🚀 How to start outbound sales from scratch?

3 tactics to start outbound sales

🎯 Focus on fit

• Focus on finding a target account list before writing any copy; balance between relevance and scale of prospects matters more than clever copy

• Identify your 5-10 happiest customers and find lookalike companies that share similar traits (e.g. industry, company size, tech stack, buying trigger, core pain points) using tools like Ocean.io, Google, or ChatGPT

• Avoid the urge to spray-and-pray outreach; build a focused list of a few hundred highly relevant prospects, and personalize messaging

📨 Invest in deliverability and infrastructure to experiment

• Validate emails using tools like FullEnrich to reduce bounces and protect domain health

• Warm up your domains and mailboxes with providers like Smartlead, Salesforge or Lemlist

• Test your emails scientifically, in small batches, with defined personas and hypotheses

  • Keep email volumes low (10 emails per inbox per day) while testing to avoid deliverability issues 

• Use spintax (text variations like [Hi|Hello|Hey]) to ensure emails don’t look identical and reduce likelihood of getting flagged as spam

• A 1-3% positive reply rate signals emails are landing and your infrastructure is working

⚡ Blend outbound with intent-based triggers

• Build pipeline by layering outbound with these real-time triggers:

  • LinkedIn profile views

  • Post engagement

  • Job changes and promotions

  • New funding announcements

  • Hiring spikes in relevant roles

  • Company news and product launches

• Treat every trigger as an opportunity to start a conversation (e.g. manually review LinkedIn profile visitors. If a visitor matches the ICP, add to a tailored follow-up sequence within 24-48 hours. Reference the context and keep it natural.)

• Deep research may not always be feasible, but the outreach should clearly reflect personalized context (e.g. real-time triggers, a challenge they are likely facing, etc)

2 traps to avoid

🚨 Outsourcing outbound too early

• Early outbound is where founders figure out message-market-fit; it’s not just writing emails, it’s learning what makes the market tick

• Handing it off too soon kills the learning loop that sharpens positioning, objections, and ICP clarity

• Hand off to a jack-of-all-trades GTM hire or RevOps lead only after messaging consistently converts and a repeatable motion exists

🚨 “Pitch-slapping” on first interaction

• Avoid “pitch-slapping” with immediate demos and hard sells 

• Replace with thoughtful engagement:

  • Comment with substance before sending a DM

  • Reference something specific to the prospect’s role or company

  • Share relevant content before asking for time

1 tool to leverage

📖 Best practice on doing LinkedIn outbound

• Alumni outreach still works; a LinkedIn search filtered by persona and university can lead to hundreds of high-intent alumni with a 20%+ reply rate

• Leverage tools like Dripify to automate Linkedin outreach for lead generation and sales outreach

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