A Blended Tooling Approach for Cold Outbound Lead Generation Strategy

In this article on outbound lead generation strategy, we'll cover:

• Tech stack and implementation process overview
• Content needed to support a cold outbound lead generation
• Extending the strategy to other marketing tactics

Early-stage B2B companies have a lot of decisions to make when it comes to standing up their outbound lead generation strategy. With so many tactics to choose from, how do you know what to pick and what’s right for your company? Cold outbound lead generation is a strategy that can serve as the foundation for many other tactics, and we’ll cover everything you need to know to get started. 

This article presents a tactical blueprint for a cold outbound lead generation strategy that optimizes spend, business outcomes, and marketing operations. In this example, we’re using Apollo, Sendgrid, and Hubspot, but the tools presented in this article are by no means the only ones (or only combination) that can help you reach your goals. This is simply one tactical blueprint that we’ve seen battle-tested in the real world and has generated business outcomes for early-stage B2B companies in growth mode. With that said, let’s review the tech stack, basic capabilities, and pricing, and touch on the scalability of each. Keep in mind that the pricing mentioned in this article is just to give you an idea of what to expect. It’s not official and you’ll need to get the latest pricing from each vendor.

Tech Stack and Implementation Process Overview

Apollo.io

The first tool you’ll want in your tech stack is something to serve as a data source. In this case, we’re going to focus on Apollo as a data source (we get into why during our explanation of the other layers of the stack, Sendgrid and Hubspot). Apollo allows you to search a massive database of over 250 million contacts across more than 60 million companies. With the ability to filter based on job title, location, buying intent, and much more, you can search for (and find) contact information for your target ICP.

Apollo has many competitors; the most well known is Zoominfo. Zoominfo offers similar functionality and can also serve as a data source. However, Apollo has better pricing and better G2 reviews in a head-to-head comparison, and is likely a better choice for an early-stage B2B company. 

Apollo has favorable pricing across its different plan options, but let’s look at the highest level. As of this writing, the top offering from Apollo is a custom plan that runs $5,000 per year. Here are the key benefits at that price:

• 200,000 export credits. This means you can take 200,000 search results in Apollo and export them into a CSV file and then upload them into Sendgrid. (Or any email system you want.)
• Buyer intent. This allows you to search for contacts who have expressed an interest in buying certain products or services.
• Bulk-select records. At the free level, Apollo lets you select 25 records at a time. At the highest level, you can select up to 10,000 records at a time. Having this feature will save your marketer a ton of time and transforms this tactic from a mindless grind to a quick and easy scale motion.
• Bonus: For an additional $2,500 per year, you can add 100,000 export credits to your account to help you scale up.

There are nuances to Apollo and this strategy::

• Apollo is always updating its information because people are always changing jobs. According to Hubspot, email marketing databases naturally decay by about 22.5% every year. This means that if you export all 200,000 credits from Apollo in the first week (which any ambitious marketer could easily do), that list will immediately start decaying because it’s static. 
• Divide the 200,000 by 12 and export about 16,666 contacts per month. Break it down even more and you can export a little over 4,000 per week, or about 1,000 a day. The smaller chunks you do, the more up-to-date your information will be. 
• While there is an integration between Apollo and Sendgrid, we still have a soft spot in our hearts for the old school method of  exporting the records as a CSV and manually uploading them into Sendgrid. Yes, this takes an extra 30 seconds, but it gives you more control of the process.
• There are other data sources available that compete directly with Apollo, so why aren’t we suggesting one of those? The cherry on top with Apollo is the ability to set up email cadences from the system itself. While we are not using that feature for this tactic, you can connect up to five emails to Apollo at the highest level. That can open up the tool to your sales team and allow them to hop in and start sending at low volumes—which Apollo competitors cannot do.

Summary:  Apollo is your data source. It will cost you $5K per year. It will give you 200,000 contacts to add to your cold email system: Sendgrid.

Sendgrid

Next up, you’ll need a mass mailing tool to warm up the cold leads from your data sources. For this stack, we’re using Sendgrid, an email marketing service provider for large volumes of email. There are a lot of other tools to deploy emails including Mailchimp and Constant Contact. Each has their strengths and weaknesses and requires you to review their functionality to get a sense of whether they can support you. 

It’s preferable to send emails from Sendgrid instead of Apollo because Apollo sends via Google, Outlook, etc. and those systems have caps of a few hundred sends per day. You’ll quickly hit roadblocks trying to create a scalable lead generation motion with those limits. 

The contacts exported from Apollo go into Sendgrid and then:

• You should email them using a domain name that is different from your main domain name to protect the sending reputation of your main domain. Hypothetically something like yourdomainemail.com instead of yourdomain.com. Alternatively, you can also use a subdomain. For example email.yourdomain.com. The difference between the two is as follows:
  
• A different domain will hit your inbox as follows: nick@yourdomainemail.com
• A sub-domain will hit your inbox as follows: nick@email.yourdomain.com

• This is all a matter of preference because either approach will protect your main domain.

• The sending domain (in our example yourdomainemail.com) should be warmed up (we do not cover the email domain warm-up process in this article, but Mailgun offers an excellent overview of the process.)
• The content you send should provide real value to your prospects, avoid being salesy, and be as relevant as possible. This will massively reduce the number of complaints and the “tech debt” you build up when you eventually  need to clean up deliverability issues down the road.
• Cold prospects that meaningfully engage with your contact should be added to Hubspot for nurturing. (We’re defining a meaningful engagement as a downloaded asset, signing up for a webinar, completing a form, etc. Someone who “raises their hand.”)

As of this writing, and citing the most recent pricing proposal we’ve seen in February 2023, pricing for Sendgrid is $1,400 per month and that will get you 400,000 total contacts and 1,500,000 sends per month. Your pricing will flex up or down based on your specific situation. However, given that we’re talking about 200,000 contacts in the first year from Apollo, with the option to add more, this pricing will give you room to expand if needed.

Summary: Sendgrid is your mass mailing tool to warm up the cold prospects pulled from Apollo. It will cost you in the ballpark of $1,400 per month. Hand raisers should be suppressed from future Sendgrid mailings and transferred to Hubspot for nurturing. 

Hubspot

The final piece in your stack is a tool that pulls it all together and keeps your lead generation running like clockwork. For this stack, Hubspot is magnificent. It’s a one-stop marketing automation tool that turns marketers into superheroes. Hubspot’s marketing automation platform allows marketers to develop and deploy a wide range of marketing tactics all under one roof and is very user friendly.

It is also quite expensive. For early-stage B2B companies without an unlimited budget, keep this in mind: storing 400,000 marketing contacts in Sendgrid will cost you around $1,400 per month. Storing 400,000 marketing contacts in Hubspot will cost you $6,650 per month.

However, depending on your budget and goals, Hubspot can absolutely be worth the investment. Plus, the strategy we’ve laid out will massively reduce your Hubspot bill by only bringing in warmed-up prospects. Hubspot is essential to this strategy because it helps you create a marketing machine that requires minimal manual intervention. 

With Hubspot you can:

• Set up the landing pages that you link to from Sendgrid deployments
• Create the forms that live on those landing pages
• Create automations to deliver the assets to the cold prospects that complete those forms (or register them for a Zoom webinar, etc.)
• Create workflows to process and segment the cold prospects into corresponding lists 
• Create an export list of warmed-up prospects that goes back into Sendgrid to act as a suppression list
• Create email cadences to try and move the warmed-up prospects into a discovery call

Once it’s set up, it just works. Automatically. Hubspot is a critical infrastructure to help this process scale. There are other marketing automation tools like Marketo and Salesforce, but each require a heavier lift on the marketing operations side and they are not as user friendly as Hubspot.

To summarize the entire process:

• Cold prospects are found in a data source (Apollo) and exported into a mass mailing tool (Sendgrid)
• Sendgrid emails the cold prospects to warm them up
• Warmed-up prospects (i.e., those who meaningfully engage) are moved into Hubspot
• Hubspot cadences email the warmed-up prospects to get them to book a discovery call
• Warmed-up prospects that graduate from Sendgrid to Hubspot are suppressed from future Sendgrid emails

As you optimize your cold outbound lead generation process, you’ll want to dive deeper into content strategy, landing page strategy (for example, this strategy can also be executed using Unbounce for landing pages), and email deployment best practices. But this article gives you everything you need to know to set up your own blueprint based on the outcomes you want. 

For early-stage B2B companies, this strategy can produce business outcomes, is cost-optimized, and can be executed somewhat easily, assuming you have supporting content.

Content Needed to Support Cold Outbound Lead Generation

We’ve heard it before many times, but content truly is king, and creating a content engine takes time, budget, and resources. We’re not going to lie, this strategy will not work without high-quality, relevant content that attracts the interest of your cold prospects. Beyond well-written emails, sequences, and landing pages, here are some content suggestions that can set you apart:

• eBooks
• Videos
• Webinars
• Podcasts
• Blog posts
• Dedicated pages
• Customer testimonials
• Industry content

It’s incredibly important that you send your cold prospects something that is not salesy. The content has to provide value and  give leads a reason to engage with your email. This typically involves taking the time to track down a subject matter expert and explain why you need their support to produce content. For early-stage companies, this can be the founder(s) of the company. They should have an excellent sense of what problems your prospects are facing. 

Extending the Outbound Lead Generation Strategy to Other Marketing Tactics

This strategy gets interesting when you consider how it applies to other marketing tactics. The reality is not every company will have an appetite for cold outbound email prospecting. However, a clever marketer can reframe and present this exact tactic as a way to support other marketing efforts. For example, it can be used to generate webinar signups, download eBooks, download podcasts, sign up for a live event, and more. 

Could your outbound lead generation strategy use a refresh? Drop us a line at growth@rightsideup.co to get started.