Building a Sustainable Outbound Engine for Programmatic Advertising
Client
Category
Date
The client came to us with a manual outbound process split across Gmail, spreadsheets, and a half-used HubSpot instance. We rebuilt the outreach infrastructure from the ground up — CRM, lead sourcing, cold email delivery, and reporting — and have run and continuously optimized the campaign for nearly two years since.
The Background
Before this engagement, the client's outreach was manual and fragmented: leads were sourced by hand, uploaded in small manual batches, and tracked inconsistently across individual inboxes. There was no unified pipeline connecting outreach activity to deal stages, and no reliable way to see what was actually working.
The Results
39,951
911
511
Reply rate around 2.3% overall, with individual segmented campaigns reaching 8–15%
Rebuilt HubSpot into a clean system of record, with automated lead sync and pipeline logic across the client's five deal types
Migrated sending platforms twice (Instantly → Lemlist → Woodpecker) to stay ahead of deliverability shifts, without losing pipeline continuity
The Challenge
The client's biggest targeting problem wasn't finding leads — it was finding the right ones. A large share of companies that responded to outreach were interested in becoming supply partners (traffic sellers), when the priority was demand-side partners (media buyers and DSP clients) — the higher-value relationships.
Getting the ICP and messaging precise enough to filter for demand leads, without losing supply leads that still had value, took continuous refinement.
At the same time, with hundreds of replies coming in monthly, a small sales team couldn't manage that volume manually — HubSpot needed to be automated enough without becoming a full-time job on its own.
The Approach
We built the full outbound stack — multiple databases for lead sourcing, HubSpot as the system of record, and a cold email platform for delivery — and have swapped the delivery layer twice as the market shifted, moving from Instantly to Lemlist to Woodpecker to stay ahead of deliverability changes.
We designed and continuously refine messaging by audience segment, replacing broad “programmatic advertising” language with buyer-specific copy once data showed generic messaging pulling in the wrong audience.
We keep the CRM clean on an ongoing basis — merging duplicates, correcting lead sources, and syncing outreach data automatically — and run structured list refreshes tied to seasonal buying cycles rather than letting lists go stale.
The result is a system the client's team can rely on week to week, not a campaign that was set up once and left alone.
