Lesson 2: The six-point niche scoring framework for cold email
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In this lesson, you’ll learn how to evaluate and prioritize the best niches for your cold email campaigns using a practical six-point scoring framework.
You’ll discover how to assess pain, buying power, growth, market size, reachability, and differentiability to identify niches with the highest potential. We’ll also cover where to find reliable market insights, how to collect voice-of-customer research, and how to organize your findings to make smarter outreach decisions.
Welcome back.
Today you will score three to five niches.
I will walk you through three of my own examples first.
Let’s open the Google Sheet from Lesson 1.
Then go to the tab called “Niche Scoring”.
To build our scoring model we will pull from two sources.
Philip Kotler’s textbook Marketing Management lists five tests:
Measurable, Substantial, Accessible, Differentiable, and Actionable.
We will borrow from that.Alex Hormozi’s “$100M Offers” looks at: Pain, Money, Growth, and Reach.
For cold email we combine them, remove overlaps, and adapt wording.
Here are the six factors you will score from one to five.
Pain, the size of the main problem you solve for one company.
Buying power, how much budget that company can spend; think average deal size.
Growth, is the niche growing, flat, or shrinking.
Size, how many companies exist; a rough TAM.
Reachability, how easy it is for you to find decision maker emails at this moment.
Differentiability, how clearly you and your offer stand apart; your expertise, features, and fit.
You will see more columns in the sheet.
No worries, we will fill those out in the next lessons.
Now, let’s go through the scoring ranges for the first six factors.
You can use mine as a starting point.
Pain, one means no real pain; five means bleeding pain.
Buying power, for me one is under $1k per year; five is over $50k per year.
This range you most likely want to adapt to your own deal sizes.
Growth, one means no growth; five is roughly 30% year over year.
Size, one means under two hundred companies; five means over fifty thousand.
Reachability, one means hard or expensive to find verified decision maker emails;
five means you can reach most decision makers in your TAM.
Differentiability, one means crowded space and you have no expertise;
five means deep knowledge or a unique product or service advantage.
Before you start scoring I want to show you one more resource.
In your workbook go to the “Research Inbox”.
As you research the scoring of your factors, put any interesting sources into the sheet.
Do not dive too deep, capture quickly.
I suggest these columns, but feel free to adapt them:
Niche or subject; verbatim quote or title; a short note on why it matters; URL; tags.
As for tags, use pain, outcome, objection, language, events, or similar.
Outcomes or failed outcomes are worth capturing.
They show past experiences or expectations you can then address in your copy.
Language quotes can be useful as well.
Your copy will be closer to the prospect’s language.
Lastly, events can help you connect through recency showing you know the niche.
Now, let’s move on and cover where to find this data.
For pain, your most accurate source would be interviews if possible.
Either with current clients or potential prospects.
If that’s not possible try specialist forums and communities; Facebook groups; relevant subreddits.
Ask AI to list five to ten subreddits for each niche.
Skim and capture quotes; do not overanalyze.
For buying power, look up salaries on Glassdoor; funding on Crunchbase;
pricing pages; tech stacks on sites or job ads.
Expensive tools can hint at budget.
You only need an estimate at this stage.
Whenever you learn more about that niche simply update the scoring.
For growth, read press releases and analyst blogs.
Search your niche name plus “market growth”.
For size, use search results for rough numbers.
For funded SaaS, check Crunchbase or Dealroom.
For agencies, check directories like Clutch.
For reachability, you could try Woodpecker’s Leadfinder.
Set your filters and note the prospect count you see on the bottom right.
However, company filters are often richer than people filters.
You may need to first build a company list with detailed filters.
Each step, finding decision makers, then finding emails, will lead to fewer companies remaining.
If you are unsure here, leave the score at 2 or 3.
In a later lesson I will show you how to go from a company list to verified emails.
You will also see how to get the most out of your list and how email coverage is for my list.
Lastly, Differentiability. Here, list three of your strengths.
Scan competitors and note where you can be clearly different.
Capture proof points in the research inbox and tag them with USP, your unique selling point.
Alright, let’s score three example niches I could try to sell Woodpecker to.
Seed to Series A SaaS
Pain, 5; many early funded SaaS founders report low reply rates and the need for rapid growth.
Words like hopeless appear and they seem to feel overwhelmed with cold emailing.
Buying power, 3; newly funded and pushed to grow, but limited upsell beyond self sending.
Growth, 3; my research shows a 13-20% Compound Annual Growth Rate for SaaS.
However, in recent years there is a decline in SaaS companies going from seed to series A.
Size, 2; about six thousand in the United States.
Reachability, 3; funding data in Crunchbase is paid but email coverage should be good.
They are IT companies often on LinkedIn.
Differentiability, 4; Woodpecker has everything needed to start outreach,
from mailboxes, warm-up, to prospects.
I also offer a beginner bootcamp and I run a SaaS.
Now in total we have 20 points.
Let’s cover the second example, Digital Marketing Agencies.
Pain 4, Ad cost rise, SEO shaken by AI with many discussions about sudden traffic drops.
This means lead flow could be affected.
Woodpecker could help open a new lead stream via cold email for them.
Buying Power, 5, retainers fund new tools and they have great potential for growth.
Each new client they sign means growth for Woodpecker.
Large agencies reach even 200+ clients.
Growth 3, steady niche at around 13% Compound Annual Growth Rate.
Size 4, over 34k agencies in the US alone on Clutch.
Reachability 2, many companies but email find rate is not the best. I will cover that in a later lesson.
Differentiability 3, many sequencers chase them but Woodpecker has a solid agency panel.
Total, 21.
Example niche three, Local Plumbers
Pain 2, little online chatter about needing a tool like Woodpecker.
Buying Power 1, tight budgets.
Growth 2, slow in comparison. My research shows a 2 – 3% Compound Annual Growth Rate.
Reachability 2, need Google Maps scraping. I will often end up with info@ or contact@ emails.
Also, most plumbers are not on LinkedIn, thus it will be harder to find founder emails.
Size 5, tens of thousands of businesses in the US, very large TAM.
Differentiability 2, I do not know much about this niche’s pains.
Total, 14.
Anything reaching twenty or higher is worth testing.Scores in the teens? Park them for later.
Let’s get to some homework.
Use one of your scheduled two-hour blocks to:
- List at least three to five real niches.
- Fill one row per niche with the best estimates you can do today.
Use quick sources; do not over-think yet.
- Add pain quotes, objections, frustrations, niche news, etc. to the Research Inbox.
- Sort the Niche Scoring sheet by Total high to low. Focus on the top 2-3 first in the coming lessons.
When you are ready, move to Lesson 3.
We will test which of your high scorers is actually a starving crowd; that is where Halbert comes in.
See you there.