Here’s the number that should end the debate. McKinsey’s 2026 Global B2B Pulse survey found that B2B buyers now use an average of ten channels across a single purchasing journey. Ten. So “cold email vs cold call” is the wrong question. Pick one and you go invisible on the other nine touchpoints your buyer actually uses. I’ll concede the obvious: cold calling feels dead to a lot of reps, and inboxes are more fatigued than ever. But the reps who win aren’t choosing. They’re sequencing both.

In this guide, I’ll walk you through the exact cold email plus cold call sequence that Simon, one of lemlist’s sales reps, used to hit a 40% reply rate. You’ll see how he finds numbers, validates contacts, wires the channels together, and runs the call script, all inside one platform. No theory. His real sequence, step by step.

The trick with a multichannel approach is understanding how each channel works, then getting them to work as a team. Today you’ll see a sequence built from cold emails and cold calls. Together they act as a sales duo. You don’t have to choose between cold calling and cold emailing. You use both.

Why does one channel stall on its own? An email lands when your prospect is heads-down and gets buried by lunch. A cold call catches them in a meeting and goes to voicemail. Each channel misses on its own timing. Stack them, and a miss on one becomes a warm-up for the next. That’s the mechanic behind everything below.

One more thing before we start. This isn’t a pitch dressed up as a guide. Everything Simon does here, you can copy with the tools you already have. Where lemlist speeds it up, I’ll say so and show you exactly where. Where a free tool does the job, I’ll point you to that instead. Fair enough? Let’s build it.

For this article to do its job, Ilya and I decided to walk you through every step of the process. We’ll give you real examples so you can see how it works in practice, not just in slides.

The path has five steps, and the order matters. You pick your audience, find the contact details, validate them, connect your channels, then build the sequence itself. Skip a step and the next one gets shaky. Send to a bad list, and the best call script in the world won’t save you. So we’ll take them one at a time, and you can implement each before moving to the next.

Cold emailing and calling every lead on the planet is a recipe for failure. Figure out who your ideal client is and what their pain points are first.

Questions to answer: What’s the current objective of my prospect’s company? What are the obstacles to hitting it? How does my product make their job easier? Did the prospect hear about us before? What would their path to purchase look like? What might hold them back?

There’s a template for finding your ideal client, and it’s worth using before you write a single line. You can also localize based on region, culture, and language, matching the preferences of your ideal clients.

Answer those honestly and your list shrinks. That’s the point. A tighter list means every email and every call is aimed at someone who could realistically buy. Volume feels productive, but a wrong-fit prospect who never replies costs you the same hour as a perfect one who does. Spend the hour on the right people.

Targeting tells you who. Timing tells you when. Those are two different problems, and most reps solve only the first. lemlist’s Intent Signal Agents watch for buying moments (a new hire, a funding round, a website visit) and drop those leads straight into your sequence with context-based messaging. So you reach the right person while the reason to reach out is still fresh.

Think about how that changes an opening line. A generic intro asks the prospect to care for no reason. A message that references a role they just posted or a round they just raised gives them a reason built in. Timing does half the personalization work for you before you write a word.

Two pieces of info you can’t email or call without. Obvious, but this is where a lot of sequences quietly break, because half the data is stale before you send.

You don’t have to start from a blank CSV either. Pull ICP-fit contacts from lemlist’s 650M+ lead database and enrich them with verified emails and phone numbers in one click. Start with the list, not the spreadsheet.

Why start there? A blank CSV means you’re already gambling on data you scraped or bought from somewhere unverified. Building from a database that fits your ICP filters means the enrichment step confirms details you trust from the start. You spend your time on outreach instead of cleaning a list you didn’t build carefully.

If you’d rather work from a guide, there are walkthroughs for both jobs: find verified emails and lemlist’s phone number finder. Let’s take the phone side next, because that’s the part most reps skip.

Why do they skip it? Numbers are harder to source than emails, and the bad ones waste real time on the dial. So reps quietly drop the call channel and go email-only. Then they wonder why replies flatten. Getting the phone data right is what keeps the middle of your sequence alive, so it’s worth the extra step.

Traditionally, finding phone numbers is slow, and the numbers you dig up are often wrong. With lemlist’s phone number finder you get accurate numbers at a low price, straight from inside lemlist.

Here’s what makes the accuracy hold up. lemlist finds numbers with waterfall enrichment, which checks the market’s top five phone-data providers (Prospeo, ContactOut, Cleon1, Cognism, and Datagma) for a 77% average find rate. You pay only for successful finds, about $20 per 100 numbers found. No credits burned on dead ends.

Why does the waterfall matter? Any single provider has gaps in its coverage. One is strong in the US, another in Europe, another for a specific role type. Checking one source means accepting that source’s blind spots. Checking five in sequence means a number one provider misses can still be caught by the next. That’s how you push the find rate up without paying for every attempt.

You can search in four places:

A quick word on pricing, because reps always ask. Paid plans include monthly enrichment credits for finding emails and phone numbers. Once those run out, it’s pay-as-you-go for successful finds only, so you never pay for a miss. You can start with a 14-day free trial and test the whole flow before you commit.

A share of your contact details will be invalid or old. That’s not a maybe, it’s a certainty at scale.

With phones, a bad number costs you a few minutes. With invalid emails, the cost is bigger. You risk SPAM triggers and damaged deliverability, which drags down every campaign after it. The fix is simple: verify both before you hit send.

Here’s the part reps underrate. A single send to a dead list won’t sink you, but the damage compounds. Mailbox providers watch your bounce rate, and a spike tells them you don’t clean your data. Once that trust erodes, your inbox placement drops for everyone on the list, including the leads who would have replied. Validation is cheap insurance against a problem that’s slow and expensive to reverse.

Validate phone numbers with a free tool like the phone validator from Textmagic. Run your list through it and drop the numbers that bounce back as invalid.

Validate email addresses to protect your sender reputation. Once your domain gets flagged, even your good emails start landing in spam, and clawing that reputation back takes weeks you don’t have. Clean the list first, then send.

Make this a habit, not a one-off. Data decays every month as people change jobs and companies fold. A list that validated clean in January will have dead addresses by spring. Re-check before each major send and you keep both your deliverability and your call connect rate steady.

There are tons of tools to pick from, and the integration between them matters more than any single feature. If your email tool and your dialer don’t talk to each other, you’ll waste the day switching tabs and losing context.

That’s the case for keeping it in one place. Cold calls now run on lemlist’s native in-app calling, a built-in VoIP dialer that reaches 90+ countries. It records, transcribes, and AI-summarizes every call, then syncs the result to HubSpot, Salesforce, or Pipedrive. You add call steps to the same sequence as your emails and trigger them on real engagement, like email opens, clicks, or LinkedIn activity.

That engagement trigger is the part I’d flag first. Instead of calling a cold list top to bottom, you call the prospects who just opened your email or clicked a link. They already have you in mind. The call stops being cold and turns into a well-timed nudge. The transcript and AI summary then land in your CRM automatically, so you’re not scribbling notes while trying to listen.

Now the concession: if you already run Aircall or Ringover, I’m not going to tell you to rip them out. You can still call through them inside lemlist. Either way, the practical workflow stays the same.

Here’s how you run it:

Target audience set. Contacts found and verified. Channels wired together. Now you get to see the cold email sequence that Simon, our sales rep, actually uses. His play is two cold emails split by a cold call in the middle. That structure is what sits behind the 40% reply rate.

Before we break it down, one modern shortcut. Instead of building this sequence by hand, you can describe your goal and ICP in a chat and let lemAgent build it. It assembles the full multichannel sequence for you, steps, channels, and timing included. Build it manually to learn the mechanics, then hand the repetitive version to the agent.

I’d still learn it by hand at least once. When you understand why the call goes in the middle and why the gaps stay short, you can read the results and adjust with intent. Let the agent handle the assembly after that. Now, here’s what each part of Simon’s play is doing.

Use LinkedIn first. Connect with or engage a prospect before you email, and reply rates jump. Simon segmented the prospects who didn’t respond and used that opening line as a soft intro. He didn’t fire all 220 connection requests and emails on the same day. He spread them across a week so the volume looked human.

Customize the message. The second paragraph is written for that specific prospect. His CTA reads like an invitation to talk, not a demand for a demo. Small difference, big effect on replies.

Pull insights from research. Simon used Welcome To The Jungle to see which companies were expanding their sales teams and what those teams were trying to hit. That gave him a framework to work from, whether the next touch was an email or a call.

Why does that research pay off twice? A hiring signal tells him the company is growing, which usually means a budget and a problem worth solving. It also gives him a concrete reason to reach out that the prospect can’t dismiss as generic. The same detail sharpens the email opener and the phone intro, so one bit of research fuels two channels.

The cold call sits in the middle. After the first email, if the prospect hasn’t replied, Simon calls. Because the channels are connected, he dials in a few clicks and sees opens and clicks in one interface. He lists every number before he starts and averages about 20 calls per hour. Each call runs under two minutes. The goal of the call is one thing: book a Zoom meeting.

His intro is a pattern interrupt: “I totally understand you’re busy, all I need is 24 seconds to explain my point. Do you have 24 seconds?” He references the previous touch (“I emailed you two days ago…”) and never lets more than two days pass between steps. Then he pitches lemlist in one sentence aimed at the main pain point and asks about their current process. Whatever they tell him goes into lemlist’s Notes to prep the Zoom.

Look at what that intro actually does. It names the objection (“you’re busy”) before the prospect can, and the oddly specific 24 seconds makes them curious enough to stay on. The reference to the earlier email tells them this is a real sequence, not a random dial. And asking about their process flips the call from a pitch into a conversation, which is the whole reason the reply rate holds.

The follow-up email. If he didn’t reach them, and there was no reply on LinkedIn, the first email, or the call, a follow-up goes out. It opens with an {{icebreaker}} tag, a unique sentence per lead stored in a CSV column. I call this the Tiramisu strategy. With a little research, you’ll be amazed how many small details you can pick up and use in that first line.

Simon’s twist is a personalized video thumbnail: his image, dynamic {{firstName}} text, the lead’s LinkedIn photo, their company logo, and a play button. Clicking it opens a dynamic landing page tailored to that person, with the video, editable text, and Simon’s lemcal to cut booking friction.

Those touches are real and they still work. Doing them one lead at a time is the hard part. So alongside the personalized video, you can use Smart Messaging to clone your voice from a single recording and send personalized audio notes at scale. That’s the version of this play that survives contact with a full pipeline.

Here’s the honest tradeoff. A hand-recorded video for every lead converts well, and it also eats your afternoon. Record ten and you’ve done nothing else that day. Smart Messaging keeps the personal feel, your actual voice, the prospect’s name, the relevant detail, while removing the part that doesn’t scale. Use the hand-made version for your top accounts, and let the cloned voice cover the long tail.

Besides Simon being the man, this is a strong outbound sequence because it shows what a real multichannel approach does to your conversion rate. Remember the McKinsey finding: ten channels per buying journey. Simon didn’t try to own all ten. He stitched together the few that matter and let them reinforce each other. The payoff was concrete: 51% of the replies he got were hot leads.

When you sequence like this, every step feeds the next. LinkedIn segments your list. Research reveals ambitions. The cold call surfaces the prospect’s process, which sets up the Zoom. Connecting those dots is the whole game, and yes, it takes a bit of upfront work before it pays. The sooner you start, the more data you have to optimize.

And that’s the quiet advantage here. Every step leaves a trail. You learn which subject lines get opens, which calls get picked up, which follow-ups get replies. Run the sequence once and you have a hunch. Run it for a month and you have a system you can tune. The reps who compound those learnings pull ahead of the ones still arguing about which single channel is best.

So stop framing it as cold email versus cold call. Your buyer isn’t picking one, and neither should you.

So here’s your next step. Start a 14-day free trial and build your first version of this sequence, or book a demo if you’d rather have someone walk you through it.