348 warm leads sent straight to sales

Hey there,

Matteo here from Kinetyca.

I wanted to share a recent story of a client project. One of the first things we heard on this project was a single line about the client's outbound. The person running their web strategy called it "basically nonexistent."

That was fair. The client is a $100M ARR IT software company that had grown on inbound alone. They had tried outbound once, with another agency, and it left the team unsure outbound could work for them at all.

So they wanted one clear answer: can outbound add to the inbound baseline? They also wanted marketing to become a signal provider for sales.

Here is how we built it, and where the best list turned out to be.

01Strategy before any sending

After a first attempt that went nowhere, we started with the plan, not the sequences.

• Workshops to define the ICP, map the market and pick which plays to test first.
• Deliverables agreed before every new phase, so both teams always knew what was coming.

02Test before scaling

We did not pick a channel on day one. We ran two approaches side by side and let the replies decide.

• Cold email and LinkedIn to IT and security leaders at large companies, plus lookalike lists built from their existing customers.
• ABM plays running alongside, compared against cold outbound before deciding where to invest.
• The ABM plays replied far better, so that is where the work went

That comparison changed the question. It stopped being "does outbound work for us" and became "which kind works for us"

03Four plays, always on

Four ABM plays earned a permanent place.

• Closed-lost deals, once they have been closed for six months.
• Past champions who changed jobs.
• Website visitors not yet in their systems
• Event attendees, reached before the event.

The closed-lost play has one extra step. Each contact is checked first, still in the role and email still valid, and only then enriched. An old deal is only worth reopening if the person on the other end is still there.

04Built inside Salesforce

Their sellers don't want to jump between tools, so the system had to live where they already work.

• Clay and Salesforce are fully synced, so every play reads from Salesforce and writes back to it.
• Every play checks Salesforce first. Active customers are left out, and existing leads get a different approach from net-new companies.
• Each lead arrives with a note on where it came from, and their own routing sends it to the right rep.

The check-first step does more than it looks. It is what keeps a current customer from getting a cold email from a company they already pay.

05Sent by their own sales team

The last piece was who the emails come from.

• Closed-lost emails go out from the mailbox of the rep who owned the deal, so the lead hears from someone they already know.
• Positive replies get flagged in Slack as they land, with a clear owner for each one.

06What it produced

• 348 warm leads sent straight to sales, inside Salesforce.
• A 3.9% reply rate from old lost deals.
• Four ABM plays now always-on, sent by their own reps.

The part I would take from this is where the best list was. It was already in their CRM: the deals they had lost.

Nobody had to go and find that list. It needed a play that checked who was still there, reached them from a mailbox they knew, and got every reply to the right rep.

Which of these four lists is sitting untouched in your CRM right now? Hit reply and tell me.

PS. If you want plays like these running inside your own CRM, book a call with us here