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This playbook generates 85 meetings per month and 2x the pipeline with only 2
sales reps
Table of contents
<aside>
Who should read this
This playbook is for you if:
→ You're already doing some outreach
→ You're a founder, sales or marketing leader at a B2B Tech Company
→ You want to put your pipeline generation on autopilot and own this process
in-house.
If most of it describes you, read on.
If not, read on too - it will just be not as relevant for you
</aside>
<aside>
What you'll learn
After reading this playbook you will:
→ Understand the 5 most important areas you have to master
→ Know how to always land in the primary inbox
5
→ Write relevant & personal emails with AI
4
→ Build your lists on autopilot
3
This playbook allowed our customers to 2x their pipeline in Q2 and book 85
2
meetings per month with C-level executives with only 2 reps.
1
</aside>

5 Areas to master for a full pipeline

There are 5 areas you need to master to build a successful outreach engine
that fills your sales pipeline.
. Understand your customers (Avatar)
. Valuable Offer (Offer)
. Secure outreach Infrastructure (Deliverability)
. Accurate list and contact data (List building)
. Relevant messaging (Copywriting)
Let’s go over each 1 by 1 briefly. The goal is to give you an overview of each
topic, not a comprehensive, detailed step-by-step guide. Although some
“gurus” would sell you this knowledge as an online course. Here it is for free.
Avatar
Your customer avatar describes the type of company you’re going after (= ideal
customer profile or ICP) as well as the people you specifically talk to (=buyer
personas).
The ICP outlines the company and how you can identify them. For example, the
industry they are in, the country they operate, the technology they’re using or
the number of employees they have
Your buyer persona is the summary of the goals this person is trying to achieve,
the current solution they are using and why they are not happy with it.
Example: Enablement
ICP
B2B Tech companies in EMEA, APAC or the East Coast of the US with 1-5 sales
reps selling to a white-collar audience who are already doing some outreach.
Persona 1: (Co) Founder / CEO / CRO
● Needs to build a full sales pipeline
● Needs to bring down CAC to increase run-rate / going back to profit.
● Understands that AI is a “now-or-never” situation and does not want
to be left behind.
Persona 2: Sales Director/VP Sales:
● Overwhelmed with sales-tech solutions out there
● Doing some outreach with apollo / lemlist etc. but sees results are
declining
● Wants to use AI & Automation to create personalized outreach at
scale.
● Wants to ensure the team is fit for the future and build processes in-
house rather than outsource them.

Offer
Money follows value. The more you provide, the more you get. Thus, the goal of
your offer is to be perceived as valuable as possible.
Think of value as the following equation:

As a numerator, you have the desired outcome your customers are trying to
achieve
As a denominator, you have any frustrations that your buyer has in getting to
that outcome.
Thus, your job is to present the numerator as high and the denominator as low
as possible. In other words: more upside, less downside.
Using these building blocks, you can now create your offering statement. Using
the following structure: You get {{dream outcome}} in {{Time}} without
{{common objection or undesirable solution}}.

Example: Enablement
Desired Outcome: Create a full sales pipeline on autopilot
Frustrations: Hiring a big BDR team or depend on a lead-gen agency.
Our Offer:
We enable you to create a full sales pipeline on autopilot in 12 weeks without
needing a big BDR team or depending on a lead-gen agency.
Use this offering statement (or a variation of it) throughout all your
communication:
● Website
● LinkedIn Profile
● Outreach
● Ads
Email Deliverability
If your email does not get opened and read, what’s the point of spending all this
time researching leads, paying for the contact data and writing a relevant
message?
Thus, you want to ensure your Emails land in the primary inbox - not in
“updates”, “promotions” or even worse “spam”. The spam filters of Google and
Microsoft are getting better every day and it’s their job to protect the precious
real estate that is a senior manager’s inbox.
However, they don’t know if you’re the next prince from Nigeria who wants to
send me gold or if you have something valuable to offer. So when in doubt, the
filters block you.
Thus, your email needs to look as trustworthy as possible. This is where email
deliverability comes into play.
Email deliverability is table stakes, and yet so many marketing & sales teams
never even heard of the term. A customer recently sent me the text below on
Slack. It wasn’t just him who facepalmed. Don’t be like his marketing team.

Email Deliverability Basics

To ensure a high email deliverability, there are 3 main areas that you need to
take care of:
. Sender Reputation
. Email Content
. Sending Infrastructure
. Sending Behaviour
Let’s have a look at each area to give you an overview.
Sender Reputation
The sender's reputation consists of 3 aspects. The reputation of your domain,
of your IP address and your inbox.
Domain reputation
This refers to the overall trustworthiness of your domain and is built up over
time. Multiple factors go into this but most importantly don’t raise any red flags
(high spam score, bounce rates, low reply rates etc.)
IP Address
The IP address refers to the specific server where your emails are sent from,
which is typically the same server that hosts your inbox. If you're using a
Google or Microsoft inbox, you'll usually share the server (and the IP) address
with others. Thus, one bad sender may affect the IP's reputation. Google /
Microsoft have sophisticated systems to identify and isolate problematic
senders, protecting the overall reputation of their IPs and domains. They
manage this process automatically, so you don't have to actively monitor it.
If you're using your own server or get your inboxes from an SMTP provider like
maildoso or mailreef, this becomes a much bigger concern and needs to be
actively monitored. Therefore, we recommend you stay with Google and
Microsoft inboxes unless you're very experienced already or have specific
needs that require a different setup.
Sender Engagement
The sender's engagement describes the way people respond to your
messages. As a rule of thumb, the goal here is to have a high response rate and
a low spam report rate. How to ensure that will be the main content of this
playbook later on.
Email Content
This refers to the specific content of your emails. You want to make sure you
don’t use any spam trigger words and send out the same email in large
volumes.
Most email-sending platforms (ESP) have a built-in spam checker, but they are
the words you’d expect (FREE, make money, win big etc.).
To ensure that you don’t send out the same message at high volumes, you want
to use AI personalization (more on that below) and spintax. If you set up spintax
it randomly changes certain words in a sentence without changing its meaning.
For example, change Hi {{firstname}} to Hello {{firstname}}. Again, most ESPs
have that function built into them.
Sending Infrastructure
This refers to the technical part. Most importantly, you want to authenticate
your domain and appear as a trustworthy party. You do this by setting up your
SPF, DMARC and DKIM records properly. Depending on whether you’re using
Google or Microsoft, the details slightly change, but there are tons of step-by-
step guides on how to do it. Just google it or search on YouTube.
You can then test your setup and inbox placement with Glockapps.
Sending Behaviour
Again, the main point is to appear as a normal, trustworthy party. A trustworthy
party does not send 1000s of emails at the same time and does so just once.
You want to spread out the workload. The best practice here is to stay below 25
emails per day (with a variance of 10-20%) and send them in randomised
intervals between each email.

Action steps Email Deliverability

The actions to ensure maximum deliverability are a mix of protection and
prevention.
Multi-domain, multi-inbox setup
The cornerstone of protection is a multi-domain, multi-inbox setup. That means
instead of sending from your primary domain you use a secondary domain.
Furthermore, you set up multiple inboxes to spread the sending volume across
them. If one domain goes down, you can easily replace it and lose only a few
inboxes instead of your main domain.
. Calculate the number of domains and inboxes you need. Use this
formula:
Number of emails per month = number of leads * 3 emails per lead
Number of inboxes = Number of emails / (25 emails per inbox * 25 days of
sending p.m) Number of domains = number of inboxes / 2
. Purchase the domains from Godaddy. Do not use domain resellers.
. Create Google and Microsoft workspaces add the domains and set up
2 inboxes per domain. We usually recommend a 60/40 split between
the two providers.
. Redirect the domains to your main domain.

Spintax
You want every email to be at least 80% unique. You can do that in 3 ways
. Write every email manually
. Use AI to create personalised statements
. Use spintax
#1 is not a viable option. With #2 you have to be careful not to use one of those
AI first-line generators that are built into most email sequencers. They will write
something personalised that usually has nothing to do with your solution. “Hey
saw you also went to the HSG in St. Gallen” is personalised but it has 0 relation
to your offering (unless you’re organising an alumni event). Thus, you’ll have to
custom-create these AI statements yourself in a tool like clay.
<aside> <img src="/icons/bookmark_gray.svg" alt="/icons/bookmark_gray.svg"
width="40px" />
Example: Enablement
We’re using domains like goenablement.com, meetenablement.com,
teamenablement.com, getenablement.com etc. and have a 60/40 split between
Google and Microsoft
</aside>
List building
When you build your list of prospects, you have 2 ways of doing this: Static or
dynamic.
Here’s an overview of the two types of list-building
Static lists
Most salespeople start here. Every time they want to run an outreach
campaign, they use a tool to build a one-time list of accounts or people who fit
certain filter criteria. Sales Navigator and Apollo are the most well-known ones.
This makes it very easy to set up, as all you have to do is give your salespeople
a licence, and they can go and click their list together.
Suppose you’re looking for something more specific. In that case, you can also
scrape directories (like industry or partner directories) or regulatory bodies if
you’re looking for asset managers with a specific license.
A third source for static lists is conferences. If you have a ticket to an event,
there’s usually an app where you can see all the attendees to network with. You
can scrape that list of attendees.
Lastly, you can create a list of companies that are using a certain tool (ex. all
companies in Germany that use HubSpot).
The benefit of static list building is its speed, especially with B2B Databases.
It’s very easy to create a list of target accounts and people. These lists are then
usually well-targeted and generally fit your ideal customer profile.
However, there are multiple downsides.
First, this is always ad-hoc. Every time you want to run a new campaign, you
have to create a new list and thus it creates work.
Secondly, the targeting usually is just a broad application of filters, and you
don’t have a compelling event that you can use as an intent signal. Thus, you’ll
have to do that later on during the data enrichment process.
Third, suppose you’re using directories, conferences or tech stack databases.
In that case, you’ll have to do a lot of data enrichment as the data is usually
very unstructured and misses key information such as the company domain,
LinkedIn profile or email address.
All-in-all, static list building is a good starting point when you don’t have much
experience yet and you need to launch something fast or if your target
audience fits very specific criteria (events, directories or tech stack).
Dynamic lists
Modern outreach is always centred around a compelling event that indicates
that a company or person is having a problem and thus might be open to a
solution. Dynamic list building uses these events as a starting point. There are
multiple signals that you can use but some of our most successful ones are:
● job openings
● job changes
 ● LinkedIn engagements
● website visitors
● industry news
While these triggers give you a compelling event to reach out to, they also give
you a huge list of companies that may not fit your ICP. Thus, you’ll have to filter
for that first.
Dynamic lists allow you to create and run campaigns continuously. Once the
automation is set up, you no longer have to do anything. This is always the
endgame and one of the core principles of the allbound flow we’re about to
show you.

Copywriting
If you’ve created a well-defined avatar, and have a convincing offer and a highly
targeted list, writing a banger email is very easy. All you have to follow are a few
principles. You can remember them by the SES (Short, Easy, Soft)

Short
Keep your copy short, between 50-100 words. If your message has more
words, it’s too long and too complicated. Your prospects read your email on
their iPhones while going to work. Who has time to read a wall of text from a
stranger?
Easy to read
Skip the fancy marketing lingo, you don’t have to impress the reader with
sophisticated language. This is not high school where you have to sound
eloquent. Write like a 6th-grade student.
Soft ask
Don’t ask for the 15-minute meeting next Wednesday at 2 pm. Make a soft ask
and offer something in return. “If I’d build you a free AI-driven email campaign
for free, would that be valuable to you?”
The hardest part is principle #2 - easy to read.
Let’s have a look at this email that landed in our inbox:

The email is short (72 words) and ends with a soft CTA “Would you like to try
{solutionname} for free?” There are much better CTAs but it’s not bad.
However, the language (15th-grade English) is too complicated and does not
accurately describe the problem. Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking
about “transforming HR management into a streamlined, empowering
experience.”
You have to describe the problem in the words of the customer, how they would
complain about it to their husband or wife at home. They would say something
like:

“We got 15 new job applications today. They are now all in a spreadsheet and I
have to manage them there. There’s no way to properly prepare for those
interviews. And I have the annual employee reviews coming up next week. I
have to go through the 24 different google drive folders to check the goals we
set together with them last year. This drives me nuts. I spend more time looking
for stuff than actually helping & developing my employees. No wonder people
leave us after only 18 months.”

You can extract multiple problems out of that statement:

. Managing job applications and preparing for interviews
. Managing employee records and preparing annual reviews
. Increase employee satisfaction and retention.
Let’s rewrite the message by focusing on problem #1

Hi {firstname}
Saw you had 15 applications to your BDR job. Some companies are still tracking
those job applications in spreadsheets.
This manual work then gives you no time to prepare for the interviews and ask
the right/tricky questions.
Acme’s AI would allow you to screen each candidate, see if they have the “cold
calling experience” you’re looking for and give you personalized questions
based on their CV.
Happy to run those candidates through the AI and give you the report for free.
Would that be helpful?
If you now use hemingway to analyse the message, you see this:

This email is only 90 words long and uses 7th-grade English. More importantly,
it focuses on a very specific problem and offers a personalised solution
(highlighting the specific skillset they are looking for based on the job
description)
You can now A/B test this version against the other 2 problems mentioned
above with a slightly adjusted problem and solution statement.
This is the level of relevant and personalised copywriting that is considered the
gold standard now. If you’re not writing messages like that, you need to start
there. This is exactly what we help our clients achieve and outperform the
competition in highly competitive markets like edu-tech, marketing tech, sales
tech or fintech.

How to automate it all

After covering the key pieces of the puzzle, it’s time to put them together. How
can we build lists, filter out relevant leads, get their contact details and write
hyper-personalised and relevant messages - all on autopilot?
To illustrate this and walk you through it step by step, we’re going to create an
improved email. We’ll share all the tools & templates you need to build this
yourself below.
First, you need to create a list of companies that fit your ICP and a relevant
trigger. Let’s say our ICPs are European tech companies with 200-2000
employees. As discussed above, there are 2 approaches to doing this.
Option 1:
We build a static list (for example from Apollo or sales navigator) and then find
a relevant signal that we use for our outreach. In order to always have a relevant
signal, we run them through a “waterfall”, i.e. we look for a signal (open jobs),
then we look for the next (tech stack, then the next (recently changed jobs) etc.
This would look something like this:
We already talked about the downsides of this approach. It requires you to
manually build lists. So let’s go with option 2.
Option 2:
For this we would have to scrape companies that are currently hiring, what
position does not matter as our HR solution is universal. We can do this with a
solution like trigify.io but the simplest (and almost free) solution is apify. So
let’s use that.
You can set up this automation to run once a month and then send the results
to a clay table. There you’re going to qualify the accounts, i.e. check if they fit
your ICP and create the personalised message.
In Clay you do the following:
. Filter for ICP fit In the example, the only filter is that they are DACH
DACH-based company that is currently hiring (the way we build the list
ensures that) and that they have between 200-2000 employees.
The scrapes provide you with all the necessary information to filter out the
companies that are not a good fit
. Find the contact person Once you’re sure you want to reach out, you
have to find the right contact person(s). Clay offers a native feature for
that (”Find people at company”). We’re looking for “HR managers” and
“head of HR”
. Get their email Instead of using just one email provider, we use up to
10 email providers to make sure we get the maximum coverage. If one
database does not have a valid email, we check the next one - until we
find the right email (or run out of databases to check).
. Use AI to write personalisation Now we have everything we need
. Companies that fit the ICP
. The right person to talk to
. Their email address
. Context & Input data to write a personalised email
. We now feed all the data we have (job description, number of
applicants etc.) into OpenAI via API call and let it write the entire email
for us. Make sure to provide clear instructions and give a couple of
examples.
. Add to an email campaign
The last step is to add the leads to your outreach platform. We
recommend using smartlead for emails and heyreach for LinkedIn.
This is what the final clay table looks like
And here’s an example of the AI-generated email that matches the email we
wanted to create.

Because this was all done by AI, every email is slightly different. Thus, you
don’t have to use spintax. I’ve linked the table in the tool section below so
you can just copy it.
Once you get a response, we use our own tool (inboxmanager) to analyse all
the responses, classify them with AI (i.e. positive or negative?) and sync the
positive ones into the CRM.
From there, the sales reps get a task in the CRM (incl. the whole
communication history) to respond to the lead via email or phone and schedule
the meeting.
Here’s an overview of the entire workflow and which tools to use:

As you can see, the workflow “feeds itself” with new leads and runs everything
automatically until you get a positive response. You can do the same thing with
other trigger events like job changes or social media engagements.

Tools you need

Here’s an overview of all the tools you need to run this type of outreach. Make
sure you use our links for bonuses like 3000 free clay credits.
 Use Case Tool Link
Build static lists apollo apollo.io
Build dynamic lists trigify.io trigify.io
Find any data point clay clay.com (3000 free
credits)

Here the table i’ve

used above
Find emails prospeo prospeo.io
Find phone numbers BetterContact bettercontact
and email (Waterfall
enrichment)
Send emails smartlead smartlead.ai
Automate Linkedin heyreach heyreach.io
As you can see, there are quite a lot of tools that you have to master. There is
no silver bullet or magic AI agent that solves this for you. You have to build your
own Outreach Engine. To do that you have 3 options.
. You can go the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) route and through trial and error
build it yourself. It’s great, because you are independent and fully
understand how everything works. However, tit took me 12 months to
figure it all out myself.
. You hire a lead-gen agency with proven results. It’s great because it’s
fast. But you depend on them and will have to pay them a $ 5’000
retainer every single month (you get what you pay for).
. You work together with a partner that enabled 75+ B2B tech
companies to build an outreach engine. You get to take a shortcut
because you can use all their knowledge, frameworks and especially
plug-and-play templates. At the same time, you’re fully independent in
the long run because you set up the tools and know-how yourself.
Here’s a visual representation of that.
Customer bound.co chose option 3 and was able to 2x their sales pipeline in
just 90 days. CRO Amit Puri talks about it in this video.
If you want to achieve the same results, we should talk and see if we can help.
Use the link below and apply for a strategy session, where we analyse your
current situation and give you a step-by-step roadmap on how to build your
own outreach engine.
Apply now with the link below
Take the next step and schedule a strategy session