B2B sales outreach strategy for 2026 (Belkins blueprint)

Precious Oboidhe
Author
Precious Oboidhe
Michael Maximoff
Reviewed by
Michael Maximoff
Updated:2026-02-03
Reading time:15 min
background

If you asked us to lean on our experience and state the primary predictor for declining outbound performance, we’d almost always point to strategy.

Previously, most companies relied on high-volume, low-context outbound outreach. That model is now officially broken because buyers’ inboxes are saturated, attention is scarce, and tolerance for irrelevant outreach is gone. Our B2B cold email study confirms this, as reply rates dropped by 15% between 2023 and 2024.

Many teams responded by using AI to increase volume. The result wasn’t efficiency but faster brand erosion. Automating low-context outreach simply scaled what buyers already ignored.

At Belkins, we run outbound campaigns for clients across more than 50 industries. This scale gives us the advantage of seeing patterns early and separating tactics that simply look modern from systems that produce pipeline.

Our experience led us to a philosophy: outbound only works when automation accelerates human judgment, rather than replacing it. We call this human-in-the-loop outreach. AI handles research, enrichment, sequencing, and scale. Humans handle relevance, personalization, and context. The result isn’t more touches — it’s orchestrated, multichannel precision across email, phone, and LinkedIn. 

Since 2024, our campaign data show that multichannel outreach outperforms single-channel strategies, producing over 20% higher close rates, 20% lower CAC, and 25% shorter sales cycles.

In this guide, you won’t find a list of outbound tactics. Instead, it’s the operational architecture we use to build and scale pipelines for VPs and CROs across 1,000+ client engagements. If you aim to systematize revenue generation, this blueprint will show how to create outreach engines that hold up in 2026 and beyond.

📌 We worked with our partners and analyzed 16.5M cold emails, 20M+ LinkedIn outreach attempts, and over 5M cold calls to capture the full picture of what’s working now. Read our B2B cold outreach benchmarks report to learn about our findings and watch the best practices used by our partners.

Phase 1: The pre-contact infrastructure 

Most outbound failures happen before the first contact. 

Poor deliverability, invalid phone numbers, weak data, and fragile infrastructure quietly kill campaigns long before messaging is tested. After setting SMART pipeline goals, there are three more fundamentals to address. 

  1. Ideal customer profiles (ICPs)
  2. A quality lead list
  3. Technical deliverability and domain health

ICPs

The best ICPs don’t include all of your total addressable market (TAM) at once; they are the problem-aware subset who are motivated to urgently solve their particular problem. This urgency makes them likely to respond to any form of contact. It also makes crafting resonant outbound messaging easier. 

Focusing on such ICPs ensures you don’t spread your resources thin and lower conversion rates. Instead, you’re prioritizing the segments most likely to convert. After saturating this segment, you can expand into other ICP subsets.

To refine ICPs, we analyze patterns across closed-won deals and the happiest customers. We examine the industry, company size, pain points, buying triggers, and strategic initiatives that motivated executives and buying committees to back purchases. 

For instance, you could notice that a disproportionate number of your best customers come from the same industry. It’s tempting to want to target more companies like them, but when you dig deeper — talking to customers and internal teams — you uncover the real driver. These buyers are not converting because of a product feature. They’re buying because they’re facing specific conditions: rapid growth, regulatory pressure, a major transition, or increased scrutiny.

That insight changes everything. Instead of broad industry targeting, you are now doing situational targeting where timing, not just fit, creates demand.

At Belkins, we also create a buying committee map that outlines job titles, seniority levels, research priorities, and the strategic rationale for targeting each role. This enables us to tailor value propositions to each stakeholder when executing outbound outreach.

a buying committee table example

📚 Learn more: A B2B Healthcare ICP Example & the Best Practices 

Quality lead list

Once target accounts are defined, execution depends on your list quality. You can build lists internally or outsource them — but either way, the standard must be the same: accuracy over volume.

If building internally, start with a reliable platform that has a large database of business contacts, includes extensive firmographic data, and allows precise filtering by industry, company size, and role. 

At Belkins, we combine LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Hunter Discover, Apollo, and ZoomInfo Sales for one reason: data decay. Roughly 28% of B2B emails become invalid every year due to job changes and role shifts. As such, cross-verification is essential.

For phone outreach, we recommend tools like Nooks or platforms that provide human-verified, direct mobile numbers. Relying on generic switchboard numbers instead of direct-dial contacts can reduce connect rates by as much as 75%.

If outsourcing, vet providers carefully. Many vendors prioritize lead count over fit, or resell recycled lists that barely fit your ICP.

At Belkins, every lead is 100% hand-verified against ICP criteria. This ensures our clients spend time exclusively with the best-fit prospects. Having supported organizations across SaaS, healthcare, industrial manufacturing, and professional services, we’ve learned that list quality is often the single biggest determinant of outbound ROI.

📌 Pro tip: Avoid pre-built lists entirely. As our co-founder, Michael Maximoff, notes, they consistently underperform compared to bespoke lists and put your sending infrastructure at risk.

📚 Learn more: Where To Buy B2B Sales Leads? 4 Options To Consider

Technical deliverability and domain health

Before launching your outreach campaign, ensure your tech settings let you maximize email deliverability and the LinkedIn connection limit.

Improving email deliverability and domain health

Three non-negotiables in your tech infrastructure are essential for consistent inbox placement. Get any of these wrong, and your emails may land in spam — regardless of message quality.

  • Domain warm-up. Email warm-up is the building of a positive sender reputation by gradually increasing the number of emails sent from a new email address. A strong reputation with mailbox providers helps ensure emails land in the inbox, not the spam folder.

Mailbox providers don’t just evaluate email volume — they assess content patterns, repetition, and engagement behavior. That’s why modern warm-ups must reflect real campaign conditions.

During warm-up, we use spintax-driven message variation, where a single message framework dynamically generates structurally different versions. We spin elements like sentence order, paragraph phrasing, and wording to ensure emails aren’t identical while preserving the same core message. This reduces pattern detection and helps with running A/B tests.

Our warm-up messages also incorporate ICP-specific data points, making emails personalized to every contact using our proprietary AI tech. This allows us to create different emails for different recipient groups using contextual inputs.

Here’s how we increase daily sending limits to get new emails warmed up within 2–3 weeks.

Belkins’ 14 Day Email Warmup Cadence Example

Note that a warmed-up email does not grant permission to exceed ESP daily limits. We recommend capping daily sends at 250 emails for Gmail and 325 for business email providers. Exceeding these thresholds can damage your domain reputation.

  • Primary and secondary domain cold outreach framework. Outbound outreach shouldn’t put your primary domain at risk, but isolation alone is no longer the only consideration.

Our framework uses a dual-domain approach. For your most valuable or dream prospects, we create dedicated outreach mailboxes within your primary domain. These inboxes inherit your domain-level reputation, which improves deliverability and credibility when engaging high-stakes prospects.

In parallel, we deploy secondary outreach domains that resemble the primary domain. If your main domain is company.com, use domains like company-outreach.com or company-mail.com. We use these domains for broader outbound motion, but they require more deliberate warm-up since they start with zero reputation.

  • Domain Name System (DNS) record audit. In Michael’s experience, most deliverability issues stem from incorrect DNS configurations and many can be fixed in under an hour.

DNS tells the internet who you are, what you’re authorized to send, and whether your domain can be trusted. These DNS records are essential for reliable email authentication:

If these recommendations feel overly technical, watch the webinar recording below, where Michael breaks down how to avoid spam issues, or work with Belkins email deliverability experts to set up your deliverability infrastructure correctly.

Maximizing LinkedIn connection limit

LinkedIn caps connection requests at roughly 100 to 200 per week. Exceeding this limit leads to temporary restrictions. However, as a LinkedIn lead generation services company, we know how to overcome this challenge.

While your exact limit varies and depends on factors such as account age, activity level, and your Social Selling Index (SSI), there are two ways to extend it and send more outreach messages.

  • Raise your SSI. SSI measures how effectively you use LinkedIn for social selling. It’s scored from 1 to 100. According to Ilya Azovtsev, co-founder of GrowthBand, maintaining an SSI of 65 or higher can raise your weekly connection limit by as much as 40%. You can increase your SSI by fully optimizing your profile, engaging thoughtfully with relevant posts, and consistently building relationships on the platform.
  • Use a mobile connector. LinkedIn allows users to send extra connection requests through its mobile app, even after reaching the desktop limit. However, manual mobile outreach is inefficient. Expandi’s Mobile Connector addresses this by replicating mobile behavior on desktop, enabling you to send additional requests beyond the desktop capabilities without sacrificing ease of use.

Phase 2: The “relevance” engine (messaging strategy) 

Most prospects don’t appreciate getting unsolicited messages in their inbox. Such outreach is, by default, an interruption. The only way past that resistance is relevance.

Dreamdata co-founder Steffen Hedebrandt captures this sentiment perfectly:

“If you're not willing to ‘pay the entrance fee’ and do the actual work of getting to know me enough to write a relevant email, stay out of my inbox!”

Relevance to prospects’ needs or goals earns attention. Irrelevance earns silence or spam complaints. There are three ways we make our cold outreach relevant.

  1. Understand that relevance trumps “personalization”
  2. Achieve deep personalization/relevance with competency mapping
  3. Lead with value and a soft call-to-action (CTA)

Understand that relevance trumps “personalization”

Some sales reps reference a prospect's college mascot or mention a recent LinkedIn update in their email and call it “personalized.”

Newsflash: that’s just surface-level decoration.

True personalization that’s relevant involves tailoring messages to a prospect’s goals, challenges, situation, or active priorities. These include business triggers such as mergers, funding, or a need for new hires.

Consider this email Steffen received:

Poor Email Personalization Example

Source

While Steffen’s engagement with the post might indicate buying intent, this email doesn’t explain that connection clearly. As a result, the message feels arbitrary and irrelevant. 

Now compare that with this templatized version of one of the highest-performing cold emails used in Belkins’ client campaigns.

Subject line: Still hiring a {{Open Position}}?

 

Hi {{First Name}},

 

Is hiring a {{Open Position}} taking longer than expected?

 

I know internal hiring is always the priority, but in case timelines are getting tight, I wanted to let you know that {{Your Company}} could help if getting outside support ever becomes a consideration.

 

Is there any part of the {{Department/Team}} roadmap, like (Project/Goal}}, that’s delayed during the hiring process? For example, by augmenting your team with our {{Your Team}} (most of whom are graduates of {{Notable university/Program}}), you can develop {{Solution}} of any complexity.

 

Let me know if you'd like a brief introduction on {{Date}}.

 

Best,

 

The first email appears to have been written after the sender skimmed Steffen’s profile for 30 seconds. The second called out a likely pain point — difficulty filling a critical role — and then subtly positioned its staff augmentation/outsourcing service as a potential solution.

Achieve deep personalization/relevance with competency mapping

Competency mapping is Belkins’ proprietary method for aligning a brand’s offerings with the specific needs of buyers. It enables you to craft highly relevant outreach messages for each job title at scale. Think of it as an extension of the ICP and buyer persona process — but with greater nuance.

The process involves three key steps:

  1. Segment your ICPs. Break ICPs into sub-segments based on shared psychographic characteristics. Then rank them based on:

    • Ease of selling, i.e., how accessible and responsive is this segment?
    • Growth potential, i.e., is the market expanding or stagnating?
    • Strategic fit, i.e., how interesting or valuable is it to your business?

Breakdown of Belkins ICP based on ease of selling, growth potential, and strategic fit

  1. Map the buying committee. Identify the key stakeholders involved in the purchase decision. If you have closed-won deal data, review it to determine who typically participates. If you’re a new company, make an educated guess and refine it over time. Typical buying committee personas include:

    • Point of contact (POC). Primary person you engage
    • Initiator. Recognizes a problem and initiates the buying process
    • Influencer. Shapes internal opinions.
    • End user. Direct user of the product or service.
    • Approver. Owns the budget.
    • Buyer. Selects vendors and negotiates terms
    • Gatekeeper. Controls information flow

Aim for a maximum of five members per committee, but ensure there's a balance. For example, including an initiator and end user but skipping key decision-makers risks a deal stalling mid-process.

Next, clarify the goals, challenges, and needs of each committee member. Outline the outcomes they aim to achieve, their constraints, and what they need to surmount challenges.

Belkins-buying-committee-goals-objectives-and-responsibilities-map

  1. Understand the full decision process. Learn how each buying committee member makes buying decisions. Uncover the strategic initiatives that drive executives to fund solutions like yours so you can map value propositions to each job title and craft relevant messages to accounts in your ICP sub-segment. Here’s what that looks like at Belkins.

Belkins’ buying committee member vs value proposition map

Lead with value and include an appropriate call-to-action (CTA)

In cold outbound, the goal of the first touch isn’t to book a meeting, but to earn engagement.

Early messages work best when they lead with value — insights, benchmarks, relevant examples, or proof that you understand the prospect’s needs. This establishes credibility before requesting anything in return.

That’s where soft CTAs are most effective. Prompts like “Does this feel relevant?” or “Would it be useful if I shared this?” ask for interest, not commitment. They reduce friction and give prospects a low-effort way to respond.

However, effective outbound doesn’t stop there. In our campaigns, CTAs evolve across the cadence. As familiarity increases through follow-ups and multi-channel reinforcement, we use hard CTAs — such as proposing a call or demo — when appropriate.

We also constantly test CTA type, timing, and placement. Some sequences convert better with early soft CTAs and later hard asks. Others perform best when a clear meeting request appears sooner. The only constant is experimentation.

Phase 3: Launch a full-funnel, omnichannel outreach

An omnichannel strategy is a sales and marketing approach that involves engaging ICPs across multiple channels with consistent messaging. Engaging ICPs across channels such as email, phone calls, and social media allows you to reinforce your message, build brand recognition, and increase the likelihood of engagement.

Omnichannel vs. Multi-channel outreach

For outreach to be omnichannel, every channel must work together to deliver a unified customer experience. 

📚 Learn more: How To Align Sales and Marketing Teams: 4 Key Principles 

Metric Belkins’ omnichannel Multichannel Single-channel
Qualified yearly appointments 100–400 sales-ready prospects 60–100 Less than 60
Pipeline growth 50%–200% higher Up to 50% higher No significant increase
Sales cycle length Up to 20% shorter 5–10% shorter No significant reduction
Customer acquisition cost 20% lower 10% lower Higher
Conversion rates The highest, with 25% higher close rates Moderate, 5%–10% Low, up to 5%
Return on investment (ROI) Excellent, with 200%+ Up to 150% Moderate, 50%–100%

Sales leader Jason Bay reports having had a similar experience. He noted that prospects engaged across email, LinkedIn, and phone convert at up to 3x the rate of single-channel prospects.

Having established why omnichannel outreach matters, the two points below break down our omnichannel approach and the bottom-up marketing playbook we use to achieve fast results for teams whose marketing motion is still rudimentary.

Belkins’ omnichannel outreach cadence

Email, LinkedIn, and phone calls form the backbone of our outbound strategy. When appropriate, we layer in paid social, Google Ads, SMS, or WhatsApp. Here's how the channels support each other in a synchronized sequence. 

Channel 1: Email (the anchor)

Most of our outbound sequences begin with email due to its reach and scalability. We use email to establish context for a phone call, reengage prospects who’ve gone cold, and book appointments with warm prospects.

Channel 2: LinkedIn (the social proof)

LinkedIn outreach strengthens outbound by building authority and familiarity before a meeting or phone call, and is perfect for following up. Before launching campaigns, we optimize the company page and sales reps’ LinkedIn profiles. The optimization elements include:

  • Outcome-focused headlines that state who’s helped and why
  • Buyer-oriented summaries that emphasize problems solved
  • Consistent positioning across personal profiles and the company page
  • Proof elements such as client logos, case study highlights, or thought leadership
  • Professional visuals and content that show credibility 

After profile optimization, LinkedIn is used to create familiarity by creating content and engaging with others. Sales reps may react to relevant posts or leave thoughtful comments over several days. This creates name recognition, so when your connection request arrives, you're no longer a stranger. 

📚 Learn more: How to use LinkedIn for B2B lead generation 

Channel 3: Cold calling/intent-based calling (the accelerator)

As a cold calling services agency, we offer two calling approaches: 

  • Traditional cold calling. Calls serve as the first touchpoint. We may also call or leave a voicemail to direct prospects back to an unread email.  
  • Intent-based calling. Calls are placed after a prospect shows buying intent, such as clicking a link in an outreach email or engaging with bottom-of-funnel content. Intent-based calling lets us time outreach more precisely and achieve higher conversions. At Belkins, we prioritize this approach over traditional cold calls.

The flowchart below shows the sequence of activities in our omnichannel outreach and how prospect behavior triggers each touchpoint. Note that the interval between touches is typically one to four days.

Belkins omnichannel outreach cadence chart

📚 Learn more: To master omnichannel strategy, watch our free webinars and read our articles on B2B omnichannel marketing, implementation strategy, challenges, and examples.

Implement the bottom-up marketing playbook

Omnichannel is most successful when sales outreach aligns with marketing initiatives. If your marketing motion is still in its early stages, Michael recommends implementing a bottom-up marketing approach. 

Top-down marketing vs Belkins’ bottom-up marketing model

Bottom-up marketing flips the traditional funnel. It’s SDR-led and goes from conversion to engagement to activation and awareness. Instead of spending months building awareness first, bottom-up allows sales to validate messaging with ICPs through live prospecting. The feedback is immediate, measurable, and actionable. 

Step 1: 60-day foundational sprint 

  • Goal. Validate the core message and ICP with minimal spend.
  • Channels. LinkedIn (light engagement), cold email, cold calling, and intent-based calling.
  • Funnel stage. Conversion.
  • Activity. Target 50 to 100 accounts from your clean lead list with a multi-touch 60-day cadence. Begin with LinkedIn. Next, include cold emails and calls. Use this phase to test value propositions, identify objections, and assess the quality of your execution.
  • Success metrics:
    • Engagement rate (negative replies under 50%)
    • Meetings booked (minimum 0.5%)

Step 2: Add value-driven assets 

  • Goal. Nurture out-of-market prospects and build authority.
  • Channels. Previous channels plus webinars or live events.
  • Funnel stage. Engagement and activation.
  • Activity. Tighten the ICP fit by enriching and validating your list. Create value-first assets for educating such as webinars, live sessions, benchmark reports, or white papers tailored to your best-performing segments. SDRs use these to re-engage warm prospects and signal expertise.
  • Success metrics:
    • Positive replies
    • Webinar RSVPs and attendance
    • Asset downloads
    • New conversations

Step 3: Repackage and amplify

  • Goal. Scale awareness using validated insights.
  • Channels. All previous channels, plus blog and social content
  • Funnel stage. Awareness.
  • Activity. Scale what’s working. Repackage your value-first assets into industry-specific articles and LinkedIn content. SDRs use these in nurture sequences to reinforce credibility and spark conversations.
  • Success metrics:
    • Organic traffic
    • Social engagement
    • Continued conversations
    • Increased inbound interest

Step 4: Scale with full-funnel execution

  • Goal. Build a nonlinear system that surrounds the buyer.
  • Channels. All previous channels plus paid ads.
  • Funnel stage. Full funnel.
  • Activity. Double down on what’s proven. Amplify high-performing content through ads and search. Include proactive outbound, role-specific landing pages, and targeted calling for high-intent accounts.

Belkins’ full-funnel omnichannel sales and marketing strategy

📚 Learn more: B2B Lead Generation Strategy for 2026 & Beyond 

Phase 4: Nurture and follow up intentionally

On average, a B2B deal takes 192 days from first touch to close. Some stretch beyond a year. Without a nurturing and follow-up system, you’ll inevitably lose deals that could have been won.

Unfortunately, most teams don’t follow up. In fact, Michael tells me that after analyzing the HubSpot contact list of Belkins customers, he finds the average number of touchpoints per year is two to six. 

The biggest sin of outreach is cycling through the leads one time and only looking for fresh leads all the time. Many companies just gather a list of 500 to 1,000 new contacts every month, reach out to them with an email sequence or with calls or via LinkedIn, and move on to a new contact list the following month. 

— Michael Maximoff

There’s no one-size-fits-all follow-up framework that works for every business. The right approach depends on who you’re targeting and how they prefer to engage.

Select follow-up channels based on context

Emails, LinkedIn, phone calls, video messages, and even direct mail can all be effective, but only when matched correctly to your audience. Consider your:

  • ICP digital presence. For digital-first industries like SaaS, IT, and digital advertising, email and LinkedIn work well. Buyers in field-based or operational industries such as construction, logistics, and manufacturing are often harder to reach online and respond better to phone calls.
  • Company size. SMBs and mid-market firms are generally accessible through email and LinkedIn alone. Enterprise prospects require a coordinated omnichannel approach.
  • Prospect’s title. Different titles engage differently. In our experience, 
    • CMOs are more responsive to LinkedIn messaging paired with strong thought leadership.
    • Heads of sales favor direct calls and concise, ROI-focused emails. 
    • C-level executives require well-timed calls backed by visible brand credibility. 
    • Mid-level managers are generally reachable via a mix of calls and email follow-ups.
  • Outreach stage. In early stages, email and LinkedIn work best in tandem to establish familiarity. Once a prospect shows intent, follow-ups should become more customized — tailored emails, direct messages, and well-timed calls that reference their specific behavior.

Our 2025 B2B sales follow-up study revealed that the highest reply rates (11.87%) occurred when email outreach was paired with light LinkedIn nurturing. “Light” here means non-intrusive actions — profile views, post engagement, follows, and comments — that build familiarity without forcing a conversation.

Avoid follow-up fatigue

Our data shows that the first follow-up email delivers the highest engagement, with an 8.4% reply rate. After that, effectiveness drops steadily. By the fifth follow-up, replies fall to just 3.8%.

A graph that shows how open and reply rates decrease after each email follow-up

Beyond reduced reply rates, over-persistence comes at a cost. Sending four or more follow-up emails in a sequence can annoy prospects, increasing unsubscribe and spam complaint rates by over 3x.

A graph that shows how how unsubscribe and spam rate increase after each email follow-up

For founder-level prospects, response rates are generally stable from the initial email through the second follow-up. But it dips significantly afterwards.

A graph that shows how how reply rate among founders change depending on the number of email follow-ups

The takeaway? Protect your sender reputation, avoid alienating potential buyers, and cap your sequence at three email follow-ups per thread. If there’s no response, start a new email thread with a new subject line and refreshed positioning rather than continuing the same thread. 

Additionally, some of your prospects could be out-of-market or low-intent, so if you see warning signs that a prospect is uninterested or not ready to buy, pause the outreach. Don’t destroy long-term trust for the possibility of short-term revenue.

Follow up with purpose 

The least effective follow-ups are vague nudges like, “Just checking in — any thoughts?” These messages add no value and waste an opportunity to strengthen your position with buyers.

Every follow-up should introduce something new: a relevant insight, a short case example, a market shift, or a useful framework. Your email should give buyers a reason to care, not just remind them you exist.

Here’s an example of a value-led LinkedIn follow-up sent after an initial cold email.

{{FirstName}}, thanks for connecting!

 

Just touching base on what I sent over earlier - would love to chat about how CompanyX can help you stand out with cinematic storytelling.

 

I've attached some of our work in the healthcare industry. Worth a quick chat next week?

Determine your follow-up cadence

At our cold outreach agency, a follow-up sequence can last up to 60 days. If a prospect hasn’t engaged by then but still fits your ICP, it’s likely a timing issue. Use your broader omnichannel marketing strategies to stay visible while sales re-engage periodically, say every 3–6 months, depending on your average deal cycle.

We recommend a gap of 2–3 days between individual touches. Longer delays cause prospects to forget you; shorter gaps make the outreach feel intrusive. Rather than relying on these fixed, arbitrary intervals alone, use engagement signals to guide both timing and messaging.

For instance, if a prospect opened an email 3+ times, clicked a link in the email, viewed your LinkedIn profile, and downloaded your asset, it indicates active interest. When such signals appear, a call within 24 hours is often the ideal move. 

Example of B2B outreach follow up cadence

Phase 5: Measure and optimize

Regular performance reviews let you get insights from your campaign data that can improve your outreach.

Focus on metrics that matter

Not all metrics are useful. Some are vanity metrics. Others mislead.

For example, email open rates are increasingly unreliable due to privacy features like Apple Mail Privacy Protection, which can trigger “opens” even when an email was never read. In fact, tracking response rates might be hurting you — we found that turning off open-rate tracking pixels led to a +3% reply rate lift.

Similarly, activity metrics such as total emails sent or dials made only confirm that work occurred, not that it was effective.

As a sales leader, one of the most important metrics to track is pipeline velocity, which shows how quickly your team is turning opportunities into revenue.

Pipeline velocity = (total opportunities x win rate x average deal size) ÷ sales cycle length

However, pipeline velocity alone won’t tell you where things are breaking down. To diagnose issues, you need operational metrics tied to engagement and conversion, including:

  • Email reply rate, bounce rate, and spam complaint rate
  • LinkedIn connection and reply rates
  • Phone connect rate
  • Meeting booked rate and show-up rate
  • Customer acquisition cost

Benchmark these metrics against industry averages and review them consistently. The goal is to identify opportunities for improvement, run experiments, and measure whether changes actually improve results.

Track objections systematically

Don't treat objections as one-off hurdles to overcome at the moment. They're market insights that should guide your outreach messaging. When the same objection keeps surfacing, the smart move is to ensure your messaging addresses it. 

For example, if 40% of prospects say “We already use {{Competitor X}},” your email copy should say something like:

Most teams we work with already use {{Competitor X}}. They usually keep it for {{Use Case A}} and add us for {{Use Case B}} because {{specific benefit}}. 

 

Happy to show you how {{Similar Company}} runs both systems without overlap.

 

Addressing objections proactively helps reduce friction in the buying process, shows you understand the buyer’s world, and reduces repetitive back-and-forth for your sales team.

Here's how to systematize objection handling:

  • Audit your objections. Review the last three to six months of sales calls and email replies. Extract every objection, concern, or hesitation prospect raised.
  • Categorize by persona. Different stakeholders raise different objections. Group objections by persona so you can tailor your messaging to preemptively address each stakeholder's concerns.
  • Build response templates. Don’t rely on improvisation. Create standardized responses that acknowledge the concern, reframe it with context or data, and propose a clear next step. Store these templates in your CRM so they’re accessible to the entire team.

Optimize the SDR function

One of the most impactful decisions we’ve made in the past three years was moving our BDRs and SDRs from sales into the marketing team. As Michael explains, we saw the cost per appointment for Belkins’ clients increase by 10–20% YoY in 2022. By 2023, the traditional outbound model had become unsustainable:

“It had officially become too expensive for small businesses to get even 5 meetings for a $5k monthly spend, still trying to rely on the old outbound playbook. It became too expensive for our clients. It became too expensive for us.”

— Michael Maximoff

When Michael reviewed Belkins’ internal numbers, he noticed something striking: our own appointment costs were a fraction of what clients had been paying. The reason became clear on closer inspection.

Our BDRs weren’t running outbound in isolation. They were actively supporting marketing initiatives by collecting market insights that enabled marketing to produce more valuable content assets based on a precise understanding of the audience's needs.

That clarity, combined with structured nurturing sequences, dramatically reduced acquisition costs.

Michael concluded that:

  • Marketing plays and will continue to play a larger role in outbound success than ever before. Brand reputation is a core trust factor for buyers deciding who delivers value, and outbound alone can no longer build enough trust at scale
  • In this new future, SDRs will increasingly move from sales to marketing, acting as the bridge between the two functions. They'll no longer just be appointment setters. They’ll be:
    • Market intelligence sources. Gathering data, verifying lists, tracking intent signals
    • Messaging testers. Running A/B tests on positioning and value props
    • Content distributors. Getting relevant assets to the right prospects at the right time

The insights they gather will help you sharpen your targeting, your outreach messaging, and produce more valuable content assets. By nurturing prospects with these valuable assets, you build trust at scale, and outreach efforts are more successful.

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Precious Oboidhe
Author
Precious Oboidhe
B2B Content Strategist & Writer
Precious develops content marketing strategies and frequently blogs for the well-known B2B players. HubSpot, CoSchedule, EngageBay, and Foundation Inc. — this is only a small part of the MarTech brands Precious collaborated with.
Michael Maximoff
Expert
Michael Maximoff
Co-founder and Chief Growth Officer at Belkins
Michael is the сo-founder of Belkins, serial entrepreneur, and investor. With a decade of experience in B2B Sales and Marketing, he has a passion for building world-class teams and implementing efficient processes to drive the success of his ventures and clients.