Why We Set Out to Be The Best Outbound Sales and Lead Generation Agency

So, how did we come about to build what we believe is the best outbound sales and lead generation agency?

From the very start, Colin and I (Andrew) weren’t just chasing the dream of founding yet another sales or lead generation agency. 

We didn’t come from the typical “I wanna be my own boss” or “make them sign the contract, just run the campaign, get paid, and move on” that one often hears behind closed doors.

No. 

We were actually salespeople in the trenches. 

Our paths first crossed at a sales agency in Amsterdam that we won’t mention but will now qualify as “traditional”. Traditional because of how their outreach approaches and sales processes were set up. 

But that’s not even the issue. 

After a few months at the agency, we quickly noticed something troubling in their business practices. 

The company seemed to care more about long-term contracts and earning money than delivering genuine value and ensuring ROI to clients. 

The hardest part? 

We’d watch as clients invested heavily in the service that prioritized “running campaigns”, with little regard for operational efficiency and sustainable results. 

We’d see client meetings end with promises we knew the current approach couldn’t fulfill. 

Meanwhile, from our point of view, when businesses hire outbound sales professionals, success can only mean that they’re getting leads that their sales team will talk to or close. 

An even better outcome would be that they’re getting clients or leads on autopilot. 

Granted, outbound is not always a sure-fire process. So, success could also be failing but learning from it, or at least solving problems and seeing improvements. 

But neither scenario was happening and we could only take so much of that. 

Colin left first, then did I. We embarked on separate journeys. I went corporate and Colin eventually leaned towards freelancing. 

Surprisingly, our new experiences only further revealed gaps in the ways businesses and the agencies they hire do outbound sales and lead generation. 

Note: Struggling to connect with decision-makers in your target market? We’ll run a completely done-for-you outbound campaign, automate your sales prospecting process to generate a pipeline with prospects ready to engage on autopilot. Book a 15-minute call now to discuss your unique business needs and discover our flexible packages.

I’d find myself staying late, meticulously copying and pasting information between systems, wondering how a company this sophisticated could be so inefficient in its revenue-generating operations. 

My frustration grew into an obsession as I began researching process automation in every spare moment, convinced there had to be a better way.

Meanwhile, Colin had ventured into freelancing.

Gap 2: Most business owners and sales teams are bad at outbound sales and lead generation.

1. Purchase email domains: Organizations buy sending domains without considering deliverability infrastructure or sender reputation development. Worse, they often use their primary domain that is used for their website for their campaigns, which brings huge effects on SEO ranking and overall deliverability for the whole sales organization.
2. Minimal domain preparation: They run basic “warming” campaigns that fail to establish meaningful sending credibility or engagement metrics. Oftentimes don’t even use warmup at all. 
3. Data acquisition without strategy: They pay for expensive tools like ZoomInfo or Congnism and pull thousands of contacts without thinking carefully about who they should target and why. 
4. Surface-level targeting: They apply only the most basic filtering criteria like company size, headcount, and revenue, and miss the key data that truly indicates buying potential.
5. Spray-and-pray execution: They write one generic email and blast it to thousands of people at once. They see outreach as a number game. “Send 1000 emails, get 100 replies, convert 10”. They don’t even consider any opportunity and tools they could leverage to make their messages feel personal.

As you can guess, this approach doesn’t work and only hurts their sending domains and reputation.

Their targeting is too broad and meaningless. There are technologies that they could be leveraging to ease their lives that most are just not aware of. 

And because of that, these companies have no way to measure what’s working. Without proper tracking and testing, they can’t tell which parts of their outreach are effective and which are actually hurting their reputation.

Beyond these basic issues, they also don’t understand the technical side of email delivery. I’m talking about the complex systems and authentication protocols that determine whether messages reach inboxes or end up in spam folders.

I saw many business owners stuck in months of “financially draining marriages” with lead gen companies that ran outreach campaigns that brought them nothing, while others attempted outbound sales without the expertise or systems to execute effectively.

We (Andrew) had an interesting catch-up call in March of 2022 and the pieces started to click into place. At this point, we realized we were looking at different sides of the same broken sales process:

• sellers without efficiency and, 
• business owners without a go-to-market strategy.

But there’s more. We started sketching the vision and came down to two more capacity gaps.

Gap 3: Businesses and sales teams don’t understand how to do inbound-led outbound. Also, they don’t know how to leverage intent data and buying signals to inform their strategies.

One big problem we’ve found is that companies typically have separate inbound and outbound processes, which creates a divide between inbound and outbound strategies. 

Because of this, they’re missing the powerful synergy that comes from what we (and other experts) like to call “inbound-led outbound” or “allbound” approaches. 

Think about this; every day, your organization likely has thousands of potential buyers who have:

• Visited your website multiple times
• Engaged with your content on LinkedIn
• Connected with your team members
• Followed your company page
• Attended webinars 
• Filled out a form on your website 
• Downloaded resources through anonymous channels

These pieces of engagement intelligence represent potential buyers who have shown interest but haven’t formally entered your sales process. They’re not cold prospects—they’re warm opportunities being left untapped. 

Another issue in this context is that companies miss out on intent data and buying signals. Even those who know to look out for these pieces of intelligence (intent data and buying signals), do it manually or use the wrong tools, which is inefficient and wastes time at best.  

If you ask most outbound lead generation managers, they’ll tell you that intent data is what tools like Cognism and ZoomInfo offer as an extra selling point, a more premium service, and here is how it goes. 

Basically, they’ll have links with all sorts of articles, and if one particular person from one particular IP address has visited that article, like, five times, then that could technically indicate that they might be interested in that subject. That’s just useless noise. 

What they fail to recognize and monitor is the goldmine of behavioral signals and engagement (intent) data that could transform cold outreach into highly targeted, “contextually relevant” conversations. 

Here is a good example that applies to us. And FYI, this is how we’ve been getting most of our clients to date. 

When a company hires multiple salespeople, it’s not just about recruitment. It “signals” that they’re potentially struggling to generate a pipeline, indicating they need precisely the kind of services we provide. 

Because we know that, we create an automation that monitors and scrapes these types of signals and initiates conversations introducing our services.

Gap 4: Most business owners and sales teams can’t keep up with tech development. And when they do use tools, their sales tech stack is broken, with several individual tools costing them a lot.

When we talk to teams with this issue, the funny part is that it typically begins as an innocent attempt to solve a specific problem and quickly evolves into a tangled web of disconnected systems. 

Now, back to our storyline, each discovery reinforced our conviction that we weren’t just building another agency—we were addressing fundamental issues in the market that were costing businesses countless opportunities and wasted resources.

Note: Struggling to connect with decision-makers in your target market? We’ll run a completely done-for-you outbound campaign, automate your sales prospecting process to generate a pipeline with prospects ready to engage on autopilot. Book a 15-minute call now to discuss your unique business needs and discover our flexible packages.

How we build a go-to-market strategy and automated outbound systems that generate sales opportunities (a breakdown of our entire outbound sales and lead generation processes)

From the very start, our core business mission was to build a sales automation and lead generation agency that combines strategic targeting with operational efficiency to deliver consistent results—ALL RUNNING ON AUTOPILOT.

The key idea is that most sales teams waste too much time on irrelevant leads, manual prospecting, and inefficient workflows. 

We solve this by automating these processes and enriching your data so that you always reach out to the right people at the right time.

Now, let’s show you how we do it and the specifics involved.

Understand that this is a holistic representation of our process and workflow and that there is more than we can cover in this post. 

So, let’s start with the very first step in our process. 

Step 1: Identifying and filter the right prospects

The first thing we do here is talk with you and your team. 

We start by interviewing key stakeholders.

Here we’re trying to get a clear picture of your business and how it matters to your target audience. 

That’s because we’ve found that most business owners can’t really define their ICP. Or at least, they cannot explain what exact pain point they are solving for their customers.

So, we will sit with the key stakeholders of your business. Usually, we want to talk to the people behind the product or service idea and in client-facing situations. 

We then ask key questions like: 

• why did you start the business (product or service)
• what pain points where you trying to solve
• who are the customers that stay with you the longest
• how they live without your solution
• what’s the typical job description of the people who buy your product or service
• etc…

We’re trying to understand the very essence of your product or service and the value it brings to its users. 

From there, it gets pretty much easy to understand the ICP. If the answers are great, it can even tell us how to best reach out to them. 

We analyze your existing data sources for intel.

For us, outbound sales or lead generation isn’t just about cold calls, cold emails, or cold outreach on LinkedIn, it is all about warm intelligence and where it leads you.

So, for all the existing data your business is sitting on; think about things like website visitors, LinkedIn followers, CRM contacts, inbound leads, and more. That’s where we start. 

Instead of letting this data sit idle, we connect your CRM, LinkedIn, and website to Clay, and analyze the data to inform on the ICP and build our target lists from there.

Just so this doesn’t seem superficial, the way we do it is that Clay has native integrations with Hubspot and other CRMs. 

PhantomBuster allows you to scrape from LinkedIn (or we use third parties to scrape the data for us) and with webhooks or tools like N8N, we can connect all the systems so the data is live and constantly updated in Clay.

The idea is that we don’t just want to target your ICP, we want to target your ICP who have engaged with your business in some way. 

That way, the outbound campaign we run for you doesn’t really feel “cold.” The prospects will be much more likely to engage because we’re not reaching out of the blue. 

We always find the best data sources to scrape.

Outbound is not always a carved-out route; and more often than not, we come across businesses where we don’t get any existing data to start with. 

Even then, everything has to be contextual. What we mean is that we don’t just jump on any data source to scrape a list. 

Everything has to be contextual means finding a lead source based on your business, what you’re offering, and who qualifies as your best ICP. You can’t just scrape any data source.

For instance, we’re running an outbound campaign for a client whose ICP fits between companies that are hosting events that have exhibitors, and preferably with sponsors. 

So, for this instance, the data source we are using is 10times. 

We precisely chose 10times because it tells us all the events that are upcoming for most industries, countries, cities, and more criteria we can apply. 

So, we then use the Chrome extension Instant Data Scraper to scrape the companies and upload them to our Clay table. Like here:

Even then, we are not done filtering out the ICP yet. (More on that to come).

Precision starts with knowing what tools to use. Most don’t even pop up in conversations unless you’re taking an outbound sales course or talking with outbound experts in the actual niche they serve. 

We enrich records with contact details.

At this point, we’re typically sitting on a solid list of targets we are considering for our outbound campaigns. 

So, here, we create a campaign spreadsheet in Clay with all the key information and sections that we need. 

Here’s what it looks like: 

With just a few clicks, we can generate all the relevant information like emails, phone numbers, domains, LinkedIn profiles, etc. to enrich the data—using Clay and its integration with data enrichment tools like LeadMagic, FullEnrich, Findymail, etc. 

Keep in mind that the information we populate here is entirely dependent on the campaign and what we need for it.

Next, we clean the list.

We filter out irrelevant contacts

At this stage, our goal is to make it so that your sales team only speaks with high-quality leads. 

So, we filter our list based on key criteria here as well. Let’s go back to our example. 

First, we verify the basics: checking domains, ensuring they haven’t contacted the company before, and cleaning against do-not-contact lists using tools like BounceBan, DeBounce, or ZeroBounce and their integration with Clay. 

Then the real detective work begins. We investigate each potential client’s biggest events, confirm if they’re actually the event host, verify the number of exhibitors, and even more.  

That’s because some companies could appear as hosts in initial searches but then turn out to be participants or attendees in reality. So, we have to filter them out.

Next, we check if there are sponsors at the event. And only if yes, should they qualify. 

We can even go deeper to check if they have a floor plan and our tool can automatically do that instead of doing it manually. 

Note: Struggling to connect with decision-makers in your target market? We’ll run a completely done-for-you outbound campaign, automate your sales prospecting process to generate a pipeline with prospects ready to engage on autopilot. Book a 15-minute call now to discuss your unique business needs and discover our flexible packages.

Step 2: Automating multi-channel outreach

Once we have collected, enriched, and filtered (step 1) the prospect data, we design an automated outreach sequence across email, LinkedIn, and sometimes even cold calling. 

Let’s explain what we mean here by automation. 

For us, automation doesn’t mean creating cold email copies from random templates that we will blast to all our prospect lists in a “spray and pray” cold outreach campaign. Automation doesn’t mean “set it up and forget it” either. No. 

We are talking about using the prospect data we’ve gathered to create a smart, automated outreach strategy that feels personal, and not robotic or generic. It means strategic messaging, outreach, and customization—running on autopilot. 

Let’s break down how we do it to explain further. 

Email and LinkedIn outreach

The first thing we do here is to create personalized, AI-generated messages based on the prospect’s background. Like below:

Next, we just push our standard automation spreadsheet from the Clay UI below to Instantly.ai to run the campaign. 

But wait! We can see you wondering. 

• AI-generated messages? 
• Do you mean like using ChatGPT to craft messages? 
• How can that be TRULY personalized?

We understand where you’re coming from. And to answer your questions: 

• Yes, AI-generated messages.
• Yes, but not exactly. The thing is that nothing is set in stone with us. We use ChatGPT but from the native integration in Clay. However, there are many different LLMs applicable to different use cases and the best tool is only the one that best meets our needs and that changes pretty rapidly.
  For example, Claude.ai might have a model that is better suited for company research one day and then a new update from OpenAI might come out which is better, so we change it.
  Also, we sometimes only use those tools to design parts of the messages.
• Yes, it can be. That’s because there are a few things you need to understand first.

First of all, personalization is not as much personalization as it is relevance. 

What we mean is that if you’re thinking about personalization as it pertains to including the recipient’s first name, job titles, company name in the email, and stuff like that in the message, that’s pretty much easy to do, and we do it. See here:

The real deal is when the prospect fits the ICP (which is already checked), when the offer is tailored to their situation, and when the message is relevant. Here are some responses to our campaigns:

Also, for example, for our client with the event software solution, we ensure the messages are relevant and fit their situation. How? 

Because we’ve found that some companies have sponsors at their events and some don’t, we will use different copies for each segment based on those two scenarios. You can see we have different pitches ready below. 

Now, going back to Instantly.ai to run the campaign. Keep in mind, we use a different tool (Periodix) for LinkedIn outreach. We do know that there are tools like Lemlist that offer a dashboard to run both LinkedIn and email. We just don’t think it’s worth the money. 

Here, we are always doing some testing and optimizing campaigns for better results. As you can see here, for example, we have a lot of different sequences for them (our client with the event software). 

Next, we will be monitoring the campaigns. Dynamically sending follow-ups based on responses or lack thereof. And based on the CTA, we set up automated scheduling for meetings and demos. 

And here is the grand scheme of things after 4 weeks of running campaigns. In just four weeks, we’ve sent over 7000 emails, but we are not repeating the same pitch. We’re learning, adapting, and refining with each campaign.

The workflow goes even deeper and more than we can cover here. Another interesting example is that we can leverage Clay to have different campaigns for different criteria that pertain to the recipient’s unique tech stack. 

Let’s assume they are using Outlook. We know that Outlook is currently the worst-performing inbox provider and those campaigns don’t perform as well as if we’re sending to Google inboxes. 

To counter that, we set up the system to send them a message on LinkedIn instead.

What we want you to understand is that we set up systems that ensure that we try a lot of different things. 

We get to see what works and what doesn’t work. We can easily predict campaign outcomes and just focus on output and efficiency on our side. 

Cold calling enablement

We prepare your internal sales team for cold calling with contact details, conversation starters, and key insights from our outreach campaigns. 

We can integrate it directly into your CRM as cold calling openers and it will simply make your salespeople’s lives easier. We can also give them mobile phone number data that has been run through 15 different providers to make sure they have the best possible data. 

In conclusion, we design a single automation that hits your customers across three channels. Here is what the entire process looks like:

Step 3: Continuously scraping and using intent data beyond the initial campaign to run evergreen campaigns

By this stage, we have an interesting outbound sales system that’s bringing leads into your calendar or CRM on autopilot. But, our work doesn’t stop there. 

We continuously scrape and leverage intent data to send automated outreach messages to bring you even more leads. Now, here is what we mean and how we do it.

Intent data is one of the most powerful intelligence materials for outbound sales. 

However, most sales teams get intent data wrong. Legacy sales intelligence tools like ZoomInfo and Cognism offer simplistic data like tracking and reporting on article views or IP address visits. But that’s not real intent data. 

Our approach at Utmost Agency is different. We set up systems (by combining Clay with PhantomBuster, Apify, Trigify, and more) that automatically monitor and scrape various sources to detect real-time intent data and buying signals. 

Taking ourselves as an example here, we scrape LinkedIn job posts for SDR roles every day at 9 AM. The job post is pushed into Clay, we automatically find the hiring manager and the department manager and send them automated messages. 

We are not just looking at surface-level data like when someone clicks on some link or fills out an email form; our systems are set up to specifically focus on business dynamics.

Take funding rounds as an example. If we’re working for a client that offers cybersecurity solutions and we see an IT company raise capital, that’s more than financial news. 

It’s a precise signal that they’re about to expand their team. It means that they’re likely going to be hiring more cybersecurity analysts and engineers. 

So, we collect this data, find the right contacts, and initiate outreach automatically. This is important because sales teams would have a hard time monitoring and collecting such data manually online. Let alone the time it will take them.

These are the types of intelligence we set our systems up for and we can easily turn these moments into strategic opportunities.

A few more intent data source examples include:

• If a competitor just got acquired, their customers might be looking for alternatives.
• If a company just posted a job listing for a position related to your product, they might need your services.

We can also set things up in Clay so that whenever a lead or a current customer moves to a different organization, and they’ll likely use or need a tool/service (or one similar to what) they were using at their former organization, to hit them up with an offer for your solution.

The thing is that intent data sources are not always predetermined or set in stone. It all depends on what you offer and who qualifies as your best ICP. 

A “not-so-conventional” example here is a client of ours who offers AI-powered furnishing solutions. For them, we monitor and scrape RSS feeds from sites like Multi-Housing News, Chicago Yimby, Property Week, and many other topically and contextually relevant sites. 

Every time a new article is published, the article is pushed into Clay. We identify if the article was about an announcement of a new property development project, and if so, what the name of the project is, who the developer is, and what their website and contact person is.

Then we find contact details, generate an email automatically, and send it to the contact person.

Another example, we have a client that offers solutions to help enterprise-level businesses with tax incentives and find better ways to leverage profits to pay less taxes. 

So, we set up Trigify to monitor and scrape Fortune 500 companies that have just had a huge boost in profit margins. Those are unique opportunities and we find the contacts and reach out to them in real-time—automatically.  

Most sales teams wouldn’t think to be actively looking for such data but we see it as a critical intent signal.

Note: Struggling to connect with decision-makers in your target market? We’ll run a completely done-for-you outbound campaign, automate your sales prospecting process to generate a pipeline with prospects ready to engage on autopilot. Book a 15-minute call now to discuss your unique business needs and discover our flexible packages.

Step 4: Automating inbound lead qualification and sales handoff

Most sales teams drown in unqualified leads. They waste hours manually sorting through contacts, chasing dead-end prospects, and drowning in administrative work. 

That’s why we’ve also worked on a workflow that leverages tools like Clay, N8N, PhantomBuster, RB2B, and advanced AI-powered automation to transform this broken process.

Inbound leads from website forms, email newsletters, or LinkedIn engagements often include a mix of high-value and irrelevant contacts. Instead of your sales reps wasting time manually sorting them, we:

• automatically qualify leads using filters like company size, industry, and job title
• enrich each lead with background info (firmographics, intent data, etc.)
• push qualified leads into a Google Sheet or CRM
• automatically assign the right sales rep based on deal size, industry expertise, or workload
• send sales reps a notification with all the relevant info + pre-drafted email sequences or call scripts

Let’s show you a scenario of it in action. 

Suppose you offer HR solutions and that you made an interesting LinkedIn post about improving talent retention rates that’s driving an interesting level of engagement. 

We can leverage PhantomBuster to scrape a list of all the accounts that interacted with the post and bring it to our Clay table template.

Next, it’ll automatically sort out all the data and populate all the relevant information like company name and size, job title, and names. 

We can also track their engagement history (and even frequency) with topics related to your business, the posts they’ve made in that sense, and basically build a 360-degree profile of each potential lead—pretty much like we’ve shown you with our event software client.  

Next, using Clay’s AI-powered bots, we can set up unique events and conditions that when met, will automatically score, qualify the lead, and send them to your CRM, add them to Google Sheets, or add them to your team’s Slack.

Going back to our example, let’s say the workflow determines five people with an HR director tag in their LinkedIn profile engaged with the post. 

Our system can rapidly identify they work at mid-sized companies in your target market and fit your ICP, note they’ve been engaging with content about improving employee onboarding and retention rates. 

It’ll then automatically add them to your contact list. Your sales reps will then receive instant notifications with personalized first lines for emails and call scripts. Or another option, we can set it up to automatically reach out to potential leads on LinkedIn. 

That means that with a single LinkedIn post, you’re making an outreach to customers without even breaking a sweat. The first time you’ll even notice the workflow is at work is when they reply to your message. 

Hire Utmost Agency, the best outbound sales and lead generation agency, to improve your sales operations and get qualified leads on autopilot.

Our 4-step process ensures that you have a fully automated and functional outbound system that’s consistently and predictably bringing in leads for your sales reps to close. 

We know that every business is different, so we align with your sales strategy, industry, and ideal customers to build custom workflows that drive consistent, high-quality pipeline growth.

If you’re currently relying on manual outreach or dealing with unqualified leads, we can help you turn sales into a predictable, scalable process. 

Here is what you get with us: 

• Full-service outbound: Our team manages the entire outreach process. You get a completely done-for-you outbound lead gen. 
• Database access: Up to 5,000 qualified contacts with 10,000 email capacity
• Targeted lead lists: Custom-built for your specific industry and ICP
• Complete contact intelligence: Full details for seamless outreach
• Intent data: Identify prospects actively showing buying signals

We understand that no two businesses are identical. So, our pricing scales up or down based on:

• Your required contact volume
• Total Addressable Market (TAM) size
• Unique business requirements
• And more, you tell us about it.

Also, we do not have a magic wand and results are very dependent on your industry and company. We do sometimes guarantee a minimum number of meetings, or we work with a hybrid model where clients pay a certain fixed fee and a price per meeting.

Understand that we require a minimum 3-month engagement to ensure optimal results. 

We require the three months because at the core of every successful outbound lead generation strategy is testing. There’s also the groundwork, things like domain warmup, deliverability infrastructure setup, etc.

But the real deal is testing. We don’t want to rush through campaigns and blast people with random messages. Our first few campaigns are all about testing. We learn what works, and the approaches to everything for your business, and then we scale.

Note: Struggling to connect with decision-makers in your target market? We’ll run a completely done-for-you outbound campaign, automate your sales prospecting process to generate a pipeline with prospects ready to engage on autopilot. Book a 15-minute call now to discuss your unique business needs and discover our flexible packages.