The Outbound Prospecting Playbook for RevOps-Driven Teams

Outbound prospecting is often treated as a sales-only activity - SDRs hammering the phones while RevOps focuses on systems and data. That is a mistake. When RevOps owns the infrastructure behind outbound, reply rates climb, deliverability stays healthy, and measurement actually works. This playbook covers how RevOps should support every stage of the outbound motion.

Define and Operationalize Your ICP¶

An ICP that lives in a slide deck is useless. RevOps must translate ICP criteria into filters that reps can execute against.

Pull your closed-won data from the last 12 to 18 months and identify patterns:

Avoid the “total addressable market” trap. Your ICP is not everyone who could buy. It is the segment where you win most often, at the highest ACV, with the shortest sales cycle. Narrowing your ICP from 50,000 accounts to 5,000 will improve every downstream metric.

Build Clean, Enriched Lists¶

Bad data kills outbound before the first email sends. RevOps should own the list-building pipeline:

1. Source accounts from your data provider (ZoomInfo, Apollo, Cognism) using ICP filters
2. Enrich contacts with verified email addresses, direct dials, and LinkedIn URLs
3. De-duplicate against CRM - never prospect an existing customer or active opportunity
4. Validate emails through a verification service (NeverBounce, ZeroBounce) to keep bounce rates under 2%
5. Load into your sequencing tool with proper tagging for campaign, persona, and source

Target a list accuracy rate of 92% or higher. If more than 8% of your contacts bounce or return as invalid, switch providers.

Design Multi-Channel Sequences¶

The days of email-only outbound are over. Top-performing sequences blend channels:

• Day 1: Personalized email - reference a specific trigger (funding round, job posting, tech adoption)
• Day 3: LinkedIn connection request with a short note
• Day 5: Follow-up email with a relevant case study or data point
• Day 8: Phone call with a voicemail script
• Day 11: Email - ask a direct question tied to their likely pain point
• Day 15: LinkedIn comment on their recent post or article
• Day 19: Breakup email - clear call to action, easy to respond to

Personalization tiers matter. Not every prospect warrants deep research. Use this framework:

• Tier 1 (top 50 accounts): Fully customized - reference specific company challenges, mutual connections, or recent news
• Tier 2 (next 200 accounts): Semi-personalized - industry-specific pain points with company name and role references
• Tier 3 (remaining): Templated with dynamic fields - still relevant, but scaled through automation

Protect Deliverability¶

RevOps must monitor email health. One blacklisted domain can wipe out months of pipeline:

• Warm new domains gradually - start with 20 emails per day and increase by 10 per week
• Authenticate with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC on every sending domain
• Maintain bounce rates below 2% and spam complaint rates below 0.1%
• Rotate sending domains - use secondary domains for cold outbound to protect your primary domain reputation
• Monitor blacklists weekly using tools like MXToolbox

Measure What Matters¶

Track these outbound metrics weekly:

Key Takeaways¶

• Translate your ICP from a slide deck into executable filters in your data tools and CRM
• De-duplicate lists against CRM data and validate emails to keep bounce rates under 2%
• Use multi-channel sequences of 8 to 12 touches with tiered personalization based on account priority
• Protect deliverability by warming domains gradually, authenticating emails, and rotating sending domains
• Measure positive reply rate and sequence-to-meeting rate weekly - these are the leading indicators of pipeline health