139: How We Generated 34 Leads in One Month

Welcome back to the Practical Prospecting newsletter!

Last month, we ran a new outbound campaign that generated 34 positive replies, 20 meetings booked, and 2 deals won.

In today’s newsletter, I’ll break down exactly how we did it.

Agenda

• How I Built the List

• The Messaging I Used

• Why it Worked

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How I Built the List

As an agency, we can only take on so many clients. Because of that, we try to be selective and work with companies where we’re confident we can get strong results.

After 2+ years running the agency and working with 60+ clients, I started to notice a clear pattern. The companies we perform best with are SaaS businesses selling into one specific niche market.

That’s largely because selling a vertical solution makes everything easier. You only have to deeply understand one industry’s world, pain points, and buying behavior, rather than trying to spread that understanding across dozens of verticals.

So we decided to build a list of lookalike companies: SaaS businesses selling to one clearly defined niche.

The question was how to build that list accurately.

We started by looking at our existing customers who fit this profile and analyzing how they present themselves online.

For example:

• What industry do they list on LinkedIn?

• What keywords show up repeatedly in their company descriptions?

• What size are they?

• What patterns exist on their websites that could be scraped with AI?

The biggest commonality was simple but consistent: every one of them explicitly mentioned the niche they serve in their company description.

“We help dentists.”
“We help interior design firms.”
“We help smart home installers.”

So I asked ChatGPT to generate a single comma-separated list of niche phrases like this.

It returned a list of 100+ variations.

Instead of filtering companies by industry, which tends to exclude too many good fits, I relied solely on company size (10–500 employees), location (US), and those company description keywords to build the initial list.

Here’s what that looked like:

Then we used OpenAI 4o Mini to run a prompt on the list of 50k companies that met this criteria.

That prompt did two things:

• Read the company’s website and determine whether it was actually a vertical-specific SaaS business

• Output the specific niche they serve so we could use it later for personalization

Out of 50,000 companies, about 13,000 were a real fit. This is why ICP fit prompts matter so much. They remove a huge amount of noise that would otherwise dilute your list.

From there, I used Clay to find people at each company, specifically targeting owners, sales leaders, and marketing leaders.

The Messaging I Used

Here’s a simplified version of the first email we sent:

Email 1 —

Hi [First_Name], do you have a way to find and monitor all [Niche] who might be looking for [Their Service/Solution]?

We invest in over 60+ sales technology tools to give our clients a complete view of their total market and identify who is genuinely interested. Then, we automate personalized emails (like this one) to schedule meetings on their behalf.

Would you be open to a conversation sometime soon?

Thanks,

P.S. I imagine you receive many emails like this, so if you prefer, I can send you a short video explaining exactly how I believe we can help [Company]

***

I ran an A/B test on this first email. One version included the P.S. line (Email B), and the other did not (Email A)

Here were the results:

While the difference isn’t massive, I was surprised to see that Email A actually performed better.

In almost every other scenario we’ve tested, adding a short “video P.S.” tends to increase results.

It’s a good reminder that there are very few hard rules in outbound. Everything is worth testing.

Here’s a simplified version of the second email we sent:

[First_Name] – I just wanted to follow up on this ^^

If you're open to a conversation, we can show you how we would monitor all [Niche] in the US to detect signs that they might be frustrated or open to switching to [Company].

Would you be open to a call? Or is this better for [Colleague]?

Thanks,

***

Nothing fancy in the second email. It simply restates the same core offer in a shorter format.

When the offer is strong enough, repeating it again in the second email often works better than introducing something new.

I also included an easy out to encourage a reply, using the “Or is this better for [Colleague]?” line.

Here were the overall campaign results:

That worked out to one positive reply for every 133 leads contacted, and one meeting booked for every 226 leads reached.

Why it Worked

I wanted to share this campaign breakdown because selling in the lead generation space, as I do, is extremely crowded.

How many times have you received an email that says, “We can book you 20 meetings in one month, would you be open to a call?”

They’re everywhere.

This campaign worked for two main reasons:

1. I understood my ICP’s world

My prospects get emails like that constantly, so I needed to lead with something different. Instead of pitching myself, I called out their customer. That’s the type of personalization that actually works.

2. I used the best entry point

By “best entry point,” I mean that every product or service has multiple ways it delivers value.

Often, your main offer is not the best way to get your foot in the door. I work with clients selling complex, multi–six-figure SaaS products. If I tried to pitch the full solution in a cold email, we’d never get a reply.

Instead, the goal is to find the highest-leverage, lowest-lift entry point that resonates with your buyer and stands out from what your competitors are sending.

Thanks for reading,

Jed

P.S. If you’d like to see how we can help you with outbound, book time here.

P.P.S Join my exclusive community here where I share more behind-the-scenes insights on what’s actually working for us.