Cold outbound
From an empty list to a booked meeting.
Outbound has four steps and most teams buy a different tool for each one. Find the companies, find the people, send something worth replying to, and make it easy to say yes. Signal does all four, which is why the list and the pipeline never drift apart.
14 days free. No credit card.
- 14 days free
- No credit card
- Unlimited users
The problem
Four tools, four bills, four lists.
And none of them agree with each other by the end of the month.
Why outbound stalls
The list is exported and goes stale
Pulled out of a data tool into a spreadsheet, uploaded into a sequencer, and out of date within weeks. Nobody can tell what has already been contacted.
The follow-up stops at one
Almost nobody replies to the first email and almost nobody sends the fourth. That gap is where most outbound revenue quietly lives.
A reply turns into six emails
Somebody says yes, and then the meeting takes a week to arrange, by which point the interest that made them reply has cooled off.
How it works
Four steps, one system.
The motion
Find the companies, then the people
Describe who you sell to in plain words and Prospect Spark finds companies that match, with the decision-makers on them by job title. Reveal email and phone when you are ready to use them, and everything lands on a record rather than in a download.
- 2,000 fresh prospects a month on Launch, 5,000 on Drive and 13,000 on Command
- Decision-makers by role rather than a switchboard number
- No export, so the list and the pipeline are the same records
Send something a person would answer
Three steps from your own inbox with a gap you set, personalised where it counts, stopping the second somebody replies. Written to be read by a human being rather than optimised for a send volume.
- Gmail or Outlook, so it arrives from you with your signature
- Merge fields for name, company and job title
- ANI drafts against your ICP when the opener is the blocker
And make the yes easy
A booking link in the sequence means a warm reply becomes a meeting in one message. The booking stops the sequence, creates the meeting on the deal and puts the follow-up in your day list.
- A booking link they can use from the email
- The sequence stops, because a booking is an answer
- Straight onto the pipeline, with nothing retyped
Doing it properly
How not to ruin your domain.
The fastest way to destroy outbound is to treat it as a volume exercise. A few honest rules.
Six rules
Send from your own inbox
Your address, your signature, your sending reputation. Never a shared relay the filters already know.
Start with ten, not two hundred
Read every reply, including the blunt ones. They tell you more than any open rate will.
Relevance beats personalisation tokens
A first name in the subject line fools nobody. Being right about their problem is the personalisation that works.
Stop on reply, always
On by default. Chasing somebody who already answered is the quickest way to lose a warm prospect.
Watch deliverability per sequence
It is shown per sequence, so you can tell a message problem from a list problem before it becomes a domain problem.
Fix the opener, not the volume
The first email decides everything. If it is not working, sending more of it makes things worse.
Getting started
A first campaign this week.
Four steps
- 20 minutes
Describe your customer
Industry, size, area and the titles that matter. Plain words.
- 2 minutes
Connect your inbox
Gmail or Outlook, and set the sender name people will see.
- 30 minutes
Write three steps
One opener, two follow-ups. Short beats clever, every time.
- Day two
Enrol ten people
Read what comes back, change the opener, and go again.
Also for
Where else this lands.
Other pages
Questions
Outbound questions, answered.
Do I need a separate data subscription?
No. Prospecting data is part of Signal, with weekly look up and reveal limits metered on the workspace rather than per seat. More on sales intelligence.
Will this get my domain blocked?
Sending from your own inbox, at a sensible volume, to people who match your ideal customer, is ordinary business email. Signal shows deliverability per sequence so a problem is visible early. Volume without relevance is what ruins a domain, and no tool fixes that.
How many emails should a sequence have?
Three is a good place to start: an opener and two follow-ups. The second and third are where most replies come from, which is exactly why manual follow-up fails.
Can ANI write the emails?
It can draft from your ideal customer profile, or tighten something you wrote. You review and edit before anything is enrolled, and nothing sends until you start the sequence. More on ANI.
What about cold calling?
Calls sit in the same activity list, with a call queue you can build from a filtered list. Connect your own Twilio account and you can dial from the browser. See the integrations.
How long before outbound works?
Longer than anyone selling you software will admit. Expect to rewrite the opener twice before it earns replies. What Signal changes is that you find that out from real data in a fortnight rather than a quarter.
Question not answered here? Ask ANI and get a straight answer.
Start the first campaign this week.
14 days free. No credit card. Unlimited users from the first minute.