Introduction

What we love about outbound sales is the proactive mindset behind this motion. With outbound, you're fully in control: you choose who you target, how you reach out to prospects (messaging, channel), and when. But when everyone uses the same data and tools, the game becomes more about relevancy and creativity to truly stand out. It’s a POV, but prospecting/BDR might be the job that rewards hungry people more than most jobs.

Something incredible with prospecting is that only ONE activity (it can be a cold call, a LinkedIn message, or an email) can initiate an amazing output. People often focus on the big numbers (volume of contacts, touchpoints, total addressable market…) and “scaling” things, and so tend to forget that as at an individual level (or even as a company depending on your stage or the massive impact of a high ACV deal) only ONE reply can generate an amazing story. It’s something to always remember, to keep the bar high and the persistence needed in your execution, even more in the tough moments!

In this article we'll walk you through a specific activity that initiated the signing of Pigment’s first Fortune 500 customer back in 2023 and why it was an accident!

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Back in 2023, Pigment wasn’t ready to sell to Fortune 500 companies…

For context, in 2023, Pigment had fewer than 50 customers and a handful of BDRs and AEs. We were focused on mid-market (companies between 300 and 1,000 employees) as the product and our sales motion weren’t ready yet for enterprise. Our outbound engine was still pretty new, but we’d already set up a few things: total addressable market mapping, custom enrichment data points, and signal tracking like new hires, job postings, and G2 intent. All of this was automatically pushed to Salesforce across all accounts - mid-market and enterprise included. We knew we’d move upmarket within months, so capturing this data early was intentional: it’d give us a head start on account prioritization once the time came. But nothing was being activated on the enterprise side yet because, as mentioned above, it simply wasn’t the focus.

Still, one day, our BDR team decided to go off track…

Back then we had some Salesforce reports that showed recently captured intent signals on accounts not yet targeted by the Sales team so BDRs could use this to be more opportunistic on how they choose their target accounts. One day a BDR Manager noticed this Fortune 500 company was showing interesting G2 insights* comparing Pigment and our main competitor.

G2 insights are part of the ‘Buyer Intent’ product of G2 that captures enriched data about buyers (companies) researching our product across G2. Buyer Intent signals are triggered by a variety of actions, including interacting with Pigment’s product profile page, comparing our product to a competitor, or viewing alternatives to a product in a shared G2 product category. These signals are used to source net new accounts that are showing buying intent.

The BDR Manager decided to allocate the account to one of their BDRs - out of ICP, but a “worth a shot” approach - and that's how the story started! Rather than a long explanation, see below how the BDR (humbly) described booking the meeting with the Head of Finance at this Fortune 500 company:

And it confirmed the ‘visual prospecting’ made the difference!

If we look closely at the emails, the BDR included a visual - it’s a personalized mockup: a screenshot of our product customized with the prospect’s name and logo. This is an initiative we started early in the Pigment journey. We knew our product design (UI/UX) was a key differentiator against the legacy players we compete against, so showing the product as early as possible in the customer journey felt natural. Including a personalized image was also a way to stand out in the inbox from plain text-only cold emails, a way to spark curiosity and give prospects an at-a-glance sense of what we’re talking about. This was even confirmed by the prospect himself during a customer interview we ran with him 1 year ago, see quote below:

This kind of tactic works especially well for a product like Pigment, which is all about data visualization - but other companies have adopted this 'show, don't tell' approach too, and taken it even further. It's an even bigger lever when you sell an AI tool, where the wow effect can be immediate. Examples:

• Elevenlabs with personalized LinkedIn voice notes leveraging their own product (more here) by saying ‘I wanted to invite you to a demo, but actually you are already experiencing the demo because this is a clone of my voice’.

• Clay with a build-in-person approach with their AI hackathon program for their Enterprise customers (more here).

On our side, to scale how we generate these personalized assets, we quickly decided to implement a tool called Userled.

We chose Userled to scale the technical side, enable engagement tracking, and make the process self-serve for non-technical users. The product has since grown well beyond asset personalization, it's now a full activation layer for enterprise ABM, covering micro-sites, 1:1 and 1:few LinkedIn Ads, and more.

Teams working with BDRs often underestimate how demanding the job can be and there can be a classic tension between BDRs and the ‘support’ functions (Marketing, RevOps, Growth...) around them. When a process or idea doesn’t get adopted, the instinct is often to blame the BDRs. But we think the better question is: why isn’t it being adopted? What’s creating friction? Some marketers or ops people would have BDRs generate the assets themselves, tell them to copy/paste links or drop screenshots into the email body manually. On our side, everything was pre-populated directly in the tool BDRs used to send emails. Zero lift on their end, and that’s exactly why adoption was systematic.

To end the story, and as teased in the title, this initial meeting generated a serious sales opportunity, and after a few months of amazing work across sales, product, security, legal… it ended up being our first Fortune 500 customer, with an ACV > $100k, one of our top 10 customers back in the day ✨

Conclusion

Whether real or perceived, a classic pain for teams like us is the lack of relevant assets to be relevant or stand out in our outreach, with the bottleneck often pinned on the marketing team and asset generation. But you can find solutions on your own - here implementing Userled to generate personalized mockups at scale and letting BDRs self-serve. The self-serve part worked because it was built into the BDRs' existing workflow, rather than something new requiring heavy training or change management, which can sometimes lead to adoption challenges.

While your goal as a RevOps, GTM Engineer is to build systems, scalable motions… never forget that at the end of the day (even more so for an early company or motion), all it takes is only one activity to generate a meaningful output. The ‘extra mile’ mindset - often meaning manual and time-heavy work - is key to discovering new things, infusing creativity, and maintaining persistence over time.

AI presents a significant opportunity for GTM teams to achieve more and better with less, especially in a world where everything is changing fast: new technologies, shifting distribution channels, rising competition, and evolving buyer behaviors. Between Google and Microsoft cracking down on cold emails, ChatGPT reshaping how people search, social selling taking over in some industries, and rising customer acquisition costs… Traditional GTM playbooks no longer follow the same rules.

Some AI tools already reduce the gap from idea to execution - whether it’s building workflows in n8n, Clay or shipping products with Lovable. But to really stay ahead, GTM teams often need more than scattered tools. They need the right infrastructure -built around their stage, resources, and goals - and flexible enough to evolve over time

AI is already present in most organizations - sales reps and marketers use tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini for everyday tasks like writing emails, doing account research, or summarizing notes and documents. But that’s just scratching the surface. What’s still missing in many teams is a cohesive AI strategy - one that spans functions and thinks bigger than “Hey AI, write me some copy.”

There’s also growing tension between full automation and human-in-the-loop systems. While AI excels at research, enrichment, and first drafts, the best results often emerge when experts guide the process at both ends: shaping the direction and refining the output. That’s where compounding value is found: not in replacing workflows, but in reengineering them for better outcomes.

Behind all of that, data plays a central role - especially your internal data: positioning, tone of voice, customer insights, and strategic priorities. This is what takes AI output from ok-ish to great. Without that unique context, outputs risk being generic or off-mark. The more your systems are grounded in your data, the more relevant, differentiated, and unreplicable your GTM efforts become.

Of course, your approach will evolve with your stage and internal resources. When you're early and don’t have dedicated operators, it often makes sense to start with ready-to-use tools. But as your team matures and you bring on technical talent -RevOps, GTM engineers, growth-minded builders - it opens the door to a more composable stack - modular tools, custom workflows, automations, and AI agents tailored to how your team actually works - by enabling the ingestion and transformation of the right input data to maximize context.

In this article, we’ll share some practical use cases and examples that you could implement to support your GTM - from data cleaning and categorization to email personalization, account research, sales call analysis, and more.

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1/ Data Cleaning

Still, a lot of basic account and contact data aren’t clean in CRMs, so a lot of people still either hesitate to use variables like {firstName} or {companyName} in their outreach because they aren’t confident about the data or don’t really care and happen to be sending some “Hello Company Inc.”, and for the most rigorous spent hours cleaning lists in Gsheets. Using GenAI to clean at scale Contact data (firstName, lastName, title) and Account data (companyName) is a huge time saver for people who need to verify this data before actioning it (in email variables, for example) and preserve prospect experience. One way of doing that is to run a simple prompt, upstream or on top of your CRM (Clay or n8n can be used), to clean all the records and safely turn them into variables you can trust in your outreach.

Here is a prompt example that transforms a company name to its commonly used version, such as from ‘National Basketball Association’ to ‘NBA’, and from ‘Tableau, A Salesforce Company’ to ‘Tableau’, etc.

2/ Data Categorization

There are tons of applications to categorize data, but here are some classic use cases that many B2B SaaS companies could use:

• Persona & Seniority: For some roles, the variety of job titles - and how creative people get on LinkedIn (cc: “Growth”, “GTM Engineer” 🙃) - makes it hard to categorize them into clear functions, teams that actually make sense for your business. That’s why training AI to recognize the relevant keywords in job titles and map them to the right persona can be super valuable. It helps you be more exhaustive and granular when building persona lists, which is key for better segmentation, personalization at scale, or data analysis.

• People nationality/language: As a French company selling abroad, a classic play is to target French people based in your target countries. The common and easiest way to do that is by checking the LinkedIn profile language - but that’s limited since many French people list ‘English’ as their profile language. That’s why looking at additional attributes like schools, previous job locations… can help generate a broader audience of people who might be French and then pass their full name to the AI to tell you if it sounds French or not. You’d be surprised how a simple “Bonjour…” at the beginning of an email (and in the preview text) increases open and reply rates!

• Activity sentiments: Your Sales & Marketing teams likely generate a lot of engagements/replies, and it’s often a challenge to score or categorize them into Negative/Neutral/Positive sentiments - something that can be super useful to drive actions from Reps, avoid potential deals slipping through the cracks, or run data analysis. Pushing the last reply sentiment at the Contact level in your CRM can be a way to do so.

• Prospects LinkedIn missions: Going beyond job titles to segment and prioritize high-fit prospects is pretty advanced to do at scale (e.g., a Marketing Manager that specifically does ABM for example) - unless you manually review each LinkedIn profile and the missions they mention in their current and past roles. A good place to start is by playing around with the keyword search in LinkedIn Sales Navigator to generate a first list of contacts mentioning relevant terms. From there, you can train AI to identify the types of missions that match your criteria.

  Example: let’s say you’re selling a CRM and want to identify people who mention having implemented HubSpot in a previous role. There are so many ways to say "implemented"- you might see “set up,” “selected,” “led the implementation,” etc., which makes it a great use case for AI. However, it’s crucial to give clear guidelines on the expected output and iterate well on the prompt to avoid hallucinations. This high-quality audience will give you (i) confirmation they’re familiar with your space and one of your competitors, (ii) a signal they had enough seniority or influence to lead such a project, (iii) a scalable way to personalize with an icebreaker like: “Saw you implemented {vendorName} at {previousCompany} - curious how that experience was”.

  

3/ Account & Prospect Research

Some tools already automate account and prospect research, but most rely mainly on third-party data or public info such as recent news, LinkedIn profiles, etc. The problem? They lack context on your product, your positioning, and what truly matters for your prospects, as they don’t really leverage internal, first-party data - your real gold mine. What’s missing is the ability to feed AI with what makes your GTM strategy unique: relevant external signals, past Sales conversations, Marketing engagements, and internal knowledge (battle cards, enablement decks…). That’s how you bring relevance, specificity, and real differentiation - so GTM teams can craft a strong POV and stand out.

Here is an example of ‘AI Account Planner’ that centralizes data in one place, as it is often spread across multiple sources, and provides Reps with a clear and structured view to digest the information - rather than navigating through different tools and having to click through various CRM records, sections, websites, etc. The different sections are:

• Overview: firmographic data (from internal CRM)

• Documents & Summaries: 10-K or 10-Q reports available + the ability to input other documents with AI extracting/labelling the relevant information only

• Business Units: identify relevant subsidiaries (Business Units, Geographical Split…) - useful to spot gaps & ensure completeness of territories

• Contact Recommendations: highlight top prospects to quickly spot whitespace & drive action on account learning

• Recent News: relevant to the business and value proposition

• Gong Calls: previous call summaries and highlights

Tip: To save credits (and money), don’t generate an Account Plan for every account in your CRM. Instead, consider adding a trigger in Salesforce - like a button to generate it on demand, or automating the workflow so it only runs after a discovery call is booked, for example. The account research features of Tamtam.ai or Pocus can serve as plug-and-play alternatives.

4/ Email Generation

Data + AI + human brain for hyper-targeted outreach

With AI and the latest tools on the market, capturing valuable data is easier than ever. However, two key challenges remain:

1. providing the Sales team with the right level of information in the right system

2. making it easy to take action (removing friction between “I want to reach out” and actually hitting send)

It’s all about striking the right balance between data and human intelligence - to connect the dots, verify insights, and adapt the messaging for the most effective outreach.

Here is an example of internal tool to:

1️⃣ Let the Sales team surface key contacts in their territory with:

• Smart views (aka Sales plays) such as ‘reconnect with lost opportunities’, ‘my contacts with marketing engagements… to adopt the best practices of top-performing Reps

• Tailored contact level ‘Reasons to Engage’ based on Insights (such as new position, previous user…), Marketing engagements (attended an event, downloaded an eBook…), previous sales conversation (cold call from a past Rep, prospect included in a past demo), etc.

2️⃣ Support them by crafting a personalized email based on the above ‘Reasons to Engage’ and let them provide more context in the prompt so they can add metadata that wasn’t captured in the current engine or guide the prompt toward the right approach, tone of voice, etc.

Rather than a fully automated model, here we focus on a hybrid approach where the Reps can (i) guide the prompt based on recommended reasons to engage as we still believe the human brain is best to pick the most relevant information and (ii) verify and modify the content before pushing it to the Sequence, giving Sales Reps full control.

AI-generated replies for pre-event acquisition

Using outbound to drive registrations for events (webinars, product tours, in-person sessions…) is a repeatable way to engage prospects through a soft, low-pressure approach - especially those who aren’t ready to speak with Sales yet.

From our tests, we’ve seen better results when we don’t include the registration link in the first message. Instead, we ask if the event could be relevant for them or if they’d like to receive more details. It sounds more natural, improves deliverability, and tends to generate more replies.

The downside: the registration is not self-serve, which means we have to manually handle hundreds of replies for each campaign - and that becomes a real operational challenge as we scale.

To reduce the workload on people managing those responses, you can set up an AI-powered workflow that suggests a reply template based on the prospect’s message - whether it’s a no, a request for more info, or someone asking for the recording. The idea is to make it easy to modify and push a relevant answer into your Engagement tool, with light manual editing or personalization when needed.

5/ Conversational Agents

Most companies already use a conversation intelligence tool like Gong, Modjo, or Attention to record and analyze sales calls. Building a conversation agent on top of these call transcripts opens up a new layer of insight, enabling you to search and query across all calls to identify broader patterns. The goal isn’t just to focus on individual deals, but to aggregate conversations at scale and unlock strategic learnings.

For example, you can:

• Spot recurring pain points or patterns based on attributes like industry, company size, competitors used, or persona

• Gather competitive intel to understand why you win or lose against certain players - especially useful for Product Marketing

• Bridge the gap between your marketing messaging and how prospects actually talk - surfacing killer quotes you can reuse in cold emails or sales enablement. This is especially helpful when you're not the persona you're selling to and need to nail the right tone, wording, and verbatim.

Conclusion

GTM strategies are evolving fast, and adopting AI isn’t a nice-to-have anymore - it’s the baseline. While many teams are still discussing roadmaps or searching for the perfect tool to buy, some of the most impactful solutions are already being built in-house by those closest to the problems. Whether it’s a quick automation, a scrappy workflow, or a GPT-powered agent, internal builds can sometimes move faster than waiting on the ‘perfect’ vendor (who might not even exist yet or is in stealth mode as we speak!) selection or release.

Again, the solution depends on the current state of your GTM, the biggest pain, the stage of the company and its resources. It doesn't have to be over-engineered. Instead, when internal resources are lean and you don't have the human resources and bandwidth, it's easier to move with plug-and-play tools. These will help you go at the expected speed without complex and custom workflows. But as you grow, your strategy can (and probably should) evolve. Your organization isn't the same, and your processes are... yours. This means it becomes harder for (rigid) tools to tick all your boxes. With this in mind and more resources, it makes more sense to choose a compostable stack built around internal context, modular tools, and flexible workflows. This becomes a huge enabler for your GTM team.

At the same time, many Sales Reps & Marketers are already experimenting on their own, like building personal GPTs. As a RevOps or Growth team, one of the highest-leverage things you can do is to spot and centralize those innovations - turn them from shadow tools into shared capabilities, and help others benefit from what’s already working.

That said, it’s easy to get attached. Just because something was built internally doesn’t mean it has to stick around forever. If a better external solution comes along - one that scales better, requires less maintenance, or improves usability - that’s a good reason to evolve. It’s not a binary choice between building or buying. It’s a mindset shift: prototype quickly, remove friction, and stay agile. When the pain is high and the external options are clunky, build.

Because at the end of the day, the goal isn’t to build tools - it’s to generate pipeline and revenue, speed up decisions, and help GTM teams focus on what they do best: engaging the right people, at the right time, with the right message. It’s less about making the perfect call and more about keeping momentum.

Chances are, you’re already building. The question is whether those efforts are scalable and supported - or quietly buried in someone’s personal folder. With the AI revolution just beginning, staying curious, adaptable, and collaborative might be the real GTM advantage.

🧰 There are plenty of tools emerging in the AI & GTM tech space. Here are a few we recommend taking a look at:

• Cargo → AI workflows

• n8n → AI agent feature for workflows

• Actively → Account planning and AI-powered outreach

• Copy.ai → AI workflows

• Unify → capture signals, build plays and engage

• Attention → AI agents for Sales calls

• dust → build AI agents on top of your internal tools

• Pocus → AI agents that monitor accounts

• Tamtam.ai → AI agents for Meeting Prep, Account Mapping, Org Charts…

• folk → AI-driven CRM

• Topo → AI-SDR with humans driving the strategy

• Userled → AI-personalized marketing experiences

2. Listen to sales calls to understand the customer journey, prospect’s pain points, decision-making process, persona verbatim, and tone of voice - it will help craft relevant and impactful copywriting. Interview Sales reps to learn about how they prospect, their (own) definition of the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), their day-to-day challenges, what works and what doesn’t for them, and ask how you could help them to be successful.

3. Build a weekly or monthly reporting process where you share your learnings, results, main challenges, and next projects - don’t try to hide your challenges. Having significant results will likely take time to show your impact. This is why communication is key to sharing your progress and all the work behind generating results aka pipeline and revenue.

4. Identify opportunities for immediate impact with proven strategies and projects - don’t reinvent the wheel. Examples: help Sales Reps better source contacts using Surfe, set up your first sales triggers/intents using Datachimp or Lonescale, implement a visual prospecting strategy using Bannerbear…

5. Put yourself in the shoes of a BDR by doing their job for a few weeks. Goals: understand the whole prospecting process, be familiar with prospect objections, and book your first meetings on your own to build internal credibility - something key as your role will imply enabling and advising people.

6. Quickly identify operational challenges and work on processes that will need to be prioritized to deploy your first projects. Examples: CRM hygiene, Total Addressable Market (TAM) identification and mapping, set up of a unique key to properly sync data across your different tools and allow (clean) automation, etc.

7. Get an overview of the funnel metrics and understand how you can collaborate with marketing and synchronize the outbound & inbound motions (#AllBound) to drive demand and pipeline generation. One initiative can be to help with pre and post-event outbound to supercharge marketing events with highly qualified leads (the strength of Outbound is the proactive mindset and the ability to control the audience).

8. Don't spend too much time evaluating tools - leverage your peers who are in a similar industry/stage to make faster decisions and avoid errors people already made. Tools and data are commodities (i.e. LinkedIn scrapper, email enrichment…). In the same idea, don’t spend time building products that already exist → the value is in the outcome and it’s how you’ll use them that will make the difference!

9. Focus on operation, adoption, and making data and processes actionable for GTM teams (i.e. CRM data flows, Slack alerts..). A classic trap of Growth people is to “play” too much with data (i.e. spending too much time “scraping” data, trying to find “hacks”, or building fancy and complex automation) - get the shit done, make things operational for the teams, and focus on impact.

10. Adopt a creative mindset and high-velocity routine. Everyone does Outbound, it’s your capacity to find new ideas and iterate fast that will make the difference compared to the competition. Focus on what you control, input (audiences, experiment you launch), and hard work - there is no shortcut or secret!

📚 Some resources we recommend to level up your growth outbound skills and mindset:

• Practical Prospecting newsletter from Jed Mahrle - ex-Global Manager of Outbound Sales Development at PandaDoc

• Guillaume Cabane’s SaaStr talk about low budgets and lean Ops, and his video about “The Past, Present & Future of Growth”

• A new way to ABM from Hillary Carpio - Head of ABM at Snowflake

• Outbound Sales Fundamentals article from Clearbit

• How To Find Your Next Big Marketing Idea from Elena Verna - Interim, Head of Growth at Dropbox

• Unleashing Sales Potential: The Synergy of Sales Ops & Enablement by Maxence de Villepion - Co-Founder at Cargo

• Building a Sales Engine from Seth DeHart - Partner at Point Nine

• Outbound 101 For Marketing & Sales from Rachael Tiow - ex-Director ABM and Lifecycle Marketing at Auth0

• Brian Chesky (CEO of Airbnb) new playbook #Mindset&Velocity

👋🏻 Maki People & Pigment are hiring in Growth, Marketing, Ops, and Sales - don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions!

Since then, we had the chance to join new adventures, Maki People for Louis (HR tech, 20 employees, post-seed) and Pigment for Edouard (Fintech, 270 employees, post-Series C), and continue learning about Growth, Outbound, and Sales in B2B SaaS companies.

With the current economic situation, new technologies, the highly competitive environment… the Outbound game obviously evolved since 2021 and to drive results and be successful, you need more than ever to combine several ingredients:

• the right technical and operational setup: sourcing & enrichment tools, deliverability, tracking, GDPR, team alignment, AI…

• understand your prospects and the buying journey: the different channels, develop strong business acumen, customer intelligence, market trends…

• take into account prospect’s and stakeholder psychological bias: FOMO, peer recognition, Sales Rep's “fear”/”rejection”, etc.

We’ll share below a few thoughts and learnings from our current experiences and what we’ve seen by talking with peers:

1. A more and more complex buying journey that requires more relevant & consistent messaging across channels

2. The importance of being proactive and creative in a tough and competitive market

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1. A more and more complex buying journey that requires more relevant & consistent messaging across channels and teams

The power of multi-channel

We all know that the buying journey is complicated. It can start with a cold email, then the prospect can visit your website, go to G2 check your customer reviews and competitors’ ones, attend a webinar, etc.

We often see a lack of alignment, communication, and even some competition between channels (i.e. Outbound vs Inbound) and teams (Growth, Business Development vs Marketing). Whereas it’s so important to take into account all those components and get a consistent message through all the different channels your prospects can be in front of.

To answer this challenge, all the “Top-of-Funnel” teams need to sit down together, align on goals, segments they want to address, and build the right Ops processes.

At Pigment, we want to make sure that all the data and events (1st and 3rd party) captured by the Growth and Marketing teams are visible and actionable in the tools used by the Sales team. This is why we automatically push everything into Salesforce in two custom objects:

• Insights = external signals showing that a company is more likely to buy (for the best ones) or simply a way to improve outreach personalization by finding custom hooks/personalized icebreakers. It includes job postings, G2 and Website visits, Followers of our LinkedIn company page, previous Pigment users…

• Engagements = events/signals related to Marketing activities. It includes Demo Request Submission, Webinar Registration, Gated Content Download…

We also push all these events in the dedicated Slack channel we create for each opportunity we have with a prospect company. The goal is to align internal stakeholders in one place and make the information visible to the people who don’t have access or don’t go in Salesforce on a daily basis :

Industry-Based-Targeting

Industry-based targeting will help focus your growth strategy in which Growth, Marketing, and Sales collaborate closely to create personalized buying experiences targeting the same set of accounts.

At Maki People, we put in place an industry-based strategy to target top Enterprise accounts. Below, is an example of assets created to target Consulting firms. The idea is to align cold outreach and the content we created to educate our prospects.

The channels used:

• Cold outreach (email + LinkedIn)

• Product screenshots focusing on the use case

• Webinar

• PR

• Exclusive lunch with C-level

PS: we often saw BDRs don’t use the content created by the Marketing - it’s too bad! And at the opposite, Marketing teams don’t leverage enough Outbound to distribute the content to the right prospects.

The beauty of Outbound, as we like to say, is to have full control of who you target and to be proactive.

P.S. You can also have a look at the following article written by Maxence (Co-founder @ Cargo) about ABX.

Outbound takes time (even with the help of Intent data 😅), be patient and focus

There is more and more content about Intent data (i.e. triggers) and we talked about it in our previous article. Whereas it’s easier to use Intents with all the new tools on the market (Lonescale, Datachimp…) - we see many companies struggling to really show the impact and enable the Sales team to use it in a good way.

We see 3 main challenges (i) how you educate your Sales team on the importance of signals, (ii) how the data is pushed to the Sales team so they can easily use it, and (iii) how you leverage the data in your messaging/copywriting.

To answer those challenges, here are some examples of actions we put in place:

1. enablement: ownership of the Sales managers to allocate the accounts with Intents to their team

2. visibility: slack channels + custom object in Salesforce (cf screenshot in the section above) and Sales engagement tool (Salesloft, Outreach…)

3. engage: copywriting workshop, properties in your Sales engagement tool, and ready-to-use email templates/sequences

Something we both didn’t do enough in the past is to experiment more on the outreach part (copywriting, sequence steps, etc).

At Maki People, we don’t have for the moment the chance to have BDRs but that’s an opportunity to go further in the funnel and experiment a lot on the messaging part.

At Pigment, we recently decided that the BDR team will focus on the upper segments of our market (companies with > 1000 FTEs) and that the Growth team will now own the segment 500-1000 FTEs by implementing a fully automated outreach engine (by the way, Pigment’s Growth Team is hiring to work on this ambitious project).

An automated outreach engine (requiring data collection/transformation/ segmentation), combined with high creativity and copywriting skills, will allow you to strengthen and multiply your distribution efforts. This is beneficial for both sales prospecting and marketing initiatives like pre-event acquisition and content distribution, all while reducing Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC).

And when we talk about Intents, timing is of course key. That's why we've introduced a new CRM status at Maki People called 'Interested' at the contact level. This helps us better track positive engagements that could lead to meetings. Below is a concrete example:

1. A decision maker from a target account said that they’re hiring someone to manage what we offer

2. Two months after we identified this person thanks to the “New Hire” Intent

3. Meeting booked ✌🏻

2. The importance of being proactive and creative in a tough and competitive market

Outbound is even more complicated for two main reasons:

• the current economic environment and some companies freezing budgets

• the competition increases as it becomes easier to outreach people with the new great tools available on the market, AI and more companies double down on the Outbound motion as they have to adopt a more proactive and “aggressive” approach in this new environment

As a result, buyers are more than ever solicited. So, to drive results, you need to stand out even more than before!

Step back and proactivity

I think the first step is to realize these changes and understand what evolved for your prospects. Ask yourself these basic questions: are they still growing? do they still have the budget for your type of solution? what are their new priorities? For instance, if you sell a marketing software to manage ad spending, you should check on the platforms if they’re still investing in paid ads or if you sell an HRIS tool, it might not be the right timing if your prospect just announced a laid-off or hiring freeze. These changes are not an end in themselves and the idea is not to feel demotivated, but rather to adapt, talk with your team, and be able to try new things, change your ICP, your approach/message, and being even more creative.

Our advice when you work on a new strategy is to do things that don’t scale - start small, iterate, and be agile! Talking about agility, if you don’t have the internal resources (people, skills, or tooling) to launch or double down your Outbound engine, consider asking for external help could also be a good option (👋🏻 you can have a look at the agency Scalability or Growth freelancers - don’t hesitate to ping us if you want introductions).

Show, Don't Tell: Adopt a PLG "Attitude" in Your Outbound Motion

You have probably heard about the term PLG (Product Lead Growth) which has been very trendy in recent years and that we often contrast it with Outbound and Sales Lead motion.

In a classic (and old school 🤔) Sales motion, it’s only after a few meetings that the prospect has a chance to get an overview (or even just an idea!) of the product they are evaluating. If PLG has been a proven acquisition channel for many successful SaaS companies such as Figma, Slack, and Calendly, it’s because buying habits have changed and more and more users want to try before buying.

At Maki People and Pigment, we see great success by adding product screenshots in cold emails. If you’re creating a new category or replacing a legacy tool, it’s a great way to show how you differentiate and to make it easier to understand your value proposition for your prospects. And since both of our companies operate in competitive markets - the design and UX of the product are key differentiators in our cases, our main competitors are legacy players. As a bonus, if you’re able to personalize your visual assets based on use cases or prospect information like the logo, company name… you will stand out and show the extra mile!

Here is an example of a follow-up email that includes a personalized mockup that we could send to a prospect:

And an example of a real answer from a prospect after he received the mockup:

At Maki People - when looking at our best sequences and the content that drives more positive replies and meetings, we found that the following type of GIF that we used in a “bump email“ was a key asset (we personalized it based on the industry or a use case to be relevant):

Adopt a warrior mindset: focus on activities and launch new campaigns every week!

Sales is a numbers game. If you also have the chance to have a huge market to address - you shouldn’t be shy and have no excuses to send a high volume of emails (in a smart way of course). As Louis told one day to one of his interns (👋🏻 Marc Desazars) - we should not leave the office without reaching the email limit of all of the email addresses we use for automated outreach (you got the idea - it’s a mindset to have). Imagine your main competitor sends 500 emails/week and you 1000 emails/week - the difference at the end of the year in terms of results can be huge!

Recycling and combining your audiences could also be very powerful for reaching your objectives. That’s why it’s important to think long-term and create the right properties when importing data into your CRM or prospecting database. The more data you have, the easier it will be to create narrow audiences, resulting in more relevant messaging.

Example of an email (with the variables) from a campaign that combines two audiences previously launched:

Examples of data points from Maki People that ease building audiences directly from their CRM (Hubspot):

Be creative and always think about new ideas. Look at all new meetings booked, opportunities, customers, growth content shared on LinkedIn, news from your industry, past sequences analytics, etc…

Creativity and your capacity to try new things are a big competitive advantage!

PS: Pigment is hiring in Growth, Sales, and Marketing in EMEA and North America - you can check out the open positions here!

We (Louis and Edouard) have been running outbound strategies for 4 years now.

We started together at Kymono as full-stack Sales (from lead generation to closing customers).

We closed more than 250 companies within 18 months (including customers such as Uber, Lime, Sendinblue...) with a 100% outbound approach in France and the UK.

Full-stack work is a lot. It builds a diverse set of skills, but there's a reason very few people do it. What we really enjoyed was identifying the right companies and driving demand. This was fun, but A LOT of manual work. This is why we started to look at scraping and automation tactics to save time and scale our processes.

We decided that jumping into Le Wagon, a coding bootcamp, was the best and quickest way to develop our technical skills. It's thanks to this business and technical mindset that we moved to Growth roles.

Today, we both work as Growth Managers for eFounders fintechs. Louis works at Spendesk (300 employees - post Series C) and Edouard at Upflow (20 employees - post Series A). Even if our two startups are at a different stage, we share a common mission: generate revenue by identifying and leveraging repeatable acquisition channels, always in collaboration with the Sales team.

Introduction

Outbound is tough. There's no magic tool that will instantly level up your outbound results. The mix between a good mindset, powerful processes, and Sales collaboration will help generate qualified leads and focus your time on the most valuable tasks.

Your outbound strategy depends on many things like your market, the competitive landscape, your company stage, and your target persona. But, every successful outbound strategy is always a combination of three forces:

If you already run outbound campaigns from scratch, you probably went through these different stages:

• Define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

• Identify and track companies and contacts to target

• Enrich the data (firmographic information, emails, phone numbers...)

• Clean the data (wrong persona/title, emoji before the first name...)

• Import the data in the CRM

• Build the scenario and the copywriting (templates, scripts...)

• Launch the sequences + personalize your emails through an outreach tool

Salespeople often spend too much time doing these things manually instead of focusing on selling. It's often challenging to coordinate the sourcing and contacting stage when doing outreach. However, it's precisely targeting the right audience with the right message that is key in outbound.

One motto: Target the best companies with the right message and at the right time

As your Sales team is growing, Outbound can become even more challenging as you balance lead allocation, territories, volumes, message harmonization, and alignment between the different stakeholders (Growth/Marketing, Operations & Sales teams).

Outbound operations serve two key objectives:

1. Fill the Sales pipeline with the best leads to drive more conversations, more relevant and resonant messaging, and more timely interactions

2. Improve Sales efficiency and productivity to eliminate low-value tasks, put the right sales effort and focus on properly engaging leads

We’ll explain below a few tactics and processes we implemented to step up outbound efforts. Here are the different parts:

1. Find your ICP and best prospects

2. Leverage buyer intents

3. Build your enrichment and contact search processes

4. Leverage your CRM to personalize at scale

5. Visual prospecting

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1. Find your ICP and best prospects

The first thing you can do is to use your CRM to look at historical sales data. You should be able to identify patterns and better understand who are your best customers. Patterns can be:

• Firmographic data: industry, company size, revenue, technologies used...

• Psychographic data: title, seniority, background...

• SaaS metrics: MRR, Life Time Value (LTV)

• Product usage: # of event, # of users...

Ideally, your best customers have the highest LTV and the shortest Sales cycle.

Listening to Sales and Customer Success call recordings is also a good way to understand your prospects and customers (pain points, verbatim...). This is particularly important when you're pre Product Market Fit (PMF). This can change quickly, hence it's important to keep teams in sync.

At Spendesk (post PMF), the Growth team does this exercise 1 hour per week thanks to Modjo. It's super helpful to keep an eye on the ground and collaborate with Sales reps.

Last tip - look at inbound prospects and customers to find patterns. This can fill in blind spots, such as new industries and personas that you didn't think about during structured outbound.

Once you know your ICP and persona well, you can now start to find them on the Internet. Different sources you can use:

• LinkedIn/Sales Navigator

• Data providers: Crunchbase, DealRoom, Zoominfo...

• Rankings: Best YC startups...

You can also use technographic tools like BuiltWith to know which technologies your prospect is using and use these insights to calibrate your offer and messaging better. Let's imagine you're a SaaS business that integrates with CRMs (Salesforce, Hubspot...).

Here is what it looks like:

Gsheet function build with a homemade script

Now you have a good list of companies/prospects that you can target, the challenge is to find the right audiences that are likely to buy now. This is why using signals can help prioritize your outbound efforts.

2. Leverage buyer intents

Timing is key in Outbound.

"Bad timing" is one of the first "closed lost" reasons for many opportunities. Identifying buyer intents (an event showing that a company is more likely to buy now) will help you reach out to the prospects at the right time by leveraging a specific moment. Some examples include:

• Fundraising

• Job Offers

• New technology installed

• High growth

• New hired/position

• New customer signed

• G2 Buyer Intent feature

• Website visitors

• For example, at Spendesk, we use Albacross to identify website visitors (more info here about our process) and Asgard.ai to track job offers.

These intents are also a way to improve outreach personalization by finding custom hooks/personalized ice breakers. For example, with the hiring intent, you can find a lot of useful information in the job description like:

• Company priorities and specific missions

• Technologies used within the "experience in..." part

• The Key Decision Maker (KDM) and team structure

Here is an example of a job description with information we can leverage to personalize our outreach at Upflow:

NB: Just because you identified a signal doesn't mean that now is the right time to target your prospect. You should have a specific strategy and approach for each type of intent. i.e., Sometimes it's worth waiting a bit before using the signal. Examples:

• Fundraising announcement: It's generally a bad idea to contact them the same day of the announcement (C-levels are flooded with solicitations). Either you should wait a few days/weeks or find a way to identify the fundraise before it goes public (i.e., a startup that posts 15 new job offers the same day).

• Hiring a C-level: According to the role they're looking for, the approach can be different. If they're hiring a C-level, they are probably your (future) Key Decision Maker (KDM), so it's often better to wait until this new C-level joined the company. As you spotted the job offer and have it in your CRM, you know exactly his/her missions and can use it to personalize your outreach.

When you find an intent that works - the magic is that you have a repeatable bucket of accounts to target each week/month.

You've identified a list of companies with buying intents. Now it's time to enrich this data with company information and the relevant contacts.

3. Build strong enrichment and contact search processes

According to the volume of leads you need, your company stage, and resources (either internal resources or ability to buy tools), you have different ways to scrape and enrich companies and contacts data.

At Upflow, as we're still in early-stage with limited resources, we prefer using software like CaptainData to scrape LinkedIn and Dropcontact to find emails. On top of this stack, we use Integromat to connect these tools and build powerful workflows.

If you have an account-based approach, you've probably had trouble finding the right contacts for a given company. The easiest (and accurate) way to do it is going manually on each LinkedIn company page and scrolling each page to find and copy/paste all the interesting contacts for your company. Granted - It's very time-consuming, this is why at Upflow we've built a workflow to automate 90% of our contact search.

It's pretty straightforward: we input LinkedIn company URLs, and the workflow will automatically output all the contacts that fit our persona (in our case, the finance teams) with their emails.

Here is what it looks like with 10 input companies:

Workflow built with Integromat and several APIs such as CaptainData and Dropcontact

At Spendesk, we've built a Prospect Relationship Management (PRM) to set up a scalable lead generation engine. The idea is to have our Total Addressable Market (TAM) enriched with multiple data sources. Then, we are able to build buckets of leads and push them to our business tools like Salesforce or Salesloft thanks to Hightouch, a reverse ETL tool.

To give you a concrete example, at Spendesk, when we identify a C-level Finance who recently joined a company, we will:

1 - Send them an invitation to our community, CFO Connect, through an automated email.

2 - Notify a Sales Rep in Salesforce to outreach the person and congrats them for his new move and smoothly introduce Spendesk.

Here is an example of a workflow that we created with n8n (a workflow automation tool) - through which we've been able to scale & automate all the steps, from detecting the new hired on LinkedIn to the enrichment, all the way to the synchronization/import in our CRM.

Once all your data is ready, now is the time to activate it to generate meetings and opportunities!

4. Leverage your CRM to personalize at scale

As a Growth team, scraping thousands of datapoints & signals and having them in a database or a spreadsheet is cool and can be pleasant... but data is useless if it's not actionable to generate revenue.

Now, the crucial part is to push the right data to the right place. It's important to always have in mind that data is here to answer a specific need. One of the most important parts of Outbound Operations is ensuring that data/lead flow to sales is working properly. The goal is to make data easily visible and actionable for the teams.

Our CRM (Salesforce) is the source of truth for our prospection data (and where the Growth & Sales magic happens).

At Spendesk, we can import in our CRM 1000+ accounts and associated contacts per month. It’s so important to do it in a clean way from the beginning to avoid all the classic mistakes like duplicates, bad data, internal conflicts, etc.

When we have good data in your CRM, we are able and confident to use it in our prospecting tool and save precious time by having pre-written emails with relevant personalization.

Below, an example of datapoints we push for the Job Offer Intent:

All the extra mile that we can do for our Sales Team to gain in efficiency is a lot of time-saving for them, and at the end of the month, it's more time speaking with prospects ;)

5. Visual prospecting

Email boxes become more and more inundated and buyers overwhelmed - personalized images and gifs can be a good way to stand out. Here, we don't really talk about the classic photo of a Sales Rep and cup of coffee or a board with the prospect's name. It's not about personalizing just for the sake of it, it's about providing a better understanding of the value proposition, in a visual way.

Here are two examples of dynamics images/gifs we use at Upflow and Spendesk (the words underlined in yellow are dynamic variables):

• Upflow - personalized Customer portal with prospect data

This portal mockup shows to Loom's finance team how their customers, here Netflix (a real customer of Loom), could pay them in with Upflow.

• Spendesk - personalized Spendesk card

Example for Brest Metropole's finance team with a past Spendesk user who worked at Mailchimp.

Conclusion

When a good messaging and audience are reunited (Upflow)

Many people say outbound is dead, but if done correctly, powerful Outbound processes and personalization at scale are super helpful to find the best prospects, drive more resonant/timely interactions and help your Sales team eliminates low-value tasks. However, it's generally not enough to maximize outbound results - this is why having great BDRs with business acumen makes the difference to add high personalization and stand out with relevant messages.

We see many teams who think automation first, but you should avoid automating something (a process, a sequence...) without testing and validating it manually. Automation is not an end in itself: it's what you do when you need to scale. #doThingsThatDon'tScale.

We see Outbound Operations as a tactical support function to help BDRs maximize their productivity & focus on high value-add tasks, so they can ultimately book more meetings. The collaboration between Growth, Operations, and Sales teams is key, and they should share the same goal: generate revenue.

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Thank you to Max, Vincent, Charlie, Aleks, and Côme for the feedback and help!

P.S. Both Spendesk and Upflow are hiring in Sales, Marketing, and Growth. Feel free to reach out 👋

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