Outbound demand generation.

Cold calling, mass email campaigns, and LinkedIn outreach (both manual and automated) are the key outbound demand generation methods I use in my B2B projects.

The market has evolved throughout my career, and increasingly advanced tools have emerged. Yet, whether my team used Mailchimp, Instantly, GetResponse, Apollo, Waalaxy, Dux-Soup, Expandi, LinkedHelper, or Clay, the underlying strategy has always remained the same.

I won't spend time detailing domain warm-up strategies, LinkedIn automation settings, or Gen AI prompts for efficient data gathering and analysis in Clay - this information becomes outdated every three to six months. Based on my 15 years of experience, I firmly believe that a marketer involved in outbound lead generation must continuously search for new tools. I structure my team's workflow to ensure that up to 10% of our time is reserved for testing new approaches.

The strategy itself, however, deserves deeper attention. In B2B marketing, it is crucial to have a clear profile of your customers, understand their needs, and build campaigns that directly solve your audience's challenges. How can you do this effectively?

Below, you'll find an example of high-level segmentation. This Outreach Matrix combines ICP, Persona, and Campaign. More sophisticated versions can also include different messaging sequences or segment leads based on the communication channel, trigger responses, and more.

So, what exactly is an ICP in B2B marketing? It stands for Ideal Customer Profile, representing a company that's your ideal target client. An account-based approach might lead to one specific company, like Coca-Cola, General Motors, Apple, or any targeted client. However, in a broader outbound marketing approach, ICP usually refers to a segment of companies grouped by essential characteristics. I typically use criteria such as location, employee count, industry, revenue, notable clients, specific technologies used, or particular in-house expertise.

An equally crucial part of my method is defining the Persona. A Persona represents a specific employee type within your ICP companies who is your potential contact. Typical filters for creating a Persona include job title and responsibilities, experience and skills, location, and educational background.

At the intersection of ICP and Persona, we create the Campaign Outline. This outline typically includes Challenge, Proposition, Why, Benefits for Persona, and a Call to Action. The Campaign Outline, built upon strategic market research, is the foundation for developing our outreach message sequences. Usually, several message versions are tailored for each communication channel.

What scale of communication can we manage? Successfully scaled this model to handle outreach to hundreds of thousands of leads per month. A team of up to 10 people can manage this scale, provided automation tools, generative AI, and advanced analytics support them.