🤑 Industry
Sales & Lead Generation
📈 Company Size
51-200 employees
📧 Position Hired
Inbox Manager (SDR)
💰 Payroll Savings
$3,800/month
Andre Haykal Jr is the founder of KnowledgeX, a cold email lead generation agency, and is the co-founder of Client Ascension, one of the most well-known coaching communities in the agency space. He’s since gone on to co-found ListKit, a B2B prospect database that’s become a staple in the cold email world.
The guy knows cold email. He’s built multiple companies on the back of it.
But he had a problem.
KnowledgeX was scaling. More clients meant more campaigns. More campaigns meant more replies coming in across multiple accounts. And every reply that sat unanswered was money walking out the door.
Andre was managing the inbox replies himself. It worked when it was just him and a handful of clients. But at a certain point, the math breaks. You’re on a call with one client, and a hot reply comes in for another. You’re building a campaign, and three leads go cold because nobody got back to them fast enough.
He needed an Inbox Manager. Someone whose only job was to sit in those inboxes all day and convert replies into booked calls.
He tried hiring in the US first. It didn’t go well.
Why US Inbox Manager Hires Kept Failing
Andre hired multiple people in the US for this role. He was paying $20-30 an hour — and they still weren’t happy.
Here’s why:
The type of person who’s good at inbox management for cold email has sales instincts. They understand objection handling. They can read a reply and know whether to push, nurture, or let it go. They have the communication skills to respond on behalf of a client’s brand without sounding robotic.
But a person with those skills? They’re also qualified to go out and be a setter or a closer — roles that pay significantly more.
So what happened is exactly what you’d expect. Andre would hire someone good, they’d do fine for a while, and then they’d leave for a higher-paying sales role. Over and over.
“We got the talent piece out,” Andre said. “But we couldn’t get the value piece out — or the pricing.”
He couldn’t pay them enough to stay, because the role — as critical as it is — doesn’t generate enough standalone revenue to justify $60,000-$70,000 a year in labor costs.
This is the fundamental tension of the Inbox Manager role. It’s high-skill but narrowly scoped. The person needs sales DNA, but you can’t afford to pay sales compensation for what is essentially a support function.
Most agency owners either do it themselves (and burn out), give it to a VA who doesn’t have the instincts (and lose deals), or just let replies sit too long and wonder why their cold email ROI is declining.
Andre tried all three. Then he called us.
From First Call to First Day: 11 Days
Andre reached out to HireUA in December. We mapped the role — specifically, someone who could manage inbox replies across multiple client accounts, respond in the client’s voice, handle objections, and book calls.
The requirements were specific:
- Strong English (they’re emailing on behalf of US-based clients)
- Sales background or instinct
- Ability to context-switch between different client accounts, pricing, and messaging
- Fast. Not “I’ll get to it this afternoon” fast. “Within 5 minutes” fast.
Here’s how the timeline went:
- December 2nd: Andre started the engagement
- December 3rd: We sent over 5-6 vetted CVs
- December 6th: Andre interviewed candidates
- December 9th: Hiring decision made
- December 13th: Katarina started
11 days. From “I need someone” to “she’s working.”
Andre made a point about this on camera:
“If I were to go about doing something like this alone — like I did — I probably would have trial-and-errored inbox management hires for six months before finding a solution.”
Six months of trial and error vs. 11 days.
50 Booked Calls in Month One
Let’s talk about what actually happened once Katarina started.
Andre set up the compensation structure the smart way — base retainer plus performance incentive. $1,000/month base for part-time work (25 hours/week), plus $10 for every call booked for a client.
The first full month? Katarina booked 50 calls.
That’s a $500 performance bonus on top of her $1,000 base. A 50% bonus in her first month. Andre called it “unheard of.”
And here’s the part that matters most:
Andre admitted on camera that he wasn’t confident someone overseas could do this job. He’d been in his own head about it — “This is a high-level role, they need sales experience, they need proficient English, they’re representing my clients…”
K proved him wrong. With numbers, not promises.
The Math: Why This Hire Changed KnowledgeX’s Cost Structure
Let’s run this out.
Andre was paying US-based inbox managers $30/hour. At 25 hours per week, that’s $3,000 per month — for people who kept leaving.
Through HireUA, he’s paying $1,100/month (base + average performance bonus) for someone who books 50 calls and doesn’t leave.
That’s a savings of roughly $3,800 per month.
Over a year, that’s $45,600 in savings — on a single part-time hire.
But the real savings isn’t the labor cost. It’s the opportunity cost.
Every month Andre spent doing inbox management himself was a month he wasn’t building KnowledgeX, wasn’t growing Client Ascension, wasn’t developing ListKit. Every month he spent churning through US hires was a month of lost momentum — recruiting, onboarding, training, watching them leave, and starting over.
When he said “six months vs. six days,” he wasn’t exaggerating. He was quantifying the actual drag on his business.
What Most People Get Wrong About the Inbox Manager Role
If you’re running cold email — whether for your own business or as an agency — and you’re Googling “inbox manager,” here’s what you need to understand:
This is not an email management role.
This is not someone organizing your Gmail, archiving newsletters, and flagging important messages. That’s a Virtual Assistant task. And if that’s what you need, go hire a VA — we can help with that too.
An Inbox Manager in the cold email world is a sales-adjacent role. They’re handling replies from outbound campaigns.
They need to:
- Identify interested vs. not-interested vs. “send me more info” replies
- Respond within minutes, not hours
- Handle objections in writing (on behalf of someone else’s brand)
- Book calls and manage handoffs to closers
- Follow up on “maybe” replies without being annoying
- Tag and remove negative replies to protect deliverability
- Context-switch between different client accounts with different messaging
That’s not inbox management. That’s lead conversion.
If you want the full breakdown of this role — what to look for, how to set KPIs, the tool stack, and when you actually need one vs. when you’re better off with an SDR — we wrote the definitive guide on hiring an Inbox Manager.
The short version:
An Inbox Manager handles inbound replies from campaigns that are already running.
An SDR generates conversations from scratch with outbound prospecting.
Can one person do both? Yes — and for most businesses, that’s actually the smarter hire. Give your Inbox Manager cold prospecting work during slow periods so you’re not paying for someone to stare at an empty inbox.
What Made This Work
Andre pointed out something important during our conversation: “The number one thing that made us get to a fast start was just the fact that I understood the role and exactly what I was looking for.”
That’s worth pausing on.
Most hiring failures aren’t because the candidate is bad. They’re because the employer doesn’t actually know what they need. They write a vague job description, interview people for vibes, and then wonder why the hire doesn’t work out.
Andre knew exactly what he wanted:
- Sales background
- Strong written English
- Speed and responsiveness
- Ability to represent a brand that isn’t theirs
And he knew what he didn’t want — someone who’d stick around for 3 months and then leave for a closer role.
The other thing that made this work was the guidance through the process. Andre said it directly: “You didn’t just hand me resumes and say good luck. You guided me through the entire process — how to conduct an interview, how to determine what to look for, and how to make a hiring decision.”
That’s what separates a recruiting agency from a job board. Upwork gives you a pile of profiles. We give you a shortlist, interview coaching, candidate communication, and post-hire support.
Already Planning the Next Hire
Before we even turned on the recording for the case study video, Andre told us about another position he needed to fill.
That’s the pattern. Clients who hire through HireUA once almost always come back. Not because we lock them into anything — but because it works.
If you’ve read our Monarch Wave or Support Pets case study…you’ve seen the same pattern.
Business hires one person, sees the results, comes back for more.
Andre summed it up better than we could:
“I now know going forward — if I have hiring needs, talk to HireUA.”
Hire an Inbox Manager for Your Cold Email Campaigns
If you’re running cold email and your reply-to-booked-call conversion is suffering because nobody’s working the inbox fast enough, you know what the problem is. You just haven’t solved it yet.
We source, vet, and place Inbox Managers and SDRs who can handle cold email reply management, objection handling, and call booking. From Eastern Europe, Latin America, and beyond.
Part-time or full-time. Performance incentives built in. Candidates submitted in as little as 48 hours.
One monthly bill. No HR headaches.