Warm leads, hand-filtered, one at a time. It worked, it just couldn't scale.
The client had no in-house SDR function and a newly formed sales team with zero cold-outreach experience. Their entire lead motion was manually filtering Apollo for warm leads and cold-calling them directly. It brought in leads, but the volume was far too low to move the business. They wanted to automate outbound at real scale, without hiring and training a team from scratch to do it.
A sales agent that won't guess, and won't send without a person's sign-off.
Grounded the agent in the client's own ideal-customer profile and product details, so it never has to guess who to target or what to say.
Taught it seniority-aware messaging: a pitch aimed at a CFO reads nothing like one aimed at a CEO or COO, and the agent knows the difference before it writes a word.
Built campaign-driven company discovery that deliberately over-searches, chasing 50-100 candidate companies to land the best 10, scored on freshness and “why now” signals instead of a keyword match.
Added per-contact research and enrichment, so every message references something true about that company, not a mail-merge token.
Put a hard reviewer gate in front of every send: a human checks each generated message before it goes out, and anything the agent isn't confident about gets flagged instead of force-sent.
Shipped a live dashboard tracking opens and replies per campaign, handed to the client's own team to tune, because they know their market better than we ever will.
Correctness first. Campaign tuning left to the people who know the market.
We didn't chase the industry's ~2% reply-rate benchmark as a success metric here. We gave the client the agent and a dashboard to tune it themselves, since they're the ones who understand their market. Our bar was correctness: does it reliably do what it's supposed to, every time.