Whenever someone asks me this, I give the same answer: start with the fundamentals.
Not because it’s the exciting answer, but because everything downstream depends on getting them right. And most teams skip them because they feel slow.
Step 1: Know who your ICP actually is
Do you actually know who your ideal customer profile is, based on closed-won data, not theory? Most companies have an ICP that was defined by the founders or the marketing team based on assumptions. It might have been right at one point, but it hasn’t been validated against the customers who’ve actually bought and stayed.
Go back to your closed-won deals. Look at who stuck around, who expanded, who refers others. Find the patterns. That’s your real ICP. If the answer is different from what’s on your website, update it.
Step 2: Map the real problems each persona cares about
Once you know who your ICP is, map the actual problems each persona within those accounts cares about. Not your product features. Not your marketing messaging. The problems as they’d describe them to a colleague over a coffee.
Have you connected those problems to your solution in a way that’s specific and credible? Can your reps articulate why your solution matters for each persona’s specific situation?
Most teams have a generic value proposition that sort of applies to everyone. That’s the problem. The more specific you can be about the problem and who experiences it, the better your outbound will perform.
Step 3: Examine your messaging
Apply the pub test. Read your first email in a sequence out loud. Is it about the buyer’s world or about your product? If it’s about you, rewrite it. If it reads like a brochure, rewrite it.
Would you say this to someone in a pub? Not a pitch. Not a brochure. A conversation between two people who respect each other’s time. If it sounds like marketing copy, it fails. If it sounds like something a smart colleague would say after noticing something relevant, it’s right.
Step 4: Look at your signals
What observable changes in the market tell you someone might have a problem you can solve right now? Build outbound plays around those signals, not around static lists.
A funding round, a leadership change, a new office opening, a hiring surge. These are all observable events that create specific consequences for specific people. The consequence is what your message should be about.
Step 5: Then (and only then) think about tooling and scale
I use a framework called the Effective Seller that sorts every sales task into three buckets: Automate (repetitive, low-judgement tasks), Augment (AI assists but a human makes the final call), and Human Only (the actual conversation, the judgement, the empathy).
Get that classification right and the rest follows. You’ll know what to automate, what to use AI for, and what needs to stay human. The mistake is starting with the tools and trying to work backwards to the strategy. Start with the strategy. The tools serve it.
The step most teams miss
Make sure your outbound motion talks to your demand gen programmes. Shared targeting, coordinated timing, consistent messaging. If marketing is warming up an account with ads and content, and then a rep reaches out with no awareness of what the buyer has already seen, you’ve wasted the warming.
That integration is where the compounding value lives. Neither channel works as well alone as they do together.
I help B2B SaaS teams fix, build, and scale their outbound. Whether it’s an audit, a playbook, or a full AI-enabled system, get in touch.