If you’re part of a SaaS outbound team in 2025, chaos has probably been a constant in your life. Buyer journeys have become anything but simple - multiple touchpoints, competitors who just won’t stop popping up, budget cuts…it’s not been easy.

Add to this mix the biggest disruptor of our times, AI, enabling your Peers Next Door to bombard prospects with content, and you have a perfect recipe for exhaustion. From chasing dead ends, sending umpteen emails, struggling to stand out with one hand and tracking a ton of leads with the other like a superhuman, and so on.

Surely, there must be a way to automate at least some of this? To make the ‘execution’ part easy, so that you spend your time on strategizing and selling?

Enter Outbound Automation

Being a rapidly growing agency means we’re always onboarding new clients, and hence, always talking to potential ones. And to save our outbound team from Bandwidth Apocalypse, we’ve made our outbound process fully automated, end-to-end. 

This ensures:

• Our team can focus on high-value interactions
• Our messaging stays consistent 
• We gain valuable data insights 

Over the last year, this system has evolved into a sustainable model that keeps giving us quality leads. And in this article, we’ll give you a peek into our process - one that you can take a leaf out of and apply to your own.

Let’s get started.

How We Think About Our Outbound Marketing

Like most companies in SaaS, our marketing stands on two legs: inbound and outbound.

While inbound depends on demand maturity, outbound allows us to create that demand. It gives us control over our pipeline, letting us go after specific accounts. Outbound is also our Mad Scientist Lab, where we test new narratives fast and validate ICPs and new offerings.

Different companies have different goals with their outbound campaigns (the funniest we’ve seen is “A notification from us should engage them more than a notification from their date.”) 

For us, our broader goals for outbound include:

• Targeting high-fit accounts that aren’t actively searching
• Building awareness in new verticals and geographies
• Shortening sales cycles by engaging decision-makers directly
• Testing GTM hypotheses at speed 
• Keeping our pipeline warm and predictable

We typically drive 30-40% of our qualified pipeline through outbound, and we’re talking about high-quality SQLs that convert!

TripleDart’s Approach: How We Run Our Automated Outbound Strategy

Though our overall approach to outbound stays fairly consistent, we consider certain levers that impact the individual decisions within each cycle:

• What the ICP looks like 
• Channel mix (LinkedIn, Email, Retargeting, and so on)
• Messaging Strategy (For ex., Poke-the-bear insights, value-first CTAs)
• Extent of Personalization: Light (persona-based) to Deep (intent-based)
• Timing + Cadence (Warm-up phase, CTA placement, reply triggers…)

Based on these factors, we curate the approach for each campaign. 

Now that we have the stage set, we’ll get into the ‘how’ of it. And yes, while the individual parameters here might vary, this is the general path we take. 

1.  Cracking Our Best Account List

This is a mix of new and existing prospects. Once we have both, we combine them to arrive at the final list.  

1. New Prospects: Ideal Customer Profiles

The goal here is to hit that balance between too narrow and too broad. How do we get there?

As the saying goes, the past holds the key. We take the deals won in the last year and analyze common patterns. 

For the first level of screening, we zoom in a bit into their LinkedIn profiles, and look at some generic data points like job titles of their decision-makers, industry, revenue range, employee count, and how many times they’ve used the tag “AI Agent” in their marketing material.

Not the last one, really, at least for now. But the other questions help us narrow it down to a first-draft-level list of companies.

After this step, we narrow them down further to match our ICP. 

As a marketing agency that works with startups and scaleups, our core customers are either B2B/SaaS founders or marketing decision-makers. At the most basic level, these are the filters we go for: 

• Company Industry - Internet Technology & Software Companies
• Funded - Seed / Series A / Series B
• Employees - in Marketing Role > 10

In 2025, these specific verticals have borne more fruit than others:

• HR / Fintech Verticals
• Seed Funded Companies
• Companies hiring for Growth / Marketing Roles
• AI Domain Companies

Hence, this is an additional factor we keep an eye on.

If you want to read up a bit more about cracking your ICP, check this article out!

2. Existing Prospects: Retargeting

These prospects have already gone through the first round of screening; i.e, they are already qualified as ICPs, but they’ve been in a state of limbo on their journey. 

We have their contacts in our Factors.ai and Clay databases as these buckets:

For example, for the BOFU Page Visitors who didn’t engage on LinkedIn or book a meeting, the filters look something like this in our Factors portal:

So using this process, we have our second list of audience. We combine this list with the previous ICP list, and this gives us the full account list. 

The account list is uploaded to our LinkedIn Ad platform, and it acts as a basis for our campaigns 

2. The Content-ious Topic

What content works and what doesn’t in 2025 has become a hot topic of debate among marketers. But this much is clear: as more and more AI seeps into our material, the greater of a differentiator original and useful content becomes.

Once we have the account list, we create content tailored to different stages of the customer journey. We ensure that every content piece we put out there serves a purpose in moving prospects down the funnel.

Here’s how the strategy looks like based on the journey stage:

• Top of the funnel: Brand awareness, introducing who we are and what we do. This content appears on the feeds of people who fall into our ICP radar.

Examples: Thought leadership content, which we’d like to call the dark horse of marketing, has been hugely successful for us. These showcase our wins, experiments, learnings, or announcements.

• Middle of the funnel: Positioning ourselves as an "extended marketing team" and speaking about their operational challenges.

Examples: Original research pieces that position us as a source of trust, thumb-stopping single-image ads that showcase our services by highlighting ICP pain points and showing how we solve them 

• Bottom of the funnel: Service-specific campaigns with narratives targeted at specific roles, such as heads of growth, addressing their unique pain points.

Examples: Case studies from a relatable or aspirational client with before/after data, client testimonials as images/GIFs/videos, walkthrough video of our services 

Your prospect likely just got spammed for the umpteenth time for the day before seeing your content, so you don’t want to be just another scroll or notification. 

The best case is when you hit that right note between who you're talking to, what you're saying, and why you're saying it. Get that right, and most of the job is actually done, which is why we keep experimenting with different content formats and approaches based on the ICP type. 

Let’s quickly take a few scenarios and see how we position ourselves:

• For a seed-funded company -  “We can help you jump from $1M to $10M”
• For an AI Domain company - “We have cracked the B2B SaaS Marketing Playbook for 25+ AI Brands”
• For a company hiring for a Growth Leader - “TripleDart can be your extended marketing team.”

A quick disclaimer here. We don’t fully automate our content creation process; that would make our content look the same as any other agency. But the process of deploying the content in the outbound engine is - you guessed it - automated.

3. Inside the Flywheel of Campaign Execution

With our strategy and content in place, we implement the technical infrastructure that powers our outreach. 

1. Our Tech Stack

Clay: Manages lead enrichment and scoring workflows.

‍Vector: Tracks and segments website visitors in real-time.

‍Zapier: Automates data routing, HubSpot deduplication, and logging.

Apollo: Provides company and contact data enrichment.

Smartlead: Handles email outreach, inbox warming, and reply tracking.

Factors.ai: Supports visitor engagement scoring and retargeting.

2. Our Process

We’ll first look at a generalized version to understand how we approach this, and then look at a more specific example in outbound engineering.

General Approach

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Some accounts don't engage for months together, then something strikes them when priorities shift or budgets open up.

Factors allows us to see exactly which pages an account visited, whether they came from LinkedIn ads, direct traffic, or organic search, and if they booked meetings. Clicking on an account reveals a complete timeline of interactions, giving the overall customer journey picture.

This setup connects dots that used to live in completely separate systems. You'll spot patterns you'd never catch if you were doing this by hand!

4. Specific Workflow Deep Dive: Website Visitors Campaign Using Vector + Clay + Apollo + Smartlead 

Our outbound engine is full of workflows that help us get from point A to B with no human intervention. These workflows require simple engineering setups, after which it is plug-and-play.

Factors-based campaigns, SaaStock outreach, AI SEO…we use several workflows, each of which plays a part in the larger scheme of things.. But for this example, let’s take a close look at how we use a combination of tools to identify website visitors and connect with them.

1. Tracking Visitors with Vector

We track website traffic in real-time using Vector's free version. The moment someone visits key pages on our TripleDart site, like our pricing page or BOFU landing pages, we get a notification in Slack.

Vector automatically organizes this traffic into specific buckets like ‘Pricing Page Visitors’ and ‘BOFU Segment Visitors.’

2. Routing Traffic with Zapier

Zapier steps in here as our smart traffic controller. This is how the process looks like:

1. Zapier's Catch Webhook first receives the visitor data from Vector and then identifies if we’re dealing with an individual or company contact.
2. For individuals, we log their information in a Google Sheet and run a quick HubSpot check:

• If we already have this contact in our CRM, we stop the flow (no duplicate outreach)
• If this contact doesn't exist yet, we send them to Clay for enrichment and qualification

3. For companies, we route their data down a separate path to Clay and use it for specialized workflows like account-based nurturing or retargeting.

With this approach, we ensure there aren’t duplicates, and that our pipeline is properly synced between connecting website traffic, CRM records, and outbound campaigns.

3. Enriching and Scoring Leads With Clay + Apollo

Once Clay receives data from Zapier, we enrich each profile through Apollo. We pull essential details of the company like funding stage, marketing team size, revenue, and employee count.

We then head to the two-step scoring system:

Step 1: Clay evaluates whether the company matches our B2B SaaS profile (We only move if it is a 'Yes')

Step 2: We rank companies using these key criteria:

• Funding Stage: We prioritize Series A or B companies
• Marketing Team Size: We prefer teams with 3-5 members
• Employee Size: We target companies with 20-500 employees

Only high-scoring companies advance to our outreach stage.

After scoring, we use a waterfall approach to find the most accurate company email addresses before we start outreach.

4. How We Execute Outreach via Smartlead

We push qualified leads from the previous step into Smartlead, where we:

• Manage inbox warmup and domain rotation automatically
• Launch hyper-personalized email sequences
• Use visitor context (like "Visited Pricing Page") to tailor what we put out 

5. ABM and Passing the Baton to Sales 

1. ABM

This somewhat starts with similar steps as we’ve discussed till now. 

It starts with our ICP identification, moves through audience targeting and content creation, and then focuses on campaign management and performance tracking - essentially whatever we’ve seen till this step. 

But ABM takes things up a notch by simultaneously checking LinkedIn campaign metrics and website interaction data from Factors. It then combines these two datasets and spots patterns and opportunities that could have been missed by manual eyeballing.

For example, a company without an immediate need may not fill out a form, but show interest through other engagement signals. 

Here’s a simplified version of our ABM logic:

With this step, it’s safe to say that the torch is ready to be passed on to our sales team.

2. Sales Handoff

With our marketing passing all the intent data to sales, we take things from marketing-generated awareness to sales-driven conversion. 

This chronology helps our marketing and sales add to each other's impact instead of working in separate bubbles. 

Our sales team jumps into conversations with full knowledge of every webinar attended, every case study downloaded, and every ad clicked. 

It’s a win-win situation: the prospect gets a smooth experience, and our team works smarter.

6. Reaching Out

We arrive at a process-heavy zone here:

1. We identify "hot accounts" based on engagement scores
2. They get transferred onto a sales intelligence platform (we use Clay) with an ICP scoring mechanism. 
3. Accounts that meet the ICP criteria are pushed to an email campaign tool such as Smartlead, and to a LinkedIn Outreach Automation tool like Heyreach.
4. Through Smartlead and Heyreach, we track metrics like send rates, replies, positive responses, and bounces. 

This parallel outreach across email and LinkedIn means we get to reinforce our message, and prospects get different channels to engage.

The data flows directly from Factors to Clay, then from Clay to both Smartlead and Heyreach, without a waste of our team’s bandwidth. 

This continues until prospects take a desired action and fill out a form. How do we ensure this is not nagging but rather nurturing? We’ll see this in the next steps.

7. Integrating into HubSpot

Once the prospect fills out a form, they enter our (HubSpot) CRM. They begin their lifecycle journey where they go from SQL to opportunity to closed won/lost. 

However, not all leads move swiftly through this process because, well, not all leads convert to clients for any company. Which brings us to the next and final stage.

8. “Water the Plants”

For prospects who haven't advanced to the next step in 30-60 days, we activate a nurturing sequence. 

This way, we maintain contact in a way that’s helpful rather than spammy. 

We send:

• Newsletters and industry reports that provide value 
• Invitations for webinars - purely educational ones
• Quarterly check-ins about their marketing goals (How have their priorities and challenges evolved?) 
• Guides and playbooks that have been developed in-house, showing that we’re a helpful resource and not a nagging vendor

B2B sales cycles can drag on for weeks or even months. That's just how it is, especially with crazy-complicated buyer journeys these days. 

By automating our nurturing process, we’re able to keep the relationship warm until they're ready to move forward without burning out our team. 

We've won plenty of deals this way that would have disappeared if we'd pushed too hard or given up too soon!

Here’s how our lifecycle marketing flow looks like:

Why This Approach Works

Outbound has consistently generated 50-60 meetings a month for us. It's become a steady growth engine, especially when inbound leads fluctuate. 

Automating our outbound workflows has made it one of the most consistent and scalable growth levers in our pipeline.

Rapid ICP Validation: We no longer wait for inbound trends to spot demand. With automation, we can test new ICPs weekly: launch, learn, and adjust in real time.

Multichannel by Default: Every lead enters a coordinated LinkedIn + email + retargeting workflow without manual stitching. It feels personal, but runs at scale.

More Time for Personalization: With automated workflows handling volume outreach, our SDRs focus on strategic, high-value accounts, like say writing personalized emails that move the needle.

Conclusion

When you step back and look at the complete process, you'll see that each component works in sync with the others to run like a well-oiled machine. This approach modifies traditional outbound from a bunch of manual, disconnected tasks into a smooth and scalable system. We let the automation handle the tedious stuff so our team can focus on those high-value conversations where their expertise really shines.

Don’t forget to note here that setting this up takes investment in both tech and strategy upfront. But the payoff is worth every penny. Your team works smarter, your messaging stays on point, and deals move faster. Best of all, you're building something that grows with your company instead of holding you back when you start to scale!