When Xavier Coiffard launched LeadLead BangBang in 2023, he was not approaching cold outreach like most agency founders do.
He came in as a former startup CTO with 15 years of development experience. He thought in systems, APIs, and automation. And he had a very specific thesis: that cold email, done with technical precision and the right infrastructure underneath it, was still the highest-leverage channel for B2B growth.
The agency started with a dual focus on the US and European markets. Over time, it sharpened into something more specific. Today, LeadLead BangBang works almost exclusively in the French and broader European market, serving two types of clients: European companies looking to expand within Europe, and US or international companies that want to enter the European market for the first time.
"We are really focused on the French and European market. For European companies expanding within Europe, but also for US or global companies that want to enter the European market. That is our core ICP."
Europe is harder than most people expect. There are more languages, stricter data regulations, and cultural nuances that make generic outreach invisible. Xavier built an agency designed to operate in that complexity without flinching.
The pitch is ten seconds long: LeadLead BangBang helps companies get more clients and enter new markets. The system behind it took two years on Smartlead to build properly.
Xavier Coiffard built LeadLead BangBang on one belief: cold outreach in Europe only works when it is built like an engineering system. A snapshot of what his systems have delivered:
Xavier spent 15 years as a developer and startup CTO before making a move that surprised people who knew him. He walked away from building software to build pipelines.
The logic was direct. The most valuable system you can build for a B2B company is not a product.
It is a pipeline that actually fills. That realisation sent him deep into outbound. Cold email, LinkedIn sequencing, infrastructure, copywriting, automation.
He became obsessed with what makes a decision-maker reply, and in particular what makes French and European decision-makers reply, because they do not respond the way most outbound playbooks assume.
That obsession became LeadLead BangBang.
The agency manages the full stack: ICP targeting, list building, email infrastructure, Smartlead sequences, LinkedIn outreach, AI enrichment, and automation. Clients show up to calls. The agency handles everything else.
The results speak directly to where Xavier's 15 years of technical discipline went:
300,000 euros in signed contracts generated for a single client over 12 months. 212 qualified meetings delivered over 14 months for a B2B services firm.
A 40% lead-to-meeting conversion rate on a targeted outbound campaign. Campaigns running simultaneously in French, English, and any European language, fully RGPD compliant.
Most cold outreach agencies are built around tools they use manually. LeadLead BangBang is built around a tool it automates programmatically.
The move to Smartlead happened roughly two years ago, and the deciding factor was not deliverability features or inbox limits. It was the API.
"At the time, I think Smartlead was the only tool with a proper API. It was super important for us to be able to automate a ton of the process. Replies, warm-ups, mailbox rotation. We did all of that manually before, and now we use the API to automate everything."
Before Smartlead, mailbox rotation was a manual process. New campaign setup took time and repeated effort for each new client. Scraping pipelines were disconnected from campaign workflows. Every new client meant rebuilding the same foundations from scratch.
The moment the team started building on the API, the operation changed shape entirely. Rotation was scripted. Campaign onboarding was automated. The volume of clients the agency could support without adding headcount increased significantly.
"The conversion moment was really when we started using the API and understood how much we could do with it. Mailbox rotation was a pain. Campaign integration was a pain. Scraping server setup was a pain. Now we automate everything. That is what made us move to Smartlead and stay."
Three Smartlead capabilities form the backbone of how LeadLead BangBang operates day to day.
For Xavier, deliverability is not a feature. It is a precondition. No deliverability means no results, regardless of how good the copy is or how clean the list is.
Smartlead's warm-up system has been the foundation of every campaign the agency runs. The launch of Premium Pools made it stronger, giving access to a vetted private network of senders that builds domain reputation faster than standard public warm-up pools.
"Warm-up is probably number one. If you do not have deliverability, you are not talking to anyone and you are not getting any results. And now that Smartlead launched premium pools, it is even better."
Running outreach for multiple clients requires being able to show results across all of them, over time, in one place. Smartlead's global analytics dashboard solved this reporting problem for LeadLead BangBang without requiring any additional tooling.
At the volume LeadLead BangBang operates, manually triaging replies across every active campaign is not realistic. Smartlead's Master Inbox uses AI to categorise every incoming reply automatically with sentiment analysis. Positive replies trigger an immediate Slack notification so the team can respond within minutes.
"Before, we had to open every email and triage everything ourselves. Now we have an AI that tags replies automatically with sentiment analysis. Every time there is a positive reply, we get a message on Slack, so we can be super quick to respond. That is a big one."
LeadLead BangBang measures everything on positive reply rates, not vanity metrics. The headline result across their best-performing campaign:
457 leads contacted. 164 replied. 87 replied positively.
That is a 36% overall reply rate and a 53% positive reply rate on a single campaign run.
In a category where the industry average for cold email sits between 1 and 3%, those numbers represent a fundamentally different approach to how outreach gets built and executed.
The campaigns that drive results like these share the same foundations: a precisely defined ICP, verified and clean contact data, infrastructure that keeps emails landing in the primary inbox, and copy personalised with a data point the prospect actually recognises.
The client was a digital ads agency specialising in Pinterest advertising. The strategy was built on a single, verifiable data point: the Meta Ads Library.
The team scraped the library to identify large companies actively running Meta ads in the European market.
The logic was simple. Any company already investing heavily in Meta is a natural prospect for diversifying into Pinterest, especially if the ROI case is concrete and specific.
The outreach referenced the prospect's actual Meta ad activity. The offer was backed by real client benchmarks showing cost reductions of up to three times by adding Pinterest to the media mix.
The campaign generated a 30% overall reply rate and more than 50% positive replies. Big brands booked calls. The campaign worked because the personalisation was built on something real, not a template.
The client was an SMB in the construction niche. They had been nominated for an industry award, and the goal was to invite relevant prospects to the event.
LeadLead BangBang built a campaign around that nomination, with every email personalised using AI to match the specific context of each lead.
The outreach had a genuine reason to exist. The AI-driven personalisation made it feel like it was written for each recipient individually.
The campaign generated a 15% overall reply rate and 60 to 70% positive replies. For a niche audience in a traditional industry, those numbers were exceptional.
Finding quality data for the European and French market has always been a friction point for the agency. Most lead databases require two to three rounds of cleaning before the data is usable. Xavier expected SmartProspect to be no different.
Coverage in the European and French market is still developing, so LeadLead BangBang currently uses SmartProspect primarily for US-targeted campaigns where the database is more comprehensive. But the data quality is already there. Xavier is waiting for the European coverage to catch up.
"I cannot wait until you ship a ton of European and French market data, because that will solve a lot of my pain."
LeadLead BangBang has started using SmartAgents to automate multi-channel outreach sequences, primarily for transitions from email to LinkedIn.
The multi-channel capability is particularly relevant for the European market, where LinkedIn engagement is high and following up across channels increases the chance of a response without overwhelming any single inbox.
The best signal about Smartlead's support is that Xavier rarely needs it.
"Everything is working, so I have not really contacted support for a long time. But from time to time I have billing questions or other things, and every time they are super responsive. Within one to two hours you get an answer on chat, and the issue is resolved quickly."
For an agency where a deliverability problem cascades across every active client campaign, fast and dependable support is not optional. The consistency of Smartlead's response times has made it a non-issue.
Xavier keeps it direct.
First, get your setup right before you send anything. DNS configuration and email warm-up for at least two weeks before going live.
This is not a step that can be skipped or shortened. It is the foundation everything else stands on. Get SPF, DKIM, and DMARC in order, connect your inboxes, and let the warm-up run before a single campaign email goes out.
Second, clean your list.
The quality of the list matters more than the copy, more than the subject line, more than anything else people tend to debate. Reach the exact ICP you want with verified email addresses, and the rest becomes manageable.
"If you have the right ICP, the right setup, and you know more or less what you want to sell, that would be okay."
Two things are on Xavier's roadmap.
The first is multi-bridge LinkedIn sequencing, a true back-and-forth workflow between email and LinkedIn campaigns rather than a one-directional handoff.
The second is language-specific warm-ups, so that agencies running primarily French, German, Spanish, or Italian campaigns can align their warm-up activity with the languages they actually send in.
Both are natural extensions of an operation that has always been infrastructure-first. When the platform catches up to those needs, LeadLead BangBang will already be ready to automate them.
Three years in, the conviction that started this agency has not shifted. Cold email, executed with precision, backed by the right deliverability infrastructure, and powered by an API that lets you automate the repetitive work, remains the most effective B2B outreach channel available for the European market.
Smartlead is what makes that possible at scale, without burning domains, without manual triage, and without rebuilding the same foundations every time a new client comes on board.
If you are trying to break into the European B2B market and want a partner who has built the systems to do it properly, book a call with Xavier and the LeadLead BangBang team.
You can replicate these results when you treat outreach as a system rather than a guessing game.
Start by fixing deliverability with Smartlead's warm-up and Premium Pools, clean your data before every campaign, then build sequences around data points your prospects actually recognise.
The difference between low and high positive reply rates is not your product or your market. It is your process. Agencies that scale profitably measure everything, test constantly, and automate the repetitive work.
Ready to build your own outbound engine on Smartlead?
‍Start your free trial and use the infrastructure Xavier built LeadLead BangBang on. Track every metric, tighten every variable, and watch your positive reply rates climb. Review the complete Smartlead pricing breakdown to see how the model scales for agencies.
For more on how leading cold outreach agencies run on Smartlead, read the complete guide to managing cold email at agency scale or explore the email deliverability guide before your next campaign launch.
‍Start at 5 to 10 per day during warm-up, increase to 15 after week one, and cap at 30 per day by week three. Scaling volume too fast before your domain has reputation behind it is the single most common reason campaigns fail before they start.
‍A positive reply rate above 10% is strong across B2B cold email. Xavier's best campaign hit 53%. The gap between that and an average campaign is not better copy. It is cleaner data, tighter ICP targeting, and a specific personalisation hook the prospect actually recognises.
‍Rotating sending across multiple warmed inboxes distributes volume so no single mailbox triggers spam filters through sending spikes. Smartlead's API automates this rotation entirely, which was one of the core reasons LeadLead BangBang moved to the platform.
‍9am to 11am local time consistently performs best across B2B in Europe. Avoid early morning before 8am and end of day after 5pm. For multilingual campaigns, factor in timezone differences across French, German, and Spanish-speaking markets.
‍Minimum two weeks for an existing domain. For a brand new domain, allow four to six weeks before sending any campaign volume. Xavier's advice to every beginner is the same: do not skip this step, and do not shorten it. Everything else depends on it.
‍Yes, according to Xavier. A clean list of exactly the right ICP with a simple email outperforms a beautifully written campaign sent to a dirty list every time. Clean the list first. Write the copy second.
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Join us to elevate your outreach!
Founder, StackOptimise
Smartlead's combination of automation, unlimited inboxes, and easy campaign management has completely transformed how we run cold email campaigns.
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Founder, Cold Email Hackers
We have about 15 companies and we use Smartlead for all of them.
Founder, DutchSave Media
One of the things I love about using Smartlead is the deliverability feature. If they landed in the bounce or spam folders, we could resolve this quickly.
Co-Founder, Growth Today
I want to continue to use Smartlead to make operations more seamless - the plan is to bring more clients here and build more SOPs.
Founder, FueltoFly
Smartlead listens to the agencies and customers and builds according to what people want, that has really made things easier for us.
Founder, OutboundSync
We build an infrastructure product, and OutboundSync communicates with Smartlead itself. I love the webhook and API. They're really well done and keep getting better.
Founder, Axoleads
With SmartDelivery, you can put all of that in the hands of the tool. It ensures your emails land in inboxes, and by running a simple test, you can see if you're hitting the mark.
Founder, Claygen
Deliverability is the cornerstone of cold email outreach. You could have the best email copy in the world, but if no one is seeing it, it's useless. I really love the feature where you can actually give client accesses to your clients.
Co-Founder, Cymate
I do not want to switch to another software. Pick a solution you trust, stick with it, and keep refining your copy.
CMO, Avalanche Capital
Managing large volumes of emails through multiple inboxes used to be a logistical nightmare. With Smartlead, the process is seamless. We book thousands of discovery calls through cold emails. These campaigns are generating leads at a scale we never thought possible.
Founder, Growth Engine X
We came for the unlimited inboxes, and we stayed for the API. 1.5M cold emails/month, 7,767+ inboxes managed.
Head of Community & Ecosystem, TxtCart
You cannot replace having 10,000 touches with potential clients. When you have that much distribution and reach, you really start to see incredible results. The simplicity of Smartlead made all the difference. It doesn't require you to be a technical wizard.
Founder, Hyperke
Smartlead has been a game-changer for us. It increased our appointment volume, improved ease of use, and offered valuable features. 80% increase in appointments/month, peak of 276 appointments in a single month.
Founder, Kinetyca
Smartlead has been our cold email backbone from day one. The platform evolves constantly, keeping pace with how deliverability and personalization need to work today. 21% overall reply rate, $175K in 4 months for multiple B2B clients.
Founder, Reachflow
Smartlead is centered around deliverability and constantly evolving. Their API is not like any other platform. Smartlead covers all our needs. The focus on core features like deliverability and API integration is unmatched.
CEO, Halfwarm
Our approach to crafting conversational emails led to reply rates that many of my peers thought were unattainable.
Co-Founder, letstrike
We've grown on zero capital, zero marketing, purely cold emailing - and that's the story we love to tell. The best approach is no approach if you can't handle domain meltdown. The second best is something like Smartlead that's built from the ground up for deliverability at scale.
Founder, Fenixtal
Smartlead's white-labeling and automation let us punch above our weight. The 12M euros sales potential? That's what happens when you combine human creativity with Smartlead's precision.
Co-Founder, Digital Creativs
Nine out of 10. Ninety percent of our clients are on Smartlead unless they come in with an existing setup. That's the default.
Co-Founder, BuildingReach
At the end of the day, you have to take a bet on one tool or another. It was a no-brainer taking that bet on Smartlead. We had to even turn down the volume of our marketing campaigns - Smartlead was capable of driving more volume than our sales team was able to fulfill.
Founder & MD, Prospectiv
Since starting the business in January of this year, we've already generated $200K in sales exclusively from cold email. Smartlead has been central to our operations and has exceeded our expectations.
Founder, Growthlynk
There's so much stuff built on top of it. I would be dead if I had to rebuild it with another tool. I can manage hundreds of senders easily. I can send hundreds of thousands of emails.
Founder, Corebits
The platform's HubSpot integration, real-time Slack updates, and advanced campaign customization have been game changers for our business and our clients'.
Founder, Apex Ascension
From day one, we've never used anything else.
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