Instantly Reviews & Testimonials – Outbound That Actually Converts.

Warmup actually works. Connected two domains, let them run, and deliverability held once campaigns went live. The UI is clean. Sequences, scheduling, account limits are all where you'd expect them without digging around. For a small operation doing targeted outbound, the core product does its job.

How to run email outreach like the top 1%:

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(Based on 1,000,000+ emails analyzed in Instantly.ai)

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Here were the common patterns shared by the highest-performing campaigns:

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1. Small Lists > Broad Lists

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Micro-lists of 500-1,000 hyper-targeted prospects greatly outperformed 100,000-contact blasts.

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Reply rates: 20-30% vs. 2-3%.

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→ Stop spraying & hoping someone bites. Target people who actually have a reason to reply.

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2. Hyper-Enriched Data > Standard Data

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Don't stop at just name + email. Pull:

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- Tech stack

- Social activity

- Funding rounds

- Current initiatives

- Website case studies

- LinkedIn headline & profile

- Job postings (hiring/growth signals)

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→ Effective 'personalization at scale' starts with deep data enrichment.

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3. Personalized Openers > Generic Openers

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Instead of: "Hey John, hope all's well at [Company]"

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Try:

- Job postings → "Saw you're hiring 3 AEs…"

- Case studies → "Just read your case study on…"

- Tech stack → "Noticed you recently added [tool]…"

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→ Every email should feel 1:1.

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4. 3-Step Sequence > Single Email

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Most replies hit on the first email, but follow-ups massively lift overall sequence reply rates.

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- Email 1: Personalized opener + value

- Email 2: New angle (3-5 days later)

- Email 3: Breakup (3-5 days later)

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→ Keep them short (2-4 sentences). Reference the first. Add new value.

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Pro tip: Layer LinkedIn touches between emails.

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5. Value-First > Ask-First

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Stop pitching a spot in your prospect's calendar in email 1.

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❌ "Can we hop on a call tomorrow at 2pm?"

❌ "Do you have 15 minutes to chat?"

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✅ "Want me to send over a quick example deck?"

✅ "Happy to share what's working right now."

✅ "Can I send you something that could solve [specific pain]?"

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→ Let them raise their hand first. Earn the conversation.

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6. Fundamentals > Fancy Tactics

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Nail the 3 core pillars:

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1. ICP = who exactly are you targeting?

2. Offer = what outcome do you deliver?

3. Copy = how do you communicate value?

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→ Depth > width. Skip the shiny objects.

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7. Deliverability > Volume

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None of the above advice matters if you land in spam.

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Deliverability rules:

- Clean, validated lists

- Multiple domains (not one)

- 30-day minimum warm-up

- 30 emails per inbox per day max

- Proper setup (SPF, DKIM, DMARC)

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→ 100 emails/hour from one inbox = you're landing in spam.

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9. Tech Stack

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- Instantly.ai (sequencing, deliverability, analytics)

- Clay (enrichment, intent, personalization)

- Prospeo (data, targeting)

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Want to learn more? 👇

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Check out the Cold Email cheat sheet below.

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PS. What GTM play is getting you the best results with cold email right now?

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I love Instantly's API; it's super easy to deploy! The platform is also easy to use. I like how you can purchase pre-warmed emails within the platform. We're sending hyper-personalized email campaigns at scale, where every step has 26 email variations, and with their API, it was simple to push those emails to their platforms and send them. Setting up Instantly was extremely easy. I've set it up in a few minutes.

20-45% positive reply rates. Consistently. Even in the most competitive markets.

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This one landed at 36.84% and 7 qualified leads in 5 days. The client sells an AI support agent. One of the most competitive spaces in B2B right now. Everyone and their dog is pitching AI to customer support teams.

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So how do you stand out when your prospect has seen your pitch 50 times this month?

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You don't pitch.

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Here's what we do instead:

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We find a very specific pain point the prospect is dealing with right now. Not "customer support is hard"  that's obvious and lazy. We go deeper. What specific types of support requests are eating up their team's time? What tickets keep coming back? What's costing them hours every week that shouldn't be?

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Then we write the email around that. We explain exactly how our client's solution would handle that specific problem for them. Not in theory. Not with buzzwords. In plain language that makes the prospect think "yeah, that's exactly what's happening to us."

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And the CTA? No call. No demo. No "15 minutes this week." Simply a soft CTA such as "Does this resonate?"

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It works because it flips the dynamic. Instead of "I want to sell you something," it reads as "I noticed a problem you probably have and here's how it gets solved." The prospect doesn't feel sold to. They feel understood.

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This approach works in competitive markets specifically because everyone else is doing the opposite. When 9 out of 10 emails in your inbox are pushing for a call, the one that just shares something useful gets the reply.

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If you want to see the actual email copy we used for this campaign, Comment "EMAIL" and I'll send the exact copy + the prompts we use to personalize the emails. 

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As always, we use Instantly.ai to send emails!

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Every reply we get now lands in one place. That single change is what made scaling outreach actually survivable. 

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When you're sending for one client, replies are easy. Check the inbox, respond, done. Run it at real volume and "check the inbox" falls apart. 

19,200 sends in 26 days at a 4.5% reply rate is ~860 replies — scattered across a stack of inboxes nobody can babysit. 

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The "yes, let's talk" that pays your year lands at 9am and dies in a tab no one opened until Thursday. So we stopped chasing inboxes and built around the Unibox instead. 

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Every reply, from every account, in one feed. Then we put our GTM Engineers in the same system — same view, same conversations, no forwarding screenshots — and built a custom 24/7 AI reply-handling layer on top of it, wired straight into the Instantly.ai Unibox.

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Now a reply doesn't wait for a human to find it. It gets caught, sorted, and routed the second it lands — 3am or 3pm. 

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The outcome from one campaign window: 

→ ~860 replies handled, none buried 

→ 75 opportunities surfaced 

→ $75K in pipeline 

→ 26 days 

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Sending at scale is a solved problem. Replying at scale — catching every "yes" before it goes cold — is where the deals actually are. 

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The Unibox is where all of that lives now. Everything else routes into it. If your reply management still depends on remembering which inboxes to check, that's your leak. 

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I use Instantly to send cold emails and LinkedIn outreach messages, which automates tasks that would otherwise take a long time. I like that their email deliverability is on point, and they have an email warm-up tool with a strong reputation. The email deliverability is strong, which is crucial for email campaigns to reach recipients, and their pool of high-quality ESPs from the US is helpful. The initial setup of Instantly was extremely easy and intuitive, with lots of videos and documentation online. I'm also impressed with its powerful functionality. I would recommend it 10 out of 10 to any colleagues due to its easy setup and strong features.Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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I use Instantly as a sequencer for prospecting and reaching out to leads. I like that Instantly offers the most broad options in terms of technical settings. It's easy to use yet technically very advanced, ensuring our emails land in the mailboxes. Their customer support is really hands-on and always ready to help, which is great. The initial setup was really easy, and they provide a lot of good materials to understand the platform. I switched from Apollo to Instantly because it was technically much better.

66.67% positive reply rate. 20 leads in 7 days. From 927 contacts. 

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In 6 years of running a lead gen agency, this is the best contact-to-lead ratio I've ever seen.

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Here's what makes this campaign different:

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The target market should have made this hard. We're reaching fintech, blockchain, utilities, and manufacturing companies across Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Four wildly different industries. Saturated inboxes. Nordic prospects who are notoriously hard to sell to.

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And yet: 3.24% reply rate. 66.67% positive reply rate. 20 opportunities in a week.

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Here's what we did differently:

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1) We stopped selling in the email entirely.

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No pitch. No CTA asking for a call. No "would love 15 minutes of your time." Instead, we use AI to surface 2 very specific pain points the prospect is likely dealing with based on their company, industry, and role. Not generic stuff like "scaling is hard." Specific, researched problems they'd recognize instantly.

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2) The CTA is a free diagnostic to solve those pain points.

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That's it. No meeting. No demo. Just: "We put together a diagnostic for this - want us to send it over?"

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It doesn't feel like a cold email. It feels like someone who actually understands your business reaching out to help.

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3) The diagnostic is built through Claude and sent automatically.

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Every time a prospect says yes, Claude generates a tailored diagnostic based on their company data and sends it. No manual work. No 3-day delay. The prospect gets something genuinely valuable within hours of replying.

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4) We book 90% of the leads we generate from this campaign.

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Because by the time they've read the diagnostic, they already trust our client. The meeting isn't a pitch anymore, it's a next step that makes sense.

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We're scaling this campaign now. More infrastructure, more markets, same framework. The target is 100 qualified leads per week by June.

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The lesson here is one I keep relearning: the emails that book the most meetings are the ones that don't try to book meetings. They try to help. And when you genuinely help someone in a cold email, the meeting books itself.

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If you'd like to see the script we used, comment "SCRIPT" and I'll send it!

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As always, we use Instantly.ai for outreach!

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I cloned myself. Last week.

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3,253 emails sent. $16,500 pipeline built. I was in the gym.

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One week in..

Here's what my AI Sales Agent did while I slept & worked out: 

➤ 4,878 leads found 

➤ 3,253 emails sent 

➤ 98 replies | 3.01% reply rate 

➤ 17 opportunities | $16,500 pipeline

➤ 5 meetings booked

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All I did was write the prompts.

No SDR hire. No agency. No guesswork.

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Just a system that thinks like me, targets like me, and outbounds like me- 24/7.

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The reply rate will improve as it moves out of learning mode. 

(3.01% response rate is already way above average)

And the pipeline won't stop growing.

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Are you building AI agents into your sales process yet? 👇

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(Still slightly terrifying that it's working this well. Slightly.)

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Instantly.ai has been the backbone of our agency since day 1. Even after scaling to 1.5M emails every month, they still support all of our operations.

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Two big changes they’ve made recently that has taken our results to the next level:

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↳ AirMail: Their own SMTP infrastructure service. This has provided a huge edge for us, specially with the unpredictability of Google and Microsoft mailboxes.

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This setup is fully configured and built within just minutes at unlimited scale, for just $4 a mailbox. If you’re struggling to land in primary, this is what you should be using.

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↳ Sales Agents: These agents take a deep dive into your company and product and build it’s memory on it - your offers, differentiators, your ICP, and any custom riles you add. Once configured, it runs 4 loops:

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→ Prospecting: Pools leads from their own 450M contact database matching the ICP matrix it built

→ Enrichment: Verifies contact data, firmographics, and buying signals before any message is sent

→ Personalized Outbound: Writes copy meant for that prospect

→ Reply Handling & Booking: Handles follow-ups and books meetings on your calendar

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Completely on autopilot. They’re always a step ahead, and that’s why we continue to rely on them.

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Results like these across dozens of clients is why we've relied on Instantly.ai since day one. And with new features like Airmail + Sales Agents, the system becomes even easier to scale.

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I really like Instantly's very good customer support, which replies very quickly and always helps with anything that I need. I also find it easy to use and manage. The initial setup was very easy for me.

Instantly.ai just dropped their AI Sales Agent.

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Scary where outbound is going...

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Here's what it does:

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1. You paste your domain.

2. The agent reads your site.

3. Figures out what and to who you sell.

4. Then starts finding leads that match that.

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No setup. No long forms. No onboarding calls.

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5. It finds buyers that match your ICP.

6. Enriches every single one of them.

7. Writes personalized outreach.

8. Follows up and answers.

9. Books meetings for you.

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Scary... 

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From zero to a running campaign in minutes.

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This is where outbound is going.

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Try it for Free: https://lnkd.in/dK7nezsY

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P.S. Yet there are people still using Zoominfo data and writing emails one by one

10,280 emails. 86% open rate. 60 creator replies. $0 in ad spend.

I had a database of 10,000 TikTok Shop affiliates sitting in a spreadsheet. 

I geve this list out as a lead magnet..... And I cold-emailed it

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Short messages. Personal. Designed for an easy reply. 

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Optimised for responses, not clicks.

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60 creators raised their hand to work with us. Sixty.

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From an asset most people never touched.

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We pretend we have "traffic problems." Most of the time it's an "unused assets" problem.

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You said you needed creators. We have creators.

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You said "we don't have budget." You had a zero-cost pipeline.

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You said "we need an agency." You needed an afternoon and a spreadsheet.

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No fancy software. No paid outreach tools. No agency retainer. 

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Just a list, a sequence, and the discipline to actually send it.

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The brands winning on TikTok Shop aren't the ones with the biggest budgets.

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They're the ones who actually use the assets sitting right in front of them.

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Thanks to Instantly.ai for making this easy 👊

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I have been using Instantly for over a year now, mainly for running campaigns, and it's been very helpful in running them smoothly. I really like the user experience; it's easy to understand and manage campaigns. You can set up a campaign easily because the setup process is smooth and not complex, which is something I like a lot. When I first started, I wasn't aware of all the features, but as I explored, I began using the tool in a smarter way.

I find Instantly easy to use, especially appreciating its plaintext feature for boosting deliverability with my cold emails. Setting it up was very easy, which was a definite plus.

in the last 30 days we generated 52 leads.

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from ONE cold email campaign.

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for an accounting firm.

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52 opportunities in 22 active days.

(weekends paused)

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that's ≈ 2.36 leads per day.

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one offer, one ICP.

no ads, no referrals.

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just a focused, intent-based campaign

built in instantly.ai

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result:

$520,000 in pipeline.

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this is what happens when you

1. stop testing everything

2. execute one thing properly.

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we at NewLead have onboarded 2 new clients in this month

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we have 2 spots left

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for B2B companies who want to scale lead generation with us

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DM me now or book a call > link in comments

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Instantly.ai just announced one of the biggest evolutions in outreach ever, AI Sales Agent. 

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1) It finds leads for you based off your ICP

2) Enriches every leads

3) Drafts well written emails for every lead

4) And follows up automatically to book calls.

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I've been testing this for a month, on a smaller scale. I did nothing but add our emails accounts and it booked real calls. It works better than I imagined, I can't wait to scale this more.

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Everyone says they can build an AI SDR, Instantly actually did it.

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