#27 — SDRs on autopilot with programmatic outbound (pOutbound)
July 31, 2024•4 min read
Why it matters: Outbound sales remains effective in 2024 despite claims of its demise, but requires evolution. Harrison Rose, co-founder of GoodFit, achieved impressive results with programmatic outbound campaigns using minimal resources and no SDRs.
By the numbers:
- 6% actionable response rate
- 40% meeting booked rate from responses
- 80% meeting-to-opportunity conversion
- £125k pipeline generated from just 250 companies
The big picture: While AI is changing go-to-market strategies, the core principles of effective outbound remain unchanged. Rose's approach focuses on market mapping, tight audience building, and scalable touchpoints rather than expensive, human-intensive methods.
How it works: The process follows five key steps:
- Map your market (identify serviceable companies)
- Build targeted audiences (so specific "the messaging writes itself")
- Configure sequences (focus on scalable touchpoints like email and LinkedIn)
- Deploy automation tools (not SDRs)
- Measure, iterate, and scale
Case Study: How GoodFit Built Their Programmatic Outbound Engine
The challenge: GoodFit, a data provider for sales and marketing teams, faced two major constraints when launching outbound campaigns in 2024:
- Zero sales staff/SDRs
- Zero dedicated budget
Market context: They operated in a highly competitive space with hundreds of new entrants monthly and established players like ZoomInfo. The industry was notorious for overselling and underdelivering on data quality promises.
Step 1: Market mapping
GoodFit first identified their serviceable available market (SAM) by establishing clear qualification criteria:
- Companies with 5+ sales team members
- Companies not selling into niche audiences (SAM must be 1k+ accounts)
Using their own data tools, they trained a machine learning model to identify companies matching these criteria with 90% accuracy. This process yielded 3,639 serviceable companies.
Step 2: Audience building
Rather than targeting their entire SAM at once, GoodFit created tightly defined audience segments:
- They started with lookalike campaigns targeting cybersecurity companies
- This yielded 114 highly qualified companies for their initial campaign
- They maintained strict qualification filters to ensure all targets were truly serviceable
Rose emphasized: "Your audience should be so tight, so specific... that your messaging writes itself".
Step 3: Sequence configuration
GoodFit designed a streamlined sequence consisting of:
- 6 total touchpoints over 11 days
- 4 email messages and 2 LinkedIn messages
- No dynamic snippets that could break and damage brand reputation
Their messaging followed a simple formula for each industry:
- "You are in X industry"
- "You probably need Y data points"
- "Can I enrich an account with them?"
Step 4: Tooling deployment
The technical implementation involved:
- Syncing all 3,600 accounts to HubSpot CRM
- Tagging companies by campaign/audience
- Building contact lists filtering out those already being worked
- Exporting these lists to Lemlist for automation
- Configuring both email and LinkedIn touchpoints through Lemlist
Step 5: Results and iteration
For their first month's cohort:
- 250 companies (approximately 480 contacts) targeted
- 6% actionable response rate (exceeding 3% expectation)
- 73% of responses came via LinkedIn, 27% via email
- 40% meeting booking rate from responses
- 80% meeting-to-opportunity conversion
- 5 opportunities created worth approximately £125k in pipeline
Cost analysis: GoodFit's only direct expense was "a number of seats with Lemlist costing in the low thousands p/a." Rose notes that "for the typical cost of an SDR you can run the above stack without issue" while matching response rates and significantly reducing overhead.
Key insight: By qualifying accounts during market mapping and focusing on lookalike audiences with strong reference customers, GoodFit ensured that by the time prospects were on a call, they were "super qualified, de-risked in terms of needs, and easy to convert to opps".
The company has since continued enrolling more companies into their programmatic outbound engine, seeing consistent results while experimenting with new campaign types.
Between the lines: Rose achieved these results with zero SDRs and minimal budget by prioritizing scalability over perfection. His team used only email and LinkedIn touchpoints, avoiding resource-intensive activities like cold calling or personalized videos.
What they're saying: "Your outreach is only as good as the people it gets sent to. Something many have forgotten," says Rose. "How we go-to-market is evolving, has always evolved, and if you don't also evolve, you're gonna get left behind."
The bottom line: For the typical cost of one SDR, founders can implement this entire stack and achieve comparable response rates while significantly reducing overhead and increasing productivity.
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