Build a qualified sales pipeline before you add headcount.

Run outbound with zero sales hires and one workspace.

01The wedge

Pick 200 accounts, not 20,000.

A narrow, opinionated wedge converts better and teaches you faster, because it is small enough to research properly. Here is how to write one, and what a good one looks like next to a bad one.

A market (weak)

“Mid-market SaaS companies in North America.”

Forty thousand accounts, no reason any of them should care this week, and a message that has to be generic enough to fit all of them.

A wedge (strong)

“US B2B SaaS, 20–100 staff, that posted its first SDR job in the last 90 days.”

Two hundred accounts, an observable trigger, and a first line that writes itself: you saw the job posting.

Narrow beats wide, measurably: You can genuinely research 200 companies. You can only guess at 20,000. Every personalization tactic in chapter five depends on work you did here.
Write the wedge as a trigger, not a demographic: “B2B SaaS, 20–100 staff” is a demographic. “US B2B SaaS that posted its first SDR job in the last 90 days” is a wedge — it has an observable reason to care, right now.
Disqualification is data: When half your wedge rules itself out, that is the cheapest market research you will ever run. Rewrite the thesis before you buy a bigger list.
Write it down in one sentence: Company type, size, geography and the trigger, in a single line you could read to a stranger. If it takes a paragraph, it is still a market — keep cutting until one clause is an event with a date.

82%

of buyers accept meetings with sellers who proactively reach out. Outbound works — when it is aimed.

RAIN Group

10+

channels B2B buyers use across a decision journey. Email alone is a single-threaded bet.

McKinsey

~30%

of a seller's week goes to actually selling. The rest is admin and prospecting chores — the part a system should eat.

Salesforce

02The list

Know the data landscape before you buy a list.

There is no best database — there are four kinds of sources, each with a job. The craft is in combining them and then deleting most of what comes back.

The tools in this space

Apollo.io

Clay

The four kinds of B2B data sources, what each is best for, and what to watch out for
Source	Best for	Watch out for
Contact databases	Breadth. Hundreds of millions of records with verified emails, filterable by title, industry and headcount.	Everyone else is emailing the same records. The filter combination is your edge, not the database.
Enrichment waterfalls	Coverage. A single lookup is tried against vendor after vendor until one returns a verified hit.	It rewards ops discipline. Without a written scoring rule you will build enrichment art instead of a list.
LinkedIn	Freshness. The only database where people update their own job titles, headcount and announcements.	No export button, and the terms restrict scraping. Use it to verify and to find triggers, not to bulk-harvest.
Maps & registries	Local, trade and vertical businesses that never appear in B2B databases — clinics, contractors, logistics firms.	Unstructured and email-poor. Budget a verification pass and a phone-first cadence.

Four rules before any address touches a sequence

Verify every address before import, and keep hard bounces under 2%. It is the cheapest quality check you have on the whole list.
Send to catch-all domains last and in small batches. They accept everything, so they tell you nothing about whether the address is real.
Refresh the list quarterly. People change jobs faster than databases update, so re-check titles before a second campaign touches them.
Deduplicate against every past campaign, including the tests. One suppression list, checked at import, covers it.

What Gripwise does with this chapter

Sourcing is the easy half. The half that decides your reply rate is what you delete — so that is the part we built.

300M+

contacts you search by describing the buyer in plain English, across 35+ industry-leading data providers, verified in the same step.

Lead generation

8 facts

per account, each one dated and carrying a live URL. If a fact has no working source, it is not stored.

Research

0 sends

on the accounts that fail the fit check. They exit with a written reason you can read and overturn.

Qualification

From our own campaigns

The first wedge we ran on ourselves

We are not going to quote someone else's customer results at you. Here is one of our own campaigns, start to finish — the mechanics, not a scoreboard.

01The wedge was a sentence, not a filter set“B2B SaaS and agencies that posted a first SDR or growth role in the last 60 days.” We typed that in plain English; Gripwise built the list from live sources and verified every address before anything reached a campaign.
02Every account was read before it was written toEach company came back with dated facts and a live URL behind each one — the job post itself, the last funding announcement, the tools named in the posting.
03Roughly half the list ruled itself outBackfills, agency-posted listings and companies already running a five-person sales team failed the fit check. They exited with a written reason and zero sends — and that reason list is what we used to rewrite the wedge.
04The opener quoted their own postingNo merge tags. The first line used the phrasing from the job description, which is the one sentence we knew the reader had written themselves.
05Three channels, one scheduleEmail, a LinkedIn connect and a single call ran on one timeline per person, and every channel paused the moment someone replied.

We are early, so we are not publishing reply rates we cannot yet defend. What we can show is the shape of the work — and the disqualification list, which taught us more about the wedge than any send did.

03Deliverability

Google published the rules. This chapter is the setup they ask for.

Since February 2024 deliverability has been a public spec rather than a dark art. Everything below comes from Google's sender guidelines and the sending tools' own documentation — do it once, in this order, and you are done.

Sourced from

Google

Postmaster Tools

Instantly

< 0.10%

the spam-complaint rate Google says to stay under in Postmaster Tools — and to never reach 0.30%. Ever.

Google

SPF + DKIM + DMARC

authentication required for anyone sending 5,000+ messages a day to Gmail. Unauthenticated mail gets rejected with a 5.7.26 error.

Google

1-click

unsubscribe, required for bulk senders. Make leaving easy and the people who stay stop hitting the spam button.

Google

Cold-send from a lookalike domain: Register two or three variants of your domain (get-, try-, -hq) and run campaigns from those. Your primary domain keeps doing what it is good at: invoices, support and investor updates.
Two to three mailboxes per domain: Deliverability guides from sending tools like Instantly converge on roughly 20–30 cold emails per mailbox per day. Three mailboxes × 25 is about 1,500 sends a month — plan the campaign against that number, and add mailboxes rather than volume when you need more.
Warm up for two to four weeks before touch one: Google’s own guidance is to increase volume slowly and avoid bursts. Start warmup the day you buy the domain so it runs in the background while you build the list — the two jobs take about the same time.
Publish SPF, DKIM and DMARC first: All three are required for bulk senders since February 2024. Publish them, send yourself a test at a Gmail address, open “Show original” and confirm each line reads PASS before you schedule anything.
Set up Postmaster Tools on day one: It is free, and it is the same reputation dashboard Gmail uses to judge you. Google says to keep your spam rate below 0.10% and to never reach 0.30% — check it weekly, on the same day you read your reply numbers.
Put one-click unsubscribe in the header: Required for bulk senders, and the easiest opt-out you can offer. People who can leave quietly do that instead of reporting you, which is what actually protects the domain.

04The cadence

Multichannel, because buyers are.

The numbers below are why single-channel, single-touch outreach underperforms. The cadence that follows is what those numbers look like as a schedule.

Sourced from

Backlinko

McKinsey

Gong Labs

8.5%

of cold outreach emails get any response at all — the baseline you are trying to beat.

Backlinko · 12M emails

+65.8%

more replies from sending a single follow-up. Most deals are decided after touch one; most senders quit at touch one.

Backlinko

+93%

higher response rate when you contact several people at the same company instead of one.

Backlinko

1 schedule

for all three channels in Gripwise. Email, LinkedIn and phone share one timeline per person — and all of it pauses the moment they reply.

Campaigns

A fifteen-day multichannel cadence across email, LinkedIn and phone
When	Channel	The move
Day 1	Email	The researched opener (chapter five). One fact, one opinion, one question.
Day 2	LinkedIn	Profile view, then a connection request with no note. Notes on cold connects read as pitches.
Day 4	Email	Follow-up with a new angle or artifact — never “bumping this to the top of your inbox”.
Day 7	LinkedIn	Message accepted connections. Reference the email; do not repeat it.
Day 9	Phone	One call. A voicemail counts as a touch — state the reason you called (Gong: 2.1× higher success).
Day 12	Email	The breakup: short, useful, and it gives them permission to say no.
Day 15+	Nurture	Out of the sequence, into a quarterly touch. Dead is not the same as not-now.

The rule that keeps the whole thing honest

The moment a human replies on any channel, every channel pauses. Build that in before you launch: one shared status per person, checked by each step before it fires, so nobody gets step four while they are mid-conversation with you on LinkedIn.

05The plays

Three plays that combine email, LinkedIn and the phone.

Chapter four is the calendar. This is what the calendar branches into once people start behaving. Each play says what starts it, which channel carries each step, and what that step is for.

Sourced from

Backlinko

Boomerang

Gong Labs

01

The trigger ladder

Run it when: you have one dated, sourced trigger on the account — a round, a job posting, a changelog, a new integration — and the contact is active on LinkedIn.

EmailDay 1
Touch one, under sixty words: the trigger in their own words, one opinion about it, one question. No deck, no calendar link yet.
LinkedInDay 3
No reply
View the profile, then send a connection request with no note. The view lands first, so the request reads as a person rather than a tool.
LinkedInDay 5
They accepted
One message that adds what the email left out — the number, the screenshot, the teardown. Never a paste of the email.
PhoneDay 9
Still quiet
One call, with the reason you are calling in the first ten seconds. A voicemail counts as the touch.

Three channels, one story. The call is the fourth time they have seen your name, not the first — which is the entire difference between this and cold calling.

02

The raised hand

Run it when: someone shows interest without replying: repeat opens, a click on pricing, or a deanonymised visit from the account.

SignalSame day
Treat interest as a raised hand, not as a reply. Log which page or link it was — that is the subject of every touch that follows.
LinkedInSame day
Connect while the interest is hours old. If you are already connected, send two lines about the topic they looked at — never about the fact that you watched them look.
PhoneWithin 24h
Interest is fresh
Call once. This is the highest-intent moment a cold account will give you, and it decays within days.
EmailDay 2
No answer
One line on the original thread with two times and a booking link. Same thread — a new one throws away the context.

Most teams keep sending the same scheduled sequence to someone who has already shown interest. Escalating channel by intent — a look becomes a connection, a connection becomes a call — is where multichannel earns what it costs.

03

Reply into relationship

Run it when: anyone replies on any channel — including “not now”, “wrong person”, and a flat no.

SignalImmediately
Pause every sequence for that person and everyone else at the account. One shared status, checked by each step before it fires.
EmailWithin the hour
Yes or maybe
Reply yourself with two concrete times and a booking link. On a positive reply, speed beats polish every time.
LinkedInSame day
Any reply at all
Connection request with a note quoting their reply. A no is the warmest thing a stranger has handed you, and it makes for the cheapest accept you will ever get.
EmailQuarterly
Not now
Out of the sequence, into a quarterly touch — with a written note on what to check before you write again.

The reply is the asset, not the meeting.Run this way, a “not now” in September is a warm connection all winter and a conversation in February — none of which needs another cold email.

50–125

words is the sweet spot for the email steps — every length in that band earned response rates above 50% in Boomerang's data.

Boomerang · 40M emails

2.1×

higher success on calls that state the reason for calling early, across 100,000+ recorded cold calls. Give the human a reason.

Gong Labs

One timeline

Gripwise keeps email, LinkedIn and calls on a single account timeline, so a reply on any channel pauses the rest and every step knows what already happened.

How the plays run

06The metrics

What good looks like, in numbers.

Benchmarks compiled from Google's hard limits and Lavender's analysis of billions of sales emails. Each row tells you which part of the playbook to go back to — read it before you read your dashboard.

Sourced from

Google

Lavender

Outbound benchmarks: the level that needs work, the good mark, and the next action for each metric
Metric	Needs work	Good	What to do about it
Hard bounce rate	> 3%	< 2%	List quality. Go back to chapter two and re-verify before you rewrite a word of copy.
Spam complaints	≥ 0.3%	< 0.1%	Google’s hard line. Cut daily volume and tighten the wedge the same day you see it move.
Reply rate	< 1%	5–10%	Lavender’s benchmark report puts the average in the low single digits, so 5% already means the list is good.
Positive reply share	< 1% of sends	≥ 2% of sends	The offer and the wedge, judged by the people on it. Change the offer before you change the volume.
Meeting per positive reply	< 20%	30–50%	A scheduling and speed-to-lead problem. Put a booking link in the reply and answer inside the hour.

Opens are fine, replies are zero: Work on the message. It is being read and discarded, so rewrite the reason-to-care in the first two lines — not the greeting, and not the subject.
Replies come in, all negative: Work on the list. You are reaching real people who were never going to buy, so tighten the wedge and re-read the disqualification reasons before you touch the template.
Nothing lands anywhere: Work on deliverability, in this order: check the three authentication records pass, open Postmaster Tools, then look at whether the mailbox skipped warmup. Pause sending until all three are clean.

07The system

Everything above is runnable by hand. The cost is 10–15 hours a week.

That is the honest trade. Founders ran this playbook manually for years — the mechanics are just research, scheduling and follow-up, repeated forever. Gripwise exists to do that mechanical 80%.

Domains and mailboxes bought in-app, authenticated automatically, warming from the first hour — warmup is free on every mailbox.
A list built from a description of your wedge, verified before import and deduplicated against everything you have ever sent.
Up to eight dated, sourced facts per account — each with a live URL — so the “why you, why now” is researched, not invented.
A fit verdict on every account before touch one is scheduled. The bad fits exit with a reason, and zero sends.
Email, LinkedIn and phone on one schedule per person, paused everywhere the moment a human replies.
Reply drafts written from the full thread and the research. You approve or edit every one.

Your first week, in order

Whether you run it by hand or in Gripwise, this is the sequence. Warmup starts on day one because it is the only step you cannot compress.

Day 1 — Write the wedge as one sentence. Register two lookalike domains and start warmup the same hour, because it runs in the background all week.
Day 2 — Publish SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Send yourself a test at a Gmail address and confirm all three read PASS. Connect Postmaster Tools.
Day 3 — Build the 200-account list against the wedge, verify every address, and import your suppression list before anything else.
Day 4 — Research the first fifty accounts. Write down why each rejected one failed; that list is your chapter-one feedback.
Day 5 — Draft three openers in the 50–125 word band with 3–4 word subjects, plus the two follow-up artifacts you will send on days 4 and 12.
Week 3 — Warmup is done. Send the first fifty, then hold volume flat until you have read the first replies.

What stays with you

The calls that need a founder, and the decision of who is worth writing to in the first place. The system proposes; you approve every send. The free plan needs no card, so you can run chapters one through five on your first wedge this week.

Build a qualified sales pipeline before you add headcount.

Pick 200 accounts, not 20,000.

Know the data landscape before you buy a list.

Four rules before any address touches a sequence

What Gripwise does with this chapter

The first wedge we ran on ourselves

Google published the rules. This chapter is the setup they ask for.

Multichannel, because buyers are.

Three plays that combine email, LinkedIn and the phone.

What good looks like, in numbers.

Everything above is runnable by hand. The cost is 10–15 hours a week.

Your first week, in order

Find the accounts ready to buy.Every lead, deeply researched.Only leads that match your ICP.Find the accounts ready to buy.

Find the accounts ready to buy.