An outbound engine that books demos while the sales team sleeps
A B2B SaaS startup's pipeline depended entirely on founder hustle and inbound luck. We built a compliant, deliverability-safe outbound system — sourcing, verification, personalization, and sequencing — that turned prospecting into a background process.
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- more demos booked, quarter over quarter
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- prospects processed monthly
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- email bounce rate — down from 19%
The challenge
Where it started
The two account executives were supposed to spend their days closing — instead they spent mornings building lists in Apollo and afternoons apologizing for follow-ups they'd forgotten. A previously purchased lead list had bounced 19% of its emails and landed their main domain on the edge of spam filters.
Growth targets assumed a steady demo pipeline. Reality was feast-or-famine: whichever week someone found time to prospect, results followed two weeks later — and then dried up again.
The approach
What we built
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1
Repair deliverability first
New sending domains, properly warmed over three weeks, with SPF/DKIM/DMARC configured and the main company domain permanently out of the cold-email business.
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2
Source and verify continuously
Clay pipelines pull prospects matching their ideal customer profile weekly — industry, headcount, tech stack signals — then enrich and triple-verify every address. Under 3% bounce, by contract with ourselves.
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3
Personalize with evidence
OpenAI drafts openers citing each prospect's actual context — a job posting, a tech migration, a funding round — reviewed in batches, never sent blind.
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4
Sequence, detect, hand off
Instantly runs multi-touch sequences with reply classification: interested replies create HubSpot deals and Slack alerts; opt-outs are suppressed forever; out-of-offices reschedule themselves.
The stack
- Clay
- Apollo
- Instantly
- OpenAI
- HubSpot
- n8n
The results
What changed
Prospecting became infrastructure. The AEs' calendars fill from a system that processes 1,200 prospects a month at a 2% bounce rate, demo bookings rose 41% in the first full quarter, and pipeline reviews now discuss close rates instead of activity guilt.
“Pipeline stopped depending on whether someone remembered to follow up. Demo bookings are up 41% quarter over quarter.”
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