Cold Outbound & Deliverability w/ Alexy Bouvet from Lemlist - GTM Engineer School (Preview)

Foreign.

My screen's coming through.

Yep.

All right, well, hey everybody, I'm Jared Waxman. Welcome to our fifth and final webinar before the Go to Market Engineer School kicks off on Tuesday. Some of you probably joined these webinars before, but if not, the rundown is it's a four week class. We actually have eight classes, two classes a week for the next four weeks led by five expert instructors and then plus about 25 teaching assistants who's going to be hands on with all the students. Each webinar has been a chance for the lead instructors to share their perspective on go to Market Engineering a little bit and preview the hands on work that the students will be doing. The first cohort that we're doing is now full. Many of you are in it that are in the call today if you're interested in joining. If you're not in and you're just joining up for the next one, the wait list is on the website gtmengineerschool.com today's agenda, Mateo and I were going to give a quick overview of the class in general and then Alexi from Lemlist is going to dive into the outbound game, Outbound activation and what makes it competitive and difficult at times and where teams are focusing in order to win. And then we're going to wrap up with some Q and A, we'll introduce the characters and then get going. So yeah, I'm Jared, based in the Bay Area, background in product growth and demand gen most recently at Auth0 and Okta. For me, continuous learning has always been pretty key for me and I've promoted it to my teams always. And then with the pace of change today, it's definitely more important than ever. Some of the best learnings for me over the years have been in live structured settings where you can ask questions, get to meet folks that are one or two steps beyond where you are and where you want to get to learn from practitioners. Programs like Reforge Pavilion, Win by Design. These are some of the programs that shaped my thinking, inspired how we were building Go to Market Engineer School. Matteo, you want to, you want to go next? Yeah, sure.

Matteo here, based in London, background is in just general marketing from pre C to series B in the last couple of. Since the last couple of years I've been running my own consulting studio serving startup teams like Ahrefs, Common Room, Aerops or Hypergrowth. That's where I met Jared at Hypergrowth Partners. And yeah, also similar to Jared, been avid reforge student or repeated Reforge student and I always looked up to them in terms of quality of the learnings and the, the core structure. So it was definitely at the back of my mind to create something, let's say that at least is similar to that. So like, yeah, I'm super excited when Jared hit me up to build the GTM Engineer school and so here we are.

Great.

Thanks Alexei. Featured speaker.

Oh yeah, yeah. So pumped to be here. Basically I've been working at Lemnis for the past year now already and yeah, passionate about go to market, doing lot of outreach. So yeah, so come to, to kick off.

Fantastic. That's great. So yeah, just a little bit about like why go to market Engineer school? You've probably heard or said, hey, AI is moving so fast, it's hard to keep up. And, and that, and I think that's right. The, the pace of the tool innovation is just wild. You wake up in the morning, you log into LinkedIn and all the tools have introduced new features. There's a few new tools out there. It's pretty crazy and it's hard to feel like you're really on top of it. So we wanted to build something where people could learn together and learn from experts. So this is predominantly a hands on project based program. We're going to give you access to some top vetted tools and you're going to get to learn. You know, maybe you're not going to be the world's expert at the end of it, but you're going to at least get through the steepest part of the learning curve in building these AI powered go to market workflows. The course is going to consist of 16 real world projects using tools like Clay, Lemlist, Cargo, Octave and Air Ops. You're going to be building automation, you're going to be shipping content, you're going to be refining your outbound and you'll be getting feedback as you go. You're going to bring in, you know, if you're at a company and you're trying to stand this up right now, bring in your data, your problems to the class and start hacking away on it. Beginner friendly. It's very beginner friendly. It's built for folks in rev ops in sales and content and growth, PMM marketing ops, no technical background required. And then Participants get over $7,000 in free platform access so they can keep practicing and growing their skills. And now I'm going to hand it off to Matteo just to talk about the four weeks we have and then we'll hand it off to Alexei after that.

Thanks Jared. Yeah, so like as Jared mentioned, we have like a four weeks program. The first every class is three and a half hours. So where we're going to have two main exercises per class. So per day we're starting with in week one with focus on messaging and prospecting which are like really at the top or at the beginning of the GTM engineering process. And so we're basically because we want to start by really understanding our messaging before and ICP before and you know like prospecting like a set of companies and clients we want to then outreach. Then in week two we're going to focus on taking these ICP lists from companies and people and really using AI to craft personalized messages and then enroll them in Lemlist sequences both to reach out to them on LinkedIn and emails. Then on week three we're going to deep dive into cargo and in creating like a few AI agents and covering a bunch of use cases to streamline and automate your GTM workflows like research qualifications or identifying the lookalikes of your best deals. And in week four we're going to end up the course focusing instead of like switching gears a little bit and focusing on automating content creation as well as optimization. So we're like going to learn how to create content from a single keyword, how to repurpose that into social like LinkedIn as well as optimizing existing content and refreshing that to climb the rankings. And yeah, throughout the course as Jared mentioned, you're going to be cited by expert in all these tools and in all these workflows that you can always rely on both sync live in the sessions as well as on our Slack community Async.

Fantastic. And then yeah, today you know, you're going to get into LEM list in week two and that's what we're going to talk about today. And then I put the link in the slack in the messages but you can, you can find a recording of this and the other webinars we've done at this YouTube channel. So with that I'm going to stop sharing and hand it off to Alexi.

Cool. Thanks Jared. Let me tell if you can see my screen.

Yep, looks good.

Cool. Thanks for the introduction. Well, today what I have in mind is five quick parts. I don't want to spend too much time on talking but we rather start building very fast. So I'll go through the first two sections and then we'll be able to come back basically if we head straight into it. Why do we think At Lemnis that outreach is very core in your, in your business. Now it's because inbound doesn't scale as, as you probably know. And it's because you, you're here today. Basically what we want to to do is to be able to have a predictable, repeatable and scalable process for, for your business. And that's exactly, exactly what outreach do does. So the only thing about outreach is that it is a hard skills to get. It's something that many people can do in 2025 because you've got a lot of tools. You've got like everyone talking about it on LinkedIn. The catch is that email inboxes, they're just full of emails. People don't personalize their emails. They don't do research on your icp, they don't do research on any of it. And you just, you just have like a flooded, flooded inbox and you don't know what to select in it. So what we want to do with the Go to Market engineering school is to just help you to get the right message for the right person at the right time. We'll come back to that later. But basically you want to have very good messaging because this is a real stat is that 99.9% of messages, they crap. They just, they're classic. You don't feel concerned, you don't feel like they have spent time thinking like trying to get infos on you and stuff. So what you want is to have, you really want to have a very short message but very impactful, very personalized. And that's what we're going to do today. I just want to show you what good looks like. What is the peak state as we like to call it? Basically three things is to reach out to the right person, the right time with the right message. On top of that, you want to have a good process that is solid and that you can rely on. The first three steps you can do it. Then the fourth one, you have to know your way around go to market. Otherwise you'll be able to do it for one campaign and then everything will crash. So we'll show you how to do it. Basically I just want to show you my personal favorite that I have implemented at Lemlist. What we do at Lemlist is that we have an issue. Days are only 24 hours and we don't want our sales team to spend time on outreaching to website visitors because they're often not in our icp. But we still want to outreach because it's business. We still can have good deals from it. So what we have done is that we have automated it. So our process is that we use Snitcher to get the website visitor and then to send it to HubSpot. And from HubSpot we send it, we send it back to. We send it to Clay to have a proper view of who the person is, if this person is already a customer or not. Because we don't really want to outreach open deals or customers. And then we enrich it in clay using personalized variables and AI which is very easy to do and very quick. You'll be able to see it. We are going to put our hands on Clay just after basically all these steps will be doing them just after. So I'll just go quick over them. Then once we have our table enrich table with all of the information we need in our messaging, we just push the leads to Lemlist into a campaign. And doing so, we are able to personalize our messaging. We are able to automate the outreach and to free up some time for our sales team so they actually spend time on tasks that create value and they don't spend time doing guesswork which we clearly don't want them to do. And here is a sneak peek of the results of the campaign which we are very proud of. Actually. It's always good to have a good automated outbound campaign that it's not like top of the league stats because we still have 3% of interested people which is just market average. But we just want something that rolls and that does the work and then we can move on to more valuable desk. Thing is with outreach, the one thing you don't want is to fall in spam. Basically our job is to help you avoid this. And so that's how we try to address our ICP and that's how we do it. And so we personalize our messaging using this and saying hey, I've seen that you lending it spam. So just maybe use lendlist and you'll be able to avoid that. Right? So I think we will be able now to go over the use case and we'll go back to talking later. What I want to show you is a quick table that we can create together. Actually I've created one just so we don't lose too much time afterwards. But here we go. So what we want to do is to outreach to people. And these people today, they're going to be you. I've downloaded the participant list from the webinar. So we're going to use it and you'll see how quick it is to set up a campaign using clay and mlist. There you go. And we have everything, everything in our clay table. I'll just shrink that so that we keep our your emails private and then we'll just only keep valuable columns. Phone number might be useful. Is there any amounts currency? We don't want it. Right. So what we have here is a pretty good list of 58 people who we are going to outreach. What I want is to outreach professional emails. So I'm just going to go over the filter here and go Email does not contain Gmail and we don't have any emails. And then what we need is to have the first name of the person to outreach and to feel a bit natural. We don't want messaging with hey blank, how is it? So we're just going to go on the first name here and say is not empty. There you go. And just like that we've got 30 people that we can outreach to. Actually there are no phone numbers so to keep it clean, just hit this. Now what we want is to find the company of these people. So what we are going to do is to use I think it's personal email, it's company find company. I think it is current company. To do this we'll need the URL LinkedIn URL I think company from contacts data is a good one I think and rich person. Yeah going to use this one. I think it's a good one and we will use the emails just like that company clay. Beautiful. We'll add the LinkedIn URL and one thing that I advise you guys to do is to only run your test on the first row so that you make sure that you don't spend credits just uselessly. So now that we have two good informations company name and LinkedIn URL of the person. Sorry, I think it's Emmett, I've shown your LinkedIn URL I think I hope you don't get angry at it. So now that we have the LinkedIn URL what we can do is to find the company domain. I'm not sure that the company's domain is already given so basics so we can just check and we don't have any company domain so what we're going to do is to add enrichment Current company. Very easy. We just save it and we run it on the first row every time just to not to waste credits. Current company. Hopefully they put the company domain though otherwise we'll use another one. There you go. Company domain create column Column is being Created. Awesome. So now what we are going to do, I think we can hide one of these columns so we just keep it clean. Not this one. Yeah, awesome. What we are going to do is to ask AI to give us the ICP that this person targets. Because what we want as lemlist is to help people reach out to the icp. So what we're going to do is to go here and ask ChatGPT generate text. Of course I have already my own script so we don't lose time trying to do some guesswork. We just copy paste it here. There we go. And we will use the company domain. Company domain just here. Right. So now we can just paste it on the first line. While the ChatGPT is trying to find to find the ICP of this person, what we are going to do is to log into our lemlist account, go to our campaigns, create a new one email. We're going to do a very simple easy sequence. So just one email, very, very light. And what we're going to do is to take here the campaign ID quickly and then so as you can see we have our response here. That gives us. I'll just rename that. It gives us our icp. Once we have the ICP then we can create a very simple email. Hey amif, I saw that you. Thanks for coming to the webinar. I saw that you target XYZ icp. We've done a small test on it. Do you want to have a glimpse at it? And then we'll shoot the email. So to do that we are going to send this person to our lemlist campaign. So we go here, add link to campaign. Very easy. We use our key well here we are going to use our campaign value because our lemlist account is just full of campaigns and it doesn't charge anymore. We've got more than 10,000 campaigns so it's just a mess. Then once we have this we're just going to fill the basic information. So we go here and add just the vary. So I think we use last name as well here. Did I hide first name? No first name here. Let's go Picture. We don't need it. Custom field. We don't need them. Email address. We will need that of course. So we use the email. There we go. And then we will add a custom field which is our person as icp. So we just go to custom fields, name it icp. Very straightforward. Same here. We get the value that we have created in another column and save and don't run as Usual we just run it on the first row and normally if we go to our list, just give it some time to charge. We've got an error. Oh, I did already in campaign because I've used the wrong one. Right. Campaign. Right. So this, this campaign up changed. Oh, it's the same. Is it? Isn't it? Yeah. Right. Try again. I think it's because we have that. Yeah, I know why. It's because at Lemnis we don't want to duplicate outreach. And so we have that basic setup that avoid your sdr, your sales, your gross team to double outreach people, which is even me. I, I could have done it right now. So that's no issue. What we can do is either go to that campaign I used to try a lead up confirm and then we go to the second line. I'll try with.

So you're saying you have a role that one lead can't be in multiple campaigns.

Well, they can, but you already have, you always have a message that tells you that they are either already in it either or that they are going to be added to a campaign even though they are already in a. In a campaign. So now what we're going to do is just to try. I think Data just don't want to work with us. Just doesn't want to work with us today, which is no big deal. There we go. We got Drew just here. We've got his company product manager is his ACP and he has been added to the campaign. Cool. Beautiful. Now that we have our leads in our campaign, we can just delete this. Tries Cool. And we will keep this as not updates, save settings. Cool. Right. And so now we can just go to our sequence, say hey, thanks for. Too bad you missed the webinar. I think it's better to save. Thanks. Thanks for coming to the webinar. We usually like to keep our subject line two words. So what we can do is I don't know, GTM webinar. And just so that it's very clean in the inboxes. And what we can do as well is to use liquidsyntax. Always keep this in my back pocket just so it's very easy to get. So here it is. Very basic knowledge. But it's very good to avoid spam is to use spin syntax. What it does, it just uses variation of a word for different contacts. So let's set it up right here. We're going to type hey, hi and we'll just delete that. So what it does is just that it's going to use hey for one contact or hi for another one. And just by rotating the message you're going to send, your emails are not going to be flagged as automatic by Google. And then you'll be able to maximize your email not landing in spam. So, hey, first name. I'm going to go very quick on it today.

Maybe you could put the URL of the YouTube in case they missed it.

Yeah, of course. Yeah, I'll do that. Actually, that's a very good idea. Do you want to send it to the other chat so I can get it real quick?

Sure.

Thanks for coming today. Do you want. You want me to send the workflow to Outreach to. And then we use the ACP column.

To help.

Alexey. There we go. And so now I'll just select myself and what we can do is a preview. Hey, Drew, thanks for coming today. Do you want me to send the workflow we have done today, we have done to outreach to Product Manager, which is Drew's icp. And then he'll just feel a bit more. He will feel that we have done work to personalize our text. And so by doing this, you just massively increase your open rate on your emails. So we can just go here, hopefully Drew is here and we can just launch it just right now, very easy. And just like that, I think it took us 15 minutes. We have just launched a campaign which is personalized and then we just need to go run it for all the rows, then we can filter just to keep the people that have ICP here. ICP is not empty and boom. And because the tagmat doesn't work to work with us today we only have seven people, but at least we assure that we tell them something that means. That means something to them. And one advice is to all to never trust AI and to always go over what it has done because we have told him not to, to only give us acp. And here we have. I'm sorry, but so just be very precise for your prompt. Always look a second time after AI and then you'll be able to share very good campaigns, I think. Do you want me, Jared, to stop here just so we.

Yeah, we could stop here and take questions. But I think the thing to mention is that in the course, well, we're not going to have time to talk about it today. You're going to go through deliverability in greater detail, various different techniques around deliverability that people should be using. So. So that. That's going to be covered in more in depth in the course, right?

Yeah, exactly. We're going to talk about deliverability, we're going to talk about technical setup, which is a pain if you don't know how to do it. But at Lemnist, we have done everything to make it very simple. And yeah, this course is the. Is the place where I'm going to talk a bit more about it. And then just to show you how top performers at Lemme Seek use campaigns. They do crazy campaigns. They have very good replay rates. We are very proud of it. But yeah, yeah, just can't wait for.

The branching logic in lemlas like you were just kind of showing is very powerful if they open within a day. If they didn't open, then go Send something in LinkedIn. Send them an invite first if they accept the invite. Right. So there's a lot of useful conditional logic you can use.

Yeah. We always used to try Omnichannel campaigns just so we make it like 360 vision for the. For the prospect.

Yeah, fantastic. Okay. Yeah, maybe it's a good time to open it up to Q and A. If you want to come off camera and ask your question or put it into the chat, either is good. Let's see if there's any questions. Who's got a question? Okay. Can you show the spintax thing again in lemlist?

Sure. Let me share my screen again. Can you see my screen? Yes, I think it works. So just to go back over it, what we will do is to. We will just add new people to a campaign.

And what's the rule, Lexi? Like 30% of your email, something like that should be using Spintax.

Oh, 30% of the content should be. Yeah, that's what we recommend. It's not easy to do, but if you put the work into it, then you just lower a lot your chances to land in spam. So I've just added a new prospect in the campaigns just to show you. Who asked for the SPIN syntax?

Erica asked about showing the SPIN tax again.

So there you go. Good question. Because we have not set it up right. I think what goes wrong is just there.

And with this general functionality, you could also say, you know, good afternoon or good morning or things like that. There's a lot of other types of functionality you can do. This one is just showing the sort of randomize these variations to help with deliverability. And I usually try to do like one full sentence at the beginning and one full sentence at the end and try to make sure that about 30% of the email has some kind of variability.

Yeah. And that's what we do, actually, I don't. Yeah, I think. Yeah, there you go. So here we don't have any prospects on this campaign. It's another older one I used. But basically what you get is you get high for certain prospects which you can add just manually actually.

And then you could go and select different, you can preview with different prospects and you'll see change as you select different prospects. And then you could also send yourself a test email just to double or triple confirm that, that, that spin tax isn't broken. Because there, you know, it's pretty easy to make a, a little typo in there.

Yeah.

Leave a curly bracket or something like that.

Always looking out for, for errors. Yeah, if we, if we have a look there, I've imported it myself twice. But what you can see is that sometimes we say hi and sometimes we just say hey. It just varies. Yeah, there you go. And what. Spin syntax is very strong because you can also automate in function of the timing of the day. You're going to reach out to the person. So as you can, as you said, Jared, just before you can say, hey, good morning. Hey, good afternoon. What I have done in the automated campaign for website visitors is that I always ask for if the person wants to plan a meeting in the following days, but when we are on Friday, we don't want that. And so I just had spin syntax on it saying, hey, good weekend, have a good weekend. We can talk about it on Monday, start of next week. So you just make it a bit more contextual and so people feel just like a lot more natural reading.

Alexi, when, when it's asked, when you, you're using the day parts or, or the day of the week, is that based on the schedule that you have, the, the time zone that you've put in for yourself or based on the recipient?

It's based on the recipient. But you can also, you can also change the, the setting and base it on your time if you want to talk about you in the amount which we don't recommend really, but.

Okay, let's see.

So helps with deliverability, right? Because Google doesn't want you to send like hey, hey, hey, hey, hey for like 1000 emails or like the more Google it picks up that you're sending like semi templated emails, the more it'll flag you, right Alex?

Yeah, exactly. And this is just actions that you can have on your emails. But what we also do is we use lemwarm, which is a tool that we have as well that warms up your email address, your domains. And that makes sure that you never learn in spam. Because what is very important with emails, outreach is to always be very consistent. And so if on Monday you send 50 emails, but on Tuesday you don't sell any, and then the next week you just go Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and send 100 emails, you are going to be flagged as automatic. However, using lemlist, you'll always send a certain amount of email per day. And using lemo, we make sure that when you don't have any campaigns running, we will send emails in our base just to keep your domain warm and to keep it ready for your next campaign. It's a very important thing about outreach.

Another question Urban asked, can you tell us more about the ICP prompt? I think that's in clay.

So sure, it's a very basic prompt and that's why we get some errors here, but we can rework it on it. Actually, what I've done is just, I used the company domain and I said, hey, what is this company's domain name? Oh, actually there's an error in it using this company's domain name domain. What is the icp? It's very simple. You don't need to go a lot further for very quick campaigns like that. And there you go, that's why we had errors. And then you just always give the output example, output rules and then an example. So you say, hey, only give me the job title. I don't want you to tell me that you found the ICP of the person because we want to be ready to plug it into our message. And then you give it an example. So sales, operation manager and yeah, not harder than that. It's literally four lines. It's, it's very easy. Thing is, this part is easy, but having the whole system requires practice, requires work that you have to do. And that's, yeah, that's why I like the peer to peer learning as well.

For more sophisticated things or, you know, sometimes even simple sounding things, there's a lot of trial and error and you end up burning a few credits. But then that little help me button as well will say to Clay, hey, this is what I'm trying to do. Can you improve this prompt? And then it will, it will provide a bunch of different chunks, you know, sort of context.

And as you said, Jared, actually I, I think I, I've stopped counting the times where I watch a webinar and I go, all right, that's so easy. I just close the window, try to do it the next day and just crash. And I'M like, oh, too hard. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Cool. Any other questions before we wrap up? All right, Sounds like people are good. Thank you. Alexi, this is fantastic. I love how you. You're very daring. You did the live demo.

It was awesome. Awesome. To show you what we can do for a basic campaign like that. And, yeah, just can't wait to do some very, very peak state workflows in class. It's going to be great. Awesome stuff.

Thanks so much, Alexey. Thanks, everyone who tuned in. And for the ones that are signed up, we'll see you next Tuesday in class. And if not, you can sign up to the next cohort on the main site.

All right, thanks, everyone. Take care. Have a good day, and have a good weekend.