The Real Reason Your Pipeline Is Stalling — And How Omni-Channel Fixes It — Michael Maximoff

Why Cold Email Alone Stopped Working With Michael Maximoff

Introduction

Michael Maximoff co-founded Belkins roughly a decade ago and now serves as its Chief Growth Officer. His team recently analyzed a dataset most companies never get close to: about 16.5 million cold emails, over 20 million LinkedIn outreach attempts, and more than 5 million cold calls, published as the Cold Outreach Benchmark Report 2025.

On this episode of Ops in Motion, Michael joined Kawal to walk through what that data actually shows: why cold email’s effectiveness has collapsed over the past few years, why sales-only outreach keeps producing leads that never buy, and what to measure once outreach becomes a genuinely coordinated motion instead of separate channels working in isolation.

Who should read this: sales and marketing leaders relying on cold outreach who haven’t revisited their channel strategy or metrics in the past few years.

Key takeaways

• Cold email engagement rates have dropped roughly fivefold since 2021, from around 8% down to 1 to 2%. Open rates have become unreliable enough that many teams have stopped tracking them altogether.
• Adding LinkedIn to an email-only sequence improves performance by about 25%. Adding calling as a third channel adds another 20% on top of that.
• It now takes an estimated 60 to 80 touchpoints to move a prospect from not knowing your company to being ready to do business with you.
• Sales-only outreach, without marketing’s brand-building and nurture work behind it, tends to produce leads who like the messaging but have no real buying intent.
• Once outreach spans multiple channels and teams, pipeline should be the core success metric, not lead volume, supported by conversion rate, deal size, cost per opportunity, and engagement rate.

Cold email’s decline is steeper than most teams realize

Belkins built its business on cold email specifically, strong enough at it that the company spun off its own deliverability platform, Folderly. That makes what happened to their own results over the past several years notable. Starting around 2021, Michael’s team saw a consistent decline across open rates, response rates, and engagement rates. Open rates became unreliable enough to abandon as a metric entirely. By 2023, engagement rates that used to average around 8% had dropped to 1 to 2%, close to a fivefold decline.

The fix wasn’t a better subject line or a smarter send-time algorithm. It was adding channels. Layering LinkedIn onto an email sequence improved performance by about 25%. Adding calling as a third channel, especially triggered by an engagement signal rather than sent cold, added another 20% on top of that. Paid channels, conferences, and webinars pushed results further still.

The underlying reason is straightforward: there’s simply too much noise competing for a prospect’s attention now, and Belkins’ data puts the real number at 60 to 80 touchpoints before a prospect moves from unaware to ready to do business.

Sales-only outreach produces leads who like you but don’t buy

Even when Belkins’ own emails were outperforming average benchmarks, Michael noticed something the numbers alone didn’t explain: plenty of prospects responded positively to the messaging but had no real intent to buy. The problem wasn’t the copy. It was that SDR outreach was running disconnected from marketing’s brand-building, content, and nurture work, which meant prospects were being asked to buy before they’d actually moved through any real consideration stage.

The fix was a full-funnel, omnichannel approach: letting prospects move through awareness, consideration, and activation before a sales conversation even happens, instead of trying to compress that entire journey into a single cold email or call. It takes longer per prospect, but the payoff shows up on the other end, shorter sales cycles once a conversation does start, and meetings that convert into real opportunities at a much higher rate.

The same disconnect shows up between inbound and outbound motions specifically. Marketing runs a webinar; SDRs handle only cold outreach and follow-ups, with no real coordination between the two. Automation tools like Chili Piper can route inbound leads based on budget or industry and get a team roughly 70 to 80% of the way to proper qualification, but SDRs are still essential for the edge cases, reducing friction, and catching no-shows automation can’t handle. Once SDRs were brought directly into marketing’s webinars, conferences, and content as part of one shared outreach playbook, engagement, lead quality, and pipeline all improved together, unified around one CRM, one ICP, and one buying journey regardless of which budget funded the activity.

“When SDRs are integrated into growth and marketing conversations, they can build relationships, not just book meetings. That’s how you flip the funnel and drive real engagement.”

— Michael Maximoff

Once outreach is unified, pipeline is the metric that matters most

Asked how to evaluate cost and performance once SDRs and marketing are working from the same playbook, Michael was direct: pipeline should always be the core success metric. Underneath that, conversion rate, deal size, sales cycle length, and how deeply a team is penetrating its actual ideal customer list matter more than raw lead volume.

Cost per opportunity is worth tracking and optimizing quarter over quarter rather than treated as a fixed number. Engagement rate, specifically the ratio of constructive, positive responses to total responses, is a useful signal on its own: a 40 to 50% constructive response rate suggests the ICP and message are actually landing, while a lower rate is a sign to revisit targeting before spending more on volume.

Kawal’s read on the report’s biggest takeaway ties all of this together: most organizations run email, LinkedIn, and calls, but without a real strategy connecting them. Tools don’t talk to each other, metrics stay disconnected by channel, and teams operate in silos even when they’re technically working the same accounts. Treating outreach as one coordinated motion, rather than three separate channels reporting separately, is where the actual performance gain comes from.

Action items

FAQs

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