Sellestial

AI-driven sales assistant that delivers accurate and autonomous CRM updating. That’s because unlike traditional CRM software, we offer unparalleled reliability and context-aware automation.

Co-Founder, Chief Revenue Officer

Meetings.bio

Commercial Advisor and Co-Founder

Meetings.bio is a life-science-oriented lead generation service provider. We prospect, engage, and book sales meetings with relevant decision-makers in life science industries, so you can focus on closing deals.

It's completely risk-free: no retainers, no hidden fees. You only pay for meetings that actually happen.

Making life science decision-makers excited about a product or service can be challenging. But we cracked it—we booked over 2,700 sales meetings for 70+ happy life science vendors just in the last 3 years.

I am happy to show you how we’ve done it—simply book a strategy call here - https://calendly.com/meetings_bio/30min

Chief Commercial Officer and Co-Founder

RevOps Co-op

The RevOps Co-Op is a community built to serve its members through on-demand expertise, best practice content, educational opportunities, and networking events. All go-to-market operations professionals are welcome - from marketing to customer success and everything in between. Join us and grow as a RevOps Pro

Member

RevGenius

RevGenius is a group of revenue-generating sales and marketing professionals brought together to learn, share, support, and grow with each other.

HYPCCCYCL

Genialis

Genialis is a computational precision medicines company unravelling complex biology to find new ways to address disease. ResponderID™, Genialis’ clinical biomarker discovery platform, defines, models, and validates actionable biomarkers and optimally positions novel drugs to accelerate translational research and clinical development. Genialis is trusted by biopharma and big pharma alike, and together, we bring precision to medicine.

Senior Account Executive and Co-Founder

AD Mass Ljubljana

Pole Vault Coach

TechPeaks - The People Accelerator

Participant

Študentska organizacija Univerze v Ljubljani (Student organisation of University of Ljubljana)

Member of the Student Assembly

President of the Student Organization of Faculty of Pharmacy

Društvo študentov farmacije Slovenije

Event organization, Finances, Project management

Event organizer

How Founder-led sales can be done right? • Founder at Sellestial • 3rd-time Founder • Don't be a stranger, follow me and reach out

We are all guilty of sending boring follow-ups to our potential customers. 

Even with all the data we gather on prospects, it seems tough to personalize and truly contextualize our communication. We often default to generic messages that might not hit the mark.

We’re working on something that could help craft more personalized, relevant communications at scale, whether it's for hot deals and leads, webinar attendees, form submissions, sign-ups, or any other inbound leads, within HubSpot. 

Interested in a deeper dive into Sellestial? Let's chat over a virtual coffee - my treat! Feel free to reach out directly here on LinkedIn or pick a slot here: https://meetings-eu1.hubspot.com/klemen-hrovat

Klemen Hrovat

🤖 Meet our new team member: The Contact Cleaner

We're excited to introduce an AI agent that's already making a huge impact on data cleanliness in many HubSpot portals.

What does it do?

The Contact Cleaner works 24/7 in your HubSpot portal,
automatically identifying and fixing data quality issues that used to take hours. 

It's like having a meticulous data analyst who never sleeps.

And a team member on whom you can rely that you will never send a marketing email like this.
"Hey KLEMEN,"
"Hey Klemen Hrovat, PhD,"
"Hey Klemn"
"Hey klemenh@sellestial.com"

The capabilities are impressive:
✅ Fixes typos and formatting inconsistencies across thousands of contacts
✅ Validates phone numbers and postal codes using real-time verification
✅ Removes role-based emails (goodbye, info@ and sales@ addresses)
✅ Standardizes names, job titles, and locations
✅ Flags suspicious entries for human review

But here's what makes it special:
It's smart enough to know when NOT to make changes.
The agent uses confidence scoring and a conservative approach. 
If it's not certain about a correction, it flags it for our team to review rather than guessing.
It respects data integrity above all else.

The best part?

RevOps and Marketing teams now spend little to no time fighting bad data before sending the new campaign. 

Curious about cleaning up your HubSpot portal? Drop a comment or DM me, happy to share what we've learned and how we are helping others.

#HubSpot #DataQuality #SalesOps #MarketingOps #DataHygiene

Why should you not treat a HubSpot contact as a person?

I'm explaining this to HubSpot admins, RevOps experts, and HubSpot solution partners daily.

People change jobs all the time.

You shouldn’t lose visibility, or break reporting, just because someone changed their job.

Our rule is simple:
- Create a new contact for each new employment.
- Keep the old record as the historical truth for the prior company.

This keeps:
- Activity history intact and relevant to the company where it happened.
- Lifecycle stage, attribution, and ICP fit correctly for the new employer.
- Work email/phone semantics honest (no more bounces or “ghost” consent).

In this article, I explained what we advocate, why, and how we suggest doing it in HubSpot.

People change jobs all the time. You shouldn’t lose visibility, or wreck reporting, just because someone changed their job. Our rule is simple: Create

Open article: Why should you not treat a HubSpot contact as a person? by Klemen Hrovat • 3 min read

Why should you not treat a HubSpot contact as a person?

Prejšnji teden sem imel čast govoriti na konferenci.
Naslov moje predstavitve je bil
“How an Alien got us into the HubSpot community”

Delil sem našo zgodbo o tem, kako smo si zgradili prepoznavnost v HubSpot skupnosti.

Prvič sem predstavil celotno zgodbo od začetka do konca.

Bil sem kar malo živčen, kako jo bo občinstvo sprejelo.
In dovolj pogumen (nor), da sem stopil na oder oblečen v vesoljca.

Občutek pred nastopom je bil enak kot prvih 15 minut na INBOUND24.

In tako kot na INBOUND-u sem se hitro sprostil.
Res sem užival na odru.
In glede na povratne informacije po predstavitvi,
je ljudem bila všeč – ne samo predstavitev, ampak predvsem pristop.

Verjetno ni bila všeč vsem, ampak blagovnih znamk ne gradimo za vse, ane?
Če želiš ugajati vsem, če ne podžgeš vsaj dela svojega občinstva, igraš preveč na varno.

Eno glavnih sporočil, ki sem jih želil predati, je bil kako pomembni so odnosi.
Vsi smo ljudje, zaupamo drug drugemu, v dobi AI bomo še bolj iskali človeške odnose, zaupali bomo svojim vrstnikom, zaupali bomo LJUDEM.

P. S. Če te zanima predstavitev, mi pošlji DM — z veseljem pošljem prezentacijo.

Sales reps don’t wake up in the morning and say, “I can’t wait to enter data into HubSpot!”

Data hygiene is NOT their job.
It’s RevOps’ or HubSpot Admin's job to design systems that:
✅ Capture the right data automatically
✅ Minimize manual entry
✅ Audit for duplicates and bad records
✅ Standardize and clean important properties

Blaming reps for bad data is like blaming drivers for potholes. Wrong target.

Agree or disagree?

I wish that were me ...
I will be OOO for most of next week
So I added that picture to my OOO email

Do you think it's ok or too witty for the B2B space?

“I think HubSpot is broken.”

I’ve heard this from many sales teams.

But HubSpot isn’t broken.
The data is.

👉 Lifecycle stages that are not properly updated.
👉 Contact properties that reps don’t trust.
👉 Companies with 5 versions of the same entity.
👉 Contacts sitting in HubSpot for 10 years, still at the same company.

Before you throw money at new tools, ask yourself ➡️ Do I trust my CRM data enough to bet next quarter’s revenue on it?

If not, the problem isn’t HubSpot—it’s data hygiene.

What is your reaction to "My HubSpot is broken"?

Merge or don't merge?
This is often the question in deduplication.
But it turns out it’s not an easy decision.

One thing we learned in the past month
Is that deduplication is the end goal
But you need to do the steps before.

Clean
Enrich
Merge

These 3 steps should be taken if you want to
deduplicate your HubSpot portal
In the optimal way.
And don’t make any mistakes.

Why?

Wrong enrichment
Overwritten correct values
Badyl configured integrations

These are just a few cases that we saw
causing the mess in portals,
which prevents you from doing easy dedup.

If you take an naive approach,
Define a few simple rules
And merge records

I can almost guarantee
you will be making mistakes
and merging records you shouldn’t.

Are you aware of data quality in your HubSpot
before you set the simple rules to merge “duplicates”?

Did you ever merge some records that you realized you shouldn’t?
And wasted a lot of time unmerging
Because there is no easy unmerge function in HubSpot?

Before you think about deduplication next time, let me know, happy to chat and share some of the steps we suggest to other HubSpot users around deduplication.

Why HubSpot data cleaning matters NOW.

Not last year, not next year

Pre-AI
Extra data was cheap.
The risk of losing something wasn't worth the cleanup effort.

Post-AI
Data is expensive to enrich.
And the rewards for great information are exponentially higher.

This fundamental economic shift changes everything.

You can't afford to run AI and AI-enrichment on dirty data anymore. You'll either:
→ Overspend your budget by 2-3X
→ Or spread your compute so thin you won't see AI's value

The technology finally arrived. 

It's cheap enough and good enough—FINALLY.

Companies that clean their data in 2025 will be 12-24 months ahead.

Companies that wait will watch their successors do it instead.

The question isn't "should we clean our data?"

The question is: "Do you want to be the person who owns this challenge?"

First Brian Halligan on Hot Ones with Sean Evans

Now Luka Dončić on Hot Ones with Sean Evans

First, a picture with Brian at INBOUND

....

P.s I'm proud to say on Zoom calls, when I'm asked where I'm calling from, that I'm from Slovenia, just like Luka 🇸🇮

Nejc and I will walk you through the workshop for RevOps, marketing and sales experts. With the workshop, we want to help you master AI fundamentals and build practical skills to transform your operations.

Nejc (Nates) Škoberne and 1 other attendee

Practical AI For RevOps Workshop Overview

Your HubSpot is only as smart as its dirt
If your data’s messy, automation will break and reports mislead.
Fix these five hygiene challenges first:

1) Deduplication (Contacts & Companies)

Set merge rules:
How do you decide if something should be merged or just a parent/child relationship?
Which record is primary - keep the most recent record’s property values or the oldest record, so you preserve the creation date?

Lock a “Source of Truth” order: Human edit > CRM form > Integration > Import.
Or a different version of that, if you trust other sources more. 

Figure out what’s causing new duplicates to minimize the creation and define processes to dedupe as soon as possible. 

2) Unclean First & Last Names

What to check today
Names in ALL CAPS, all lowercase, with emojis, or stuffed titles (e.g., “John (CEO) 🚀”).
First name = Company or Initial only (“J”).

Configure the system
Clean Title Case
Strip emojis, trailing spaces, honorifics (“Mr.” “Ms.”), and role junk (“CEO”).
Separate Name from Job Title—never store both in First or Last Name.
Remove Middle name from First Name


3) Outdated Contacts

What to check
No activity in 180+ days AND not in an active segment.
Hard bounce, unsubscribed, or deactivated owner.
Contact created 5 years ago


4) Missing Job Title or LinkedIn Profile

Check
Contacts without Job Title, generic (“Staff”), or nonsense ones.
Contact LinkedIn URL missing

Quick wins
Enrich contacts with LinkedIn URL so you have a link to check for potential promotions and job changes
Validate LinkedIn URL property - must contain linkedin.com/in/ or leave blank.

5) Companies with Wrong LinkedIn URL & Bad Firmographics

Validate
Company LinkedIn URLs that aren’t linkedin.com/company/
Domains that are not the same to the company domain on their LinkedIn page. If that is not the same, it indicates some challenges with some of the enrichment tools. I have seen some pretty weird enrichments happened because of native HubSpot enrichment which takes primary domain and runs with it, no questions asked. 


Minimal data hygiene
👉 Clean contacts: First/Last name, Job Title, LinkedIn URL
👉 Contact and company Duplicates
👉 Clean company names

What's your biggest struggle with data?

AI here, AI there, AI everywhere
Does your head feel like that - 🤯 ?
A foundational workshop about AI for RevOps might save your head from blowing away. 

What you'll learn:

How LLMs actually work – Clear up misconceptions and understand the fundamentals that matter for RevOps

Which models to use when – Navigate the vendor landscape and make smart cost vs. performance decisions

Four core LLM applications – Generate, extract, classify, and execute tasks with practical exercises for each

Prevent hallucinations and ensure reliability – Guardrailing techniques using XML tags, JSON schemas, and structured outputs

Multiple ways to invoke LLMs – From Google Sheets scripts to Model Context Protocol (MCP) implementations

When to use AI agents (and when not to) – Agentic workflows, memory management, and tool usage strategies

Stay compliant and secure – Data privacy and compliance essentials for handling customer information

Real RevOps use cases – Apply everything you've learned to actual processes you face daily (including your submitted use cases)

Ready to build a strong AI foundation? 
Sign up today, don't let others take your seat (seats are limited for every workshop so we can provide the learning experience you deserve)

OpenAI has an Academy.

No matter how skilled you already are, I'm sure we can all learn something.

A few interesting lessons, with short videos available at the links below. 

During our workshops, Practical AI For RevOps: The Foundation, we'll do a more thorough overview of these topics and dig deeper.

Introduction to GPTs
https://lnkd.in/dY9MxizN

Introduction to Prompt Engineering
https://lnkd.in/dG4Uw_Tr

Advanced Prompt Engineering
https://lnkd.in/dhZRxDAh

ChatGPT 101: A Guide to Your AI Superassistant
https://lnkd.in/dUjkuees

ChatGPT & Reasoning
https://lnkd.in/difN2Syx

Multimodality Explained
https://lnkd.in/db2BDJaD

OpenAI, LLMs & ChatGPT
https://lnkd.in/dcNcbQ64

ChatGPT for Data Analysis
https://lnkd.in/dAiETafB


Oh, and this is our workshop I mentioned above 😊 
https://lnkd.in/dw7MW3GU

There is no such thing as perfectly clean CRM data

And it’s fine. Here’s why

Yes, accurate data is important, but chasing 100% purity is often a time sink with diminishing returns.

Consider that one B2B sales team had a 40% duplicate rate in their HubSpot data, causing reps to spend 6 hours a week on manual cleanup instead of calling customers.
(Imagine how many deals could close in those 6 hours!) 

It’s no surprise that studies find sales professionals spend a lot of their time on non-selling tasks like data entry.

Tools are helping with some of that, but we are still far from clean CRMs.

What did we do wrong to change ABC -  “always be closing” to ABC -  “always be cleaning”?
- Marketing emails bounce
- “Hi KLEMEN,” still happens
- Contacts are in the same position in your portal for 10 years. But do you believe they are still with that company?
- Champion customers move position without you noticing that
- Some contacts in your HubSpot get 10 emails in a week because they are enrolled in different workflows

Forward-thinking RevOps experts recognize that not all data in HubSpot needs to be perfectly clean.

Different companies and contacts have different potential value. So treat data quality accordingly.

For someone who signed up for your newsletter 3 years ago but never did any other action, according to your data in HubSpot, you don’t want to monitor monthly if they are still with that company. 

But a raving fan at one of your customers, who moved to another ICP matching company a week ago - you do want to catch that insight, right?

Feeling overwhelmed by AI possibilities in RevOps?

You're not alone.

That's Nejc (Nates) Škoberne designed this intensive 8-hour workshop.

We're covering everything from LLM fundamentals to agentic workflows, from reliability techniques to real RevOps use cases. 

No fluff—just practical, hands-on learning you can apply immediately.

I wrote a detailed breakdown of all 8 modules we'll cover in the article below.


Fair warning
- It's intense
- You'll be exhausted
- But you'll have the foundation to confidently use AI in your operations.

#RevOps #AI #GTM #SalesOps

If you're a RevOps, GTM, sales, or marketing leader who feels overwhelmed by AI possibilities, you're not alone. After countless conversations with pr

Open article: Practical AI for RevOps: A Foundation-Building Workshop by Klemen Hrovat • 3 min read

Practical AI for RevOps: A Foundation-Building Workshop

That's one of the most important questions around data hygiene.
I've stopped trying to convince skeptics about data cleaning.
Instead, I ask one question:

"Do you believe there's gold in the dirt of your CRM?"

If they say yes → We can talk.

If they say no → I move on.

Here's why:

A company has 30,000 contacts in their CRM:
5,000 are duplicates
8,000 are maybe duplicates
15,000 are low-grade and not interesting
10,000 are worth investing AI enrichment on

That 10,000? That's the gold.

But right now, you're paying to enrich ALL 30,000.

Your nurture campaigns are hitting dirt, not gold.

Your sales team sees 5 versions of the same company.

Your enrichment budget is 3X what it should be.

If you believe there's gold in there, let's separate it from the dirt.

If you don't believe it, that's okay too. 

But no amount of convincing will change your mind; only pain will.

HubSpot, any particular reason why it's not possible to change the name of a sequence via API?

🎙️ New to streaming or looking to level up? Check out StreamYard and get $10 discount! 😍 https://lnkd.in/dAaAJzce

One of our customers tried to fix formatting issues with Data Hub, but they faced challenges as the system didn't do the optimal job, so it helps them do it natively and not do it in a spreadsheet manually. 

So they asked us to help them, and this is how the system works to make a basic first and last name cleaning, right in your portal. 

No more
Hi KLEMEN,
Hi JOhn,
Hi Sales,
Hi 👽 Klemen

Do you use Hi {first name} in your marketing emails in HubSpot?

Roman Hipp

BetterContact

Co-Founder & Growth

Amazon

Business Development

charles

Business Analyst & Expansion

Moss | All-in-one spend management

Customer Success

BlackRock

Spring Week

Building BetterContact | Helping early-stage B2B SaaS companies with insights & ready-to-use templates

Currently building BetterContact, a B2B SaaS that aggregates various data sources to find and verify any email and mobile phone number.

Growth Co-Founder

Last week I had a chat with Enzo from C17 Lab about cold calling, and was *overwhelmed* by how enthusiastic he talked about BetterContact & what role it plays in his team's latest winning streak

Quick context: Enzo is one of the most well-known outbound thought leaders & founder of C17, where he handles outbound strategies for some of the biggest companies out there.  

Just give it a watch yourself 👇

Building BetterContact | Helping B2B companies win outbound through more and better contact data

Here is the allbound engine that helped me bootstrap BetterContact to a 7-figure SaaS as one-man GTM team (inbound-led outbound):

𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐏 1: GATHERING INTELLIGENCE

The best way to dive deep into my ICP’s workflows (and understanding their pain points) is by having proper 1:1 conversations with them.

Not only does this allow me to dive deep into their specific use case, but also to learn more about our industry, as well as what our competitors do.

This is what I’m using for that:

Call recordings & transcripts: Fathom
Reddit keyword alarms: F5Bot
LinkedIn keyword alarms: Trigify.io

Doing these calls also allows me to re-validate our ICP hypothesis.

I then do company look-a-like searches with Discolike and Ocean, and find the right people through Sales Navigator.

I automatically connect with my ICP leads through HeyReach.io, and make sure to track their posts & activity through Breakcold.

𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐏 2: CREATING CONTENT

Based on that, I create ICP-relevant content on LinkedIn.

I realized that the less ‘skin in the game’ I have, a.k.a talking to customers and prospects in my market, the worse the content is that I distribute.

That’s why STEP 1 is the foundation for every step that follows.

𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐏 3: TRACKING ENGAGEMENT

I’m tracking profile views/post engagements etc. with Teamfluence™.

This allows me to see who might be potentially interested in giving our solution a try (and not reaching out blindly to poeple).

𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐏 4: QUALIFYING ENGAGEMENT

The engagers are being sent to Clay to qualify & enrich the leads.

I’m using Zenrows to scrape the websi & GPT o4-mini to measure ICP fit.

Occasionally I also use Builtwith for a technographic analysis and a potential integration play. 

(P.S. we recently launched our new Hubspot AutoEnrich integration)

For qualified leads I’m enriching the email address with BetterContact, and again GPT o4-mini to write personalized email copy (for ICP Tier 1 & 2).

𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐏 5: LAUNCHING OUTREACH CAMPAIGNS

The next step is reaching out to the different ICP levels.

The structure & cadence is the same (3 touches), but if there is no reply for ICP Tier 1’s, I try my best to call them. 

For that, I’m using BetterContact again to find the mobile number, and AirCall to dial (depending on geography).

The responses to my outreach (from super excited to angry reactions) are again a big booster for my market/ICP understanding.

Which again allows me to create relevant content, and the whole cycle gets more efficient over time.

Keen on hearing any feedback to my process/any tool recommendations to boost efficiency 👇

Excited to share that BetterContact is now an offical sponsor of my brother's sports team for the 2025/26 season!

Handball was a big part of my life growing up. I spent over 13 years playing competitvely (started at 3 years old).
 
Now it’s my brother who’s still giving it his all on the field, so I'm even more proud to support the team with what we can!

“Wow”. This is what I thought when my friend Mauro showed me a demo of his recruiting SaaS Taleva. Just a few months in, they already closed 5-figure deals.

Before I got to see the product, I was a bit worried I’d need to sugarcoat things (as I remember how *horrendous* our first MVP looked like).
 
But I was genuinely surprised when I saw a super-nice looking UI with a backend that already worked properly.

Basically a ready-to-use solution (and their customers seem to love it).

That’s why I'm even more excited to share that I will be an advisor for Taleva.

A 3-man, bootstrapped & hungry founder team (Mauro, Bruno, Marcos) - excited to see where this goes, and I’ll do my best to help where I can!

In 2024, BetterContact lost hundreds of customers to churn. Since then, we reduced our monthly churn from 26.6% to sub 10%, and we owe a large portion of that to partnering with a bunch of amazing tools.

And to be honest, this is something I would have liked to realize earlier:

As a point-solution that solves a specific problem (finding the right contact details), one of the most powerful ways to grow is to get natively integrated into horizontal solutions.

(I recommend everyone to go this route as early as possible)

Better later than never, in the last 12 months we've built native integrations with tools our customers already love:

- CRMs (Hubspot, Breakcold, CustomerOS)
- Outreach (Instantly, Smartlead, Saleshandy, Lemlist, Salesforge)
- No-code (Clay, Zapier, Make, nRev AI)

…and a lot of other amazing solutions (take a look at the carousel below to see a few more 👇)

That's how, in a bit less than 12 months, BetterContact went from a contact data product nobody knew of, to being natively integrated with +100 of GTM tools.

BetterContact Partner Solutions - Best Tools in Outbound

If your TAM = 5,000 companies, your 'Big TAM' (100,000) outbound playbook just won't work:

Big TAM (e.g. 100,000):

- You can afford a loose ICP definition
- One channel (email) is often enough
- There's room for A/B testing
- 30–50% reachability with Apollo or ZoomInfo is okay
- Good enough data = good enough results
- 2-touch email sequences are fine, move on if no reply
- Benchmark is 1 positive reply per 250–300 sends
- Volume over hyper-personalization is fine
- Campaign success = optimizing output and efficiency

Tiny TAM (e.g. 5,000):

- Gotta maintain a tight ICP definition (no ICP dilution)
- Go multi-channel: cold calling, LinkedIn, gifting
- Every lead matters, treat them accordingly
- Gotta do the 'unscalable' (e.g. custom Loom videos)
- Use multiple data providers, verify every contact
- You cannot afford 1 reply per 300 sends (aim for 10%)
- Stack more signals: firmographics, tech stack, hiring...
- Space out touches, don’t burn your entire list in 2 weeks
- Campaign success = maximizing reachability + response per contact

TAM is the #1 factor in shaping your outbound motion.

Some contact data providers are great in US, but completely useless in EU or UK. Based on our BetterContact data, using a dynamic waterfall vs. a static one yields 17% more valid results. 

It's common sense that every phone number provider has its own strengths and blind spots.

Relying on a static waterfall to enrich data is like trying to charge every device with one outdated cable. A few will connect. Most won’t.

We learned that the hard way at BetterContact:

↳ One provider crushes it in the US. Useless in Germany.
↳ Another works great in the UK. Falls flat everywhere else.
↳ Some are great in SaaS. Others in Finance.

That’s why we ditched the static approach almost more than a year ago.

Instead, we built layers of intelligence into BetterContact’s enrichment engine.

Here’s what happens before we pick a provider:

1) BetterAI analyzes the LinkedIn profile of your lead
2) Scans the company website & page
3) Understands industry, region, and context

Only then does our enrichment engine select the best-fit provider.

Not the cheapest one. Not the default. The right one.

The result is 17% more valid contact data vs. a static waterfall, plus:

↳ Higher data accuracy.
↳ More connections.
↳ Less wasted spend.

The art of waterfall enrichment is not stacking as many providers as possible.

It’s about knowing which one to trust, and when.

What are you using to find valid mobile numbers? 👇

Last week I spoke to a European Series A company founder who told me: ‘Cold calling is not working for us’”. After seeing their targeting, I could see why…

As they raised a lot of money recently, they thought now it’s time to go ‘big’ in outbound & reach out to as many new leads as possible.

So their targeting looked something like this:

‘We offer a payroll solution for B2B companies’

And I’ve seen this too often:
(primarily when I did this mistake myself, which was definitely WAY too often)

A team spends weeks fine-tuning their offer, script, and tech setup…

Only to start cold calling a market that’s way TOO BROAD.

“If you try to be everyone’s cup of tea, you’ll end up being no one’s cup of tea.”

The only way to win is by getting more specific, more niche.

It gets a little better with:

‘We offer a payroll solution for B2B SaaS companies under $5M revenue’

And even better, when getting REALLY specific, targeting should look something like this:

‘We offer a payroll solution for B2B SaaS agencies,
+ with 5-20 employees
+ based in Europe
+ with $1-$3M in annual revenue
+ that do cold calling
+ use Hubspot as their CRM

And all of a sudden, the message really resonates.
Because now it’s relevant.

But here’s the problem…

Most teams will never be able to maximize the outcome for their TAM.

Why?

Because they simply can’t find more than 30–60% of their TAM’s contact info.

So, to hit their goals, they’re forced to widen the targeting, and
…dilute their ICP
…reach out to bad-fit prospects
…build a trashy pipeline with low conversions

This is exactly why we built BetterContact.

Built to find the most amount of contact data to maximize the amount of revenue opportunities in a TAM.

If you're an outbound agency owner struggling with decreasingly lower outreach reply rates, here's something to think about:

Literally every outbound agency, including yours, is competing over the same contacts...

Because every agency uses the same tools (e.g. Apollo), meaning everyone reaches out to the same prospects.

However, the most-commonly used tools such as Apollo don’t have every contact in your TAM, and even if they do, a good amount of times no valid contact data is available (meaning you can’t reach them).

But those prospects still exist.
↳ They’re real people, working at real companies.
↳ They just can’t be verified by standard methods.

If you stick with this status quo, you have literally zero competitive advantage, as to the prospect, you’re just another person out of many trying to sell the same thing.

That’s why it makes sense to ‘go where others don’t’.

A concept called the ‘blue ocean’ - uncontested spaces (i.e. leads) that don’t get any attention from outbound players.

In practice, this simply means to focus on those contacts Apollo etc. don’t have contact data for.

That’s an important strategy we’ve built BetterContact around.

Facilitating access to those ‘untouched leads’ your competitors are most likely not even aware of.

Meaning:
↳ More leads others can’t reach
↳ Less competition
↳ Higher reply rates
↳ More conversions

If I were an outbound agency founder with $2M ARR ambitions (serving clients with 10,000 - 50,000 TAM), I’d bet big on adding Cold Calling to get there:

Cold calling is hard and scary:

1. Cold calls take more time than sending an email
2. Cold calling isn’t aren’t nearly as scalable as cold email
3. Mobile numbers are more expensive than emails
4. It takes courage to pick up the phone and call someone

And when you finally dial a number and no one picks up, there's no buffer between you and failure like with email.

You immediately feel the failure.

Nothing kills morale faster than:

1. Building & enriching an A+ lead list
2. Overcoming anxiety to pick up the phone
3. Just hearing: “This number is not in service”

And guess what, with mobile numbers that happens a lot, because, compared to emails, mobile numbers are much harder to verify.

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So, most agencies just avoid cold calling altogether.

At the same time, that's exactly why cold calling is your big opportunity.

I've seen top cold emailing agencies picking it up (again).

Because no one really does it at scale, you can build some serious competitive advantage by being the one outbound agency that does cold calling too.

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Starting out, here’s how I’d set up a two-month cold calling pilot:

1. Get a caller or call yourself (I recommend doing the latter at the beginning)
2. Get a (power/parallel) dialer like Aircall, PhoneBurner or Frontspin
3. Focus on high-intent leads for now (e.g. positive reply/lead magnet)
4. Enrich leads with BetterContact to get verified mobile numbers
5. Follow a simple 3-5 call touchpoints structure over 10-14 days

Give this a shot for 2 months and see what happens.

It’s really not rocket science.

With the right stack + data quality, cold calling can become one of your highest-converting outbound channels.

Things I hate to see in outbound:

- personalization based on what school I went to
- constant reinventing of age old concepts
- vendors charging for invalid contact data
- everyone using same data & signals = same message
- when companies need to dilute ICP in order to hit goals
- celebrating the wrong metrics (e.g. open rates)
- weak follow ups with no value-add

Things I love to see in outbound:

- A/B/C testing & iterating quickly
- when sender prioritizes offer over personalization
- laser-focusing on your ICP definition & TAM
- finding data, signals, buyer insights no one else has
- the fact that it went from no barrier to entry to exclusive (again)

There's plenty of things to hate about outbound. But also plenty to love about it.

Most outbound campaigns fail before the first email is even sent.

Not because the copy is bad.
Not because deliverability infra is poorly set up.
But because outbound didn't make sense in the first place.

Here’s when outbound actually works - and when you should think twice:

✅ High ACV (> $10k+)

When you're going for high-value contracts & outbound gives you direct access to decision makers.

But outbound can also work for lower ACVs - if the math checks out.

(Emails Sent × Positive Reply Rate × Meeting Rate × Close Rate × ACV) – (Emails Sent × Cost per Email) = Profit

If the cost per meeting still makes sense at the end of that chain - go for it.

But don’t just guess or hope for it. Base it on maths.

✅ Clearly defined ICP

If your target audience is vague, your messaging will be too.

Outbound works best when your ICP is razor-sharp and exclusionary.
(you win more by saying no to the wrong leads.)

✅ Pain-aware market

If your buyers already know they have a problem, your emails don’t need to educate - they just need to resonate.

✅ Narrow TAM but deep pockets

A small total addressable market isn't a problem. As long as you're willing to invest in high-quality data, personalization and multi-channel outreach.

(Wide TAMs hide weak strategies. Narrow TAMs expose them.)

✅ Strong offer & social proof

If your offer is weak, outbound will tell you quickly.

Outbound amplifies, and NOT fixes, your positioning.

Anything you would add?

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