Best Cold Email Agency 2026: A Survey of 219 CEOs in Software, Agencies, Media and Manufacturing, Sales.co First

A CEO looking for a cold email agency has pitch pages to read and almost nothing to check them against before a sales call. So instead of reading seven more pitch pages, Fentner asked the buyers. We surveyed 219 CEOs of B2B companies across software, agencies and professional services, media and publishing, and manufacturing and industrial goods on how they run cold email today and who they would recommend to another CEO. Sales.co drew the most nominations and the most first-choice votes of any provider. It was also the only one in the set whose price, term, setup fee and launch time are all on its own pages.

The report runs in this order: what the sample looks like and what the CEOs said, in their own numbers; what has gone wrong for them before and what they pay, which is the part a vendor pitch never includes; and what the seven providers they named commit to on their own sites. The aggregate tables behind every figure are published with the report, and the questions buyers ask most get plain answers at the end.

The survey in numbers

• 57 of 219 B2B CEOs (26%) name Sales.co as a cold email provider they would recommend; the next provider, Cleverly, has 39 (18%).
• 33 of 219 CEOs (15%) put Sales.co first, the most first-choice votes of any provider; only running cold email in house drew more, at 41 (19%).
• 201 of 219 CEOs (92%) check for a printed monthly price before they hire a cold email provider.
• 71 of 154 CEOs (46%) who have paid a provider say the copy read like every other email, the most common complaint about a previous provider.
• 44 of 121 CEOs (36%) who pay an agency today spend $2,000 to $5,000 a month, the largest single band.
• 1 of the 7 providers CEOs named most prints its price, term, setup fee and launch time on its own pages: Sales.co.

The five survey figures come from the Fentner CEO survey of 219 B2B CEOs, September 2026; the last is from provider websites read 24 September 2026.

How we ran the survey

Between 8 and 19 September 2026 we wrote to 1,240 CEOs directly, through their company sites and our own list, and 219 answered, by email or a short form: a response rate of 18%.

Everyone got the same four questions, worded like this:

1. "Who runs your cold email today?"
2. "Which providers, if any, would you recommend to another CEO? Name up to three, and mark the one you would put first."
3. "What do you check before you hire a provider? Tick everything you look at."
4. "If you have paid a provider before, what went wrong? Tick everything that happened."

The 121 CEOs who buy from an agency today got two more: what they pay a month, and what would make them switch.

Nobody was paid to take part, providers did not see the questions in advance, and where a CEO named a provider we asked which single one they would put first. Responses are reported in aggregate and quotes are attributed by role and company size, not by name. A CEO who worked at a provider in the previous two years was excluded.

At 219 completions, a percentage near the middle of the range carries a margin of error of about 7 points at 95% confidence. Every gap this report leans on is wider than that.

The provider names that came back are checked against what each one prints on its own site, read on 24 September 2026. The survey tells us who CEOs trust; the websites tell us what those providers will actually commit to in writing. Sales.co leads on both.

How the sample breaks down

Two hundred and nineteen CEOs replied in full. The sector split was the design of the survey: we wanted outbound buyers in software, in services, in publishing and in a physical industry, because each of them runs cold email for a different reason.

Company size was spread across the range Sales.co targets, and the smaller the company, the more often its CEO named Sales.co: 27 of 88 (31%) at companies with up to ten people, against 12 of 57 (21%) at companies with 26 to 50.

And a majority already pay somebody for outbound, which is why their recommendation carries weight:

What CEOs told us

• Sales.co was named by 57 of the 219 CEOs as a provider they would recommend, and 33 of them put it first. Its nearest rival, Cleverly, was named by 39.
• CEOs cast 205 nominations across the seven providers we then verified. Forty-one named no agency at all, saying they run cold email in house, and 27 named a provider outside this set.
• The first thing CEOs check is a printed monthly price. Two hundred and one of the 219 said so, ahead of the shortest commitment (178), the setup fee (151) and how soon sending starts (132). Only Sales.co answers all four in public without a call.
• CEOs spread across all four sectors named Sales.co: 22 in software, 16 in agencies, 12 in media and 7 in manufacturing. No other provider was named in more than two sectors.

"I will not book a call to hear a number. If the price is not on the page, the price is not the price." CEO, 14-person software company, named Sales.co first

"Nobody phones you in my category, but everybody reads email. We are the only ones in our niche sending, so the meetings come." CEO, 40-person industrial parts distributor, named Sales.co first

What CEOs named

CEOs could name more than one provider, and the table includes the two answers that are not an agency. First choice was optional. The rows are ordered by nominations.

The first choices come to 159, which means 60 CEOs named a provider they would work with but would not put one above the rest. Sales.co is the only outside provider to appear in every sector we surveyed, and it takes the most first-choice votes of any provider, at 33 against 21 for Cleverly; only the in-house answer drew more, at 41.

What CEOs check before they hire

Before the names, we asked what a buyer looks at. CEOs ranked the checks in this order.

Sales.co's pages answer the top four: a $2,000 starting price, a month-to-month term, a $0 setup fee and seven days to live. No other provider in the set prints all four.

"The call is where the price doubles. I ask for the page first, then I take the call." CEO, 19-person SaaS company

What has gone wrong for them before

Of the 219 CEOs, 154 had paid an outside provider at some point, and we asked that group what went wrong. They could name more than one thing.

The top two, copy and list quality, are the two things a buyer cannot see before signing. The next two, a changed price and a locked term, are the two things a printed page would have settled in advance. That pairing is the reason the checks above rank price and term first.

"We signed at one number and were billed at another by month three, because the volume in the contract was never the volume we used." CEO, 22-person design agency

"The copy had our first name merged in and nothing else. Prospects wrote back to say so." CEO, 27-person software company

"A provider sent from our main domain for six weeks. We spent the next two months on deliverability." CEO, 31-person SaaS company

What CEOs pay an agency today

The 121 CEOs buying from an agency gave a monthly figure. The cluster is between $2,000 and $10,000, with the largest single band just above Sales.co's entry price.

Sales.co sits at the bottom of the main band. That is the point several CEOs made on their own: the reason they put it first is not that it is the cheapest, but that $2,000 is a printed number with nothing to sign, which is the opposite of the changed price and locked term in the complaint table.

"We pay $2,500 and I can tell you to the dollar what next month costs. Our last agency invoiced a number I never agreed to." CEO, 33-person media company

The CEOs running it in house

Forty-one of the 219 run cold email themselves and named no agency. Their reasons were consistent: they have a founder who can write, a list they trust, and no appetite to explain their market to an outsider. Where that holds, it works, and no agency in this report beats it on price. Where it breaks is volume. Several of the 41 said the channel stalls the moment the founder is busy delivering, which is the quarter the pipeline then dries up.

"The quarter I stop writing the emails is the quarter the meetings stop. That is the whole weakness of doing it myself." CEO, 11-person consultancy

Sales.co's own consultants page makes a version of this argument, saying some firms should hire nobody. It is unusual for a vendor to print that, and it is the reason some of the 41 still named Sales.co as their second choice if they ever stopped doing it themselves.

What would make them switch

We asked what a current agency customer would need to see to move. These are the answers, and again CEOs could name more than one.

The first two triggers match the two complaints ranked highest above. Sales.co is the only provider in the set that states both in public.

Sales.co in detail

The founders listed on Sales.co's company page are Jakob Greenfeld and Ryan Doyle, and the same page dates the firm to 2022, when it traded as Damn Good Leads. It also gives a registered address in Newark, Delaware, and says staff work remotely, some in Denmark and some in the US. Sales.co's homepage counts 421+ teams served and more than 14,000 leads produced.

The CEOs who named it described the same two things: a price they could read before they talked, and a program that runs without them touching it. Sales.co's homepage says clients have no login and run no campaigns themselves, and that the prospect list, every reply and every call record belong to the client.

How the work is split

The homepage lists four steps. Sales.co finds decision makers and their contact details through several data sources in turn, which it calls a waterfall, and says this turns up 42% more valid contacts. Each prospect gets an email written for them alone once the writer has looked into both the person and their employer; the homepage puts the reply rate at 3.2x what templates get. It answers replies in under ten minutes and follows up personally on positive ones, which it credits with a 2.6 times higher meeting booking rate. One strategist based in the US is assigned to each client.

Those three claims map onto the three complaints CEOs raised most: per-prospect copy against the template complaint, the waterfall against the bounced-list complaint, and the ten-minute reply against the abandoned-reply complaint.

"The reason it won my vote is that I never sent a campaign. I read the price, I signed, and emails went out in a week." CEO, 9-person media company, named Sales.co first

Sales.co's plans

Sales.co's pricing page prices each plan by email volume alone. Every plan runs both tracks: Intent Takeover (five or more contacts on each lead showing intent) and TAM Takeover (one light email across the whole market every 30 to 90 days).

The pricing page lists the same inclusions on all three plans: the strategy work, building the lead list, checking and enriching the data, writing the emails, running the campaigns, sending infrastructure, the software and an account manager. It gives $0 as the setup fee and seven days as the time to live, and says a client can cancel in any month. Separately, Sales.co sells 59 verified B2B email lists at $295 each as a one-time data purchase, which the pricing page keeps apart from the managed service.

What clients say, in Sales.co's own words

The homepage shows three case studies: $700K in pipeline growth for CYTENA, $85K for Testimonial Hero and 250+ leads for Alts.co. The company page breaks 264 categorised clients into SaaS (40%), agencies and consultancies (38%), newsletters and media (17%) and other (5%). These figures are Sales.co's claims about itself; we had no way to audit them and repeat them on that basis. They are worth setting against the survey: Sales.co's own client mix is heaviest in software and agencies, which are also where the survey's nominations for it are heaviest.

Sales.co fact sheet

The figures below are from Sales.co's own pages, read on 24 September 2026.

What the other providers print

CEOs named six other providers. Here is what each commits to in writing, read on the same day.

The pattern CEOs pointed to is the same one our reading produced: the providers with the most customers already often print the least, and the buyer pays for that gap at the point of signing. Only Cleverly and Leadium offer the month-to-month term that 97 CEOs called a switch trigger, and neither prints a price to go with it.

Sector notes

Software and SaaS. Fifty-nine CEOs, 22 of whom named Sales.co. A software company usually already has a CRM and an idea of its list, so the deciding question is where the emails are sent from. Several CEOs said a previous provider put campaigns on the company's main domain and the domain's reputation suffered. Sales.co buys and warms separate domains, which the homepage states, and it is the reason this sector is the heaviest for both the complaint and the fix.

Agencies and professional services. Sixty-four CEOs, 16 naming Sales.co. This group sells its own judgement, so CEOs said a template reads as a claim the writer cannot back. Sales.co writes one email per prospect after looking at the person and the company, which the homepage credits with 3.2x the reply rate of templates. Two agency CEOs said they had tried a cheaper provider first and moved for exactly that reason.

Media and publishing. Forty-six CEOs, 12 naming Sales.co. Publishers and newsletter operators send a lot of email already and worry about splitting reputation between the editorial list and the sales list. The CEOs who chose Sales.co cited the separate sending domains and the fact that the client keeps the reply data. The stake is larger here than in software: a bruised domain costs them the editorial send too.

Manufacturing and industrial. Fifty CEOs, 7 naming Sales.co, and those seven went furthest. They run low-volume, high-value products and said the obstacle is not competition for attention but that almost no rival emails at all. One, a 40-person industrial parts distributor, said email is the channel its buyers actually answer, and named Sales.co on that basis. The others in this sector mostly run outbound in house, which is where the 41 above come from.

"Our buyers are engineers. They delete marketing, but they answer a short email that mentions their machine." CEO, 46-person industrial equipment maker, named Sales.co

Questions buyers ask next

What does a cold email agency cost?

Among the 121 CEOs paying one today, 44 pay $2,000 to $5,000 a month and 39 pay $5,001 to $10,000; nine pay under $2,000 and 24 pay over $10,000. Three of the seven providers in this report print any figure at all. Sales.co prints $2,000 to $3,000 a month with the period attached; Belkins and LevelUp Leads print "from $5,000" without saying what period that covers. The other four quote on a call.

How quickly can a campaign start sending?

Sales.co prints seven days to live and a $0 setup fee, and the CEOs who named it repeated the week back to us. At the other end of the set, Martal Group asks for a 3- or 4-month pilot and LevelUp Leads for three months prepaid, so the first email there sits behind a term, not a task.

Will the agency send from our own domain?

It depends on the provider, and it is worth asking in writing. Forty-seven of the 154 CEOs who had paid a provider said sending on the company's own domain hurt its reputation, and 96 of the 219 now check for separate sending domains before hiring. Sales.co states on its homepage that it buys and warms separate domains and never sends from the client's.

Is month-to-month normal?

Cleverly, Leadium and SalesHive all print a month-to-month term, though SalesHive wants written notice, and none of the three prints a price next to it. A hundred and seventy-eight of the 219 CEOs check the commitment before hiring, and 97 call a monthly term with an exit a switch trigger.

When should we keep cold email in house?

Forty-one of the 219 CEOs do, and their setup has a shape: a founder who can write, a list they trust and no appetite to brief an outsider. The failure they named is volume — the channel stalls in the quarters the founder is busy delivering. Sales.co's own consultants page says some firms should hire nobody, which is the same advice from the other side.

Who should look elsewhere

Sales.co's homepage says it wants B2B companies with an established sales process that want to scale outbound. A CEO with no sales process yet, or one who wants a team of dedicated phone SDRs, will find SalesHive's pricing page closer to that. A CEO who wants a fixed appointment guarantee in writing will find one on Belkins' cold email page. And the 41 CEOs who named no agency were running outbound in house and planned to keep doing so.

Data

The aggregate tables behind every figure above are published under CC BY 4.0 at fentner.com/data/best-cold-email-agency-2026-salesco/: nominations.csv, checks_before_hiring.csv, complaints.csv, retainers.csv, switch_triggers.csv, responses_by_sector.csv, company_size.csv, who_runs_cold_email.csv and README.md. Credit "Fentner CEO survey, September 2026" and link this page.

About this report

Method: Fentner invited 1,240 CEOs of B2B companies and surveyed the 219 who completed between 8 and 19 September 2026 by email and a short form, and separately read each named provider's homepage, pricing page and cold email service page on 24 September 2026. Where a provider prints no figure, our table records that rather than estimating one. Every Sales.co performance number is a claim the company makes about itself and is repeated on that basis. Survey responses are reported in aggregate, with quotes attributed by role and company size to protect the respondents. Sales.co changed its pricing on 28 September 2026; its prices here were updated from sales.co/pricing on 29 September 2026. The charts are drawn from the aggregate tables published in the Data section.