No minimum term and no prepaid pilot, so the work has to keep earning the renewal rather than relying on a contract.
The full scope of an Ultima cold email engagement, infrastructure included, because the copy does not matter if the mail does not arrive.
Separate sending domains registered and warmed over several weeks, with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC configured, so your primary domain is never exposed.
A written ideal customer profile, then a built list of named contacts at matching accounts, with every address verified before it enters a sequence.
Sequences written per segment with a specific reason for the message, reviewed with your team, and tested against reply quality rather than open rate.
Accurate headers, honest subject lines, a valid postal address, clear identification, and a working opt-out honoured within the statutory window.
Spam rate, bounce rate, and domain reputation watched in Postmaster Tools, with volume throttled the moment a signal moves the wrong way.
Replies worked by a real person, qualified against the bar agreed with you, and either booked or routed back with a written note.
Contacts, sequences, replies, and outcomes logged in your CRM as the work happens, so the record of what was said lives in your system.
Sends, deliverability health, replies, positive replies, meetings booked, and meetings held, plus what we are changing next week and why.
Eight stages, each ending in something you can review. Outreach does not start until the offer, the list, and the qualification bar are all signed off.
We interview your team, read closed-won and closed-lost, and pressure-test whether the offer is ready for outbound.
Scope and go/no-go
The pattern in your won deals, turned into a written profile and a segmented view of the addressable market.
ICP document
Accounts researched against the ICP, with several decision makers verified per account rather than one generic inbox.
Verified target list
Call scripts, email sequences, and LinkedIn touches written with your team, using the positioning your closers already use.
Approved sequences
Dedicated sending domains, SPF, DKIM and DMARC, mailbox warm-up, and your CRM configured for the pipeline stages we will report on.
Live sending stack
Role, need, authority, and timing agreed with your closers and written down before a single meeting is booked.
Written definition
Dedicated reps working the list daily across every channel, qualifying against the bar and logging as they go.
Meetings in your calendar
Weekly reporting and recorded call reviews, with the segments and messages that are not working cut rather than defended.
Weekly pipeline report
Reps log every call, note, and stage change in your system of record as they work. Nothing lives in a vendor tool you lose access to later.
You own the asset. Target lists, scripts, sequences, call notes, and pipeline history stay in your accounts throughout. If the engagement ends, or you bring the function in-house, you inherit a documented process instead of starting from nothing. If you do not have a CRM configured for outbound yet, we set one up during onboarding and it remains yours.
Priced on the team and the scope, never per meeting. Paying a vendor per appointment pays them to lower your qualification bar. Every tier is month to month, so the work has to keep earning the renewal.
A part-time rep on one channel, working the inbound leads you already generate so demand stops decaying in a queue.
One named SDR on your account across phone, email, and LinkedIn, running inbound follow-up and outbound against your target list.
Two SDRs plus closer support, owning the pipeline from first contact through to a signed deal rather than handing off at the meeting.
Any tier above, plus the SEO and marketing that creates the inbound in the first place, reported as one funnel instead of two.
No setup fee and no minimum term. If a pipeline review shows outbound is not right for your offer yet, we will tell you before you spend on it.
These are commitments made elsewhere on this page, not aspirations. No competitor is named and no result is claimed.
Companies hire a cold email agency expecting better copy. What usually decides the outcome is whether the mail reaches an inbox at all, and that is an infrastructure question settled before a single word is written.
Google publishes the thresholds plainly: keep the spam rate below 0.10%, never reach 0.30%, and authenticate with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC once you are sending in bulk. Yahoo publishes equivalent expectations. Those are not opinions from a growth blog, they are the receiving side telling you the rules. Most failed programmes broke one of them in week one and spent the next six months wondering why replies dried up.
It is also why we insist on separate sending domains. The upside of a cold email test is some meetings. The downside of running it on your primary domain is that your invoices stop arriving. Those risks are not symmetrical, so we do not take the second one.
of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free sales experience (Gartner). The few conversations you do get therefore carry the whole deal.
people in the average B2B buying group, up from 5.4 (Harvard Business Review). One champion is no longer enough to move a deal.
of sales organizations use cold calling as a primary channel, and 25% as a secondary one (HubSpot). The phone still works inside a sequence.
Source: Gartner, Harvard Business Review, HubSpot
Sales converts demand, it does not create it. These are the divisions that feed the pipeline Ultima works.
Sets up and warms separate sending infrastructure, defines your ideal customer profile, builds and verifies a target list, writes segmented sequences, keeps the programme compliant, monitors deliverability, works the replies, and reports on meetings held. At Ultima the infrastructure and the reply handling are the parts clients most often did not realise they were missing, and they are usually what decides whether the programme works.
Business-to-business cold email is legal in the US under the CAN-SPAM Act, provided you follow it. That means accurate header information, a subject line that is not deceptive, identification of the message as an advertisement, a valid physical postal address, and a clear opt-out that you honour within 10 business days. The FTC sets penalties of up to $53,088 per violating email, so we treat compliance as a build requirement, not a preference.
It can, which is exactly why we never send from your primary domain. We register and warm separate sending domains, authenticate them with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, and keep volume within limits. Google asks senders to stay below a 0.10% spam rate and never hit 0.30%, and we monitor that in Postmaster Tools. If a signal moves the wrong way, we throttle first and diagnose second.
We build the list against your written ICP rather than buying one. Accounts are researched, contacts identified by role, and every address is verified before it enters a sequence. Purchased lists are the fastest route to a bounce spike and a spam trap, and a burnt sending domain costs more than the list ever saved.
Because they are not measuring what people think. Privacy features pre-load tracking images, which inflates opens regardless of whether a human read anything. We report deliverability health, replies, positive replies, meetings booked, and meetings held. Those tie to pipeline, and they cannot be faked by an image proxy.
Domain warming and list building take the first few weeks, so meaningful volume starts after that rather than on day two. Sending hard from a cold domain is the single most common way these programmes die, and skipping the warm-up to show early activity would be trading your deliverability for a nicer week-one report.
Usually both, sequenced together against the same account, because a buying group is not reachable through one channel. Email scales further and costs less per touch; LinkedIn reaches people who ignore unknown senders and gives you a warmer second touch. If you only want one, the deciding factor is where your buyers are actually reachable, which we assess during the pipeline review.
Yes. Domains are registered in your name, the list and the sequences live in your systems, and the CRM record of every conversation is yours throughout. If you take the programme in-house later you inherit warmed infrastructure and a tested playbook rather than starting from nothing.
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