Cold Emails | Automation | Clay | Instantly.ai Outbound Partner

Outbound GTM Architecture for B2B companies

I help B2B SaaS and software development companies design and own their outbound engine.

Most teams don’t lack outreach. They lack structure and they use playbooks from 2020.

Outbound, CRM, data, and tools exist, but they’re fragmented.
Decisions are made without clear market signals.

I design and implement consolidated outbound GTM systems that connect ICPs, workflows, CRM, and data - so outbound becomes a controlled channel, not noise.

Outbound GTM Architecture
Designing and validating outbound go-to-market for products, markets, and segments.

CRM & Pipeline Activation
Turning CRM and sales data into a single, reliable system for execution and forecasting.

Outbound Enablement
Enabling teams to run outbound independently with the right tools, data, and workflows.

📅 https://calendly.com/oleg_tomenko/intro

Oleg Tomenko

Instantly.ai just analyzed 4+ billion emails.

I made a short video skimming through the report and added some TMNKO data, so we can see the trends for 2026.

Key takeaways:

• ~2% reply rate is now the minimum viable benchmark
• 93% of replies come from the first 3 steps
• More follow-ups = higher spam risk
• Inboxes are flooded with AI-generated emails
• Cold email still has the lowest cost per lead, but relevance matters more than ever

Hope you'll enjoy the video 👇

I design and implement outbound GTM systems for B2B companies | From chaos to scalable outbound

Founder @ Slyleadz | I help startups build cold outbound systems that generate qualified meetings | 💌 slyleadz.us

STRUGGLING TO FILL YOUR PIPELINE WITH QUALIFIED LEADS?

I've been there. After testing 1000+ outreach campaigns, I cracked the code.

Now, I help B2B companies build outbound systems that:
→ Generate 20-30 qualified meetings/month
→ Convert cold prospects into warm conversations
→ Scale predictably without the spam tactics

Our secret?
- Multi-channel outreach that actually works
- AI-powered personalization at scale
- Follow-up sequences with 40%+ response rates
- Data-driven targeting that finds your ideal customers

Recent wins:
→ Helped a SaaS startup book 100+ demos in 60 days
→ Built a 7-figure pipeline for a tech company in 90 days
→ Generated 500+ qualified leads for enterprise clients

Want to stop guessing and start closing?
Book a strategy call: calendly.com/slyleadz/slyleadz-15-minute-meeting-clone

Nick Palasz

People warn you about different substances but no one warns you about choosing sales as a career

Where your entire emotional stability depends on

• A reply that says looks interesting	
• A calendar notification
• Or someone typing…

It can be exhausting at times

But it’s also the kind of challenge that keeps you coming back, and I still wouldn’t trade it for anything else

If your cold email still starts with Hope you're doing well, your prospect already knows what’s coming

And it’s not good news.

They’ve seen that line a hundred times.
They know a pitch is sitting right behind it.
Half the time, they’ve already decided what to do with it before finishing the second sentence.

If you want replies, you have to give someone a reason to reply and that should happen in the first line, not the last.

Here are 5 ways that make it easier to start conversations:

1. Trigger-based opening

Mention a recent update so your email feels intentional right away, not something that was sent to 300 other people at the same time

Example: “Congrats on the Series A last week. Are you planning to grow the pipeline through outbound this quarter or mostly inbound?”

2. Observation-based opening

Point out something specific about their business to show you actually did your homework. Even one detail can separate you from everyone else emailing them.

Example: “Your team sells to CFOs at mid-market companies. How are you starting those conversations?”

3. Pattern interrupt opening

Break the usual cold email script and just sound human. You don’t always need to sound polished to get attention.

Example: “This might be the only cold email you get today that admits it’s a cold email 😅”

4. Problem hypothesis opening

If you mention a problem they probably already deal with, the email feels familiar instead of intrusive.

Example: “ Many sales teams can generate leads but struggle turning them into booked meetings. How consistent is your outbound pipeline right now?”

5. Simple question opening

Not everything needs a clever angle. Sometimes one good question is enough to start a real conversation.

Example: “What channel is driving most of your pipeline right now?”

♻️ Repost this so your team stops sending emails that look like everyone else's.

Follow Nick Palasz for more outbound breakdowns like this.

77 Cold Email Openers Every SDR Should Know

If your first line starts with Hope you’re doing well…. You already sound like everyone else

And that’s where people stop reading

These are the openers to use if you want replies and real conversations

So I built a cold email opener cheatsheet based on what’s actually working:
 ✅ Trigger-based openers (funding, hiring, product launches)
 ✅ Observation-based openers that show real research
 ✅ Problem hypothesis openers that feel relevant
 ✅ Curiosity openers that start natural conversations
 ✅ Direct question openers that get straight to the point
 ✅ Pattern interrupt openers that break the usual script
 ✅ Social proof openers that build instant credibility

If you run outbound and want more replies without rewriting your whole strategy, this one’s for you

Want the PDF version of it?

• Like this post
• Connect with me
• Comment “OPENERS” and I’ll send it over

Send information is all I needed to start believing again

That’s it. Two words

There’s no timeline, no budget, no actual commitment but I closed the laptop like something meaningful just happened

I’ve already replayed the call in my head and decided they liked me.
Now I’m imagining how I’ll structure the follow up
And I’m slightly nicer to everyone for the next 20 minutes.

They didn’t promise anything
But I emotionally adapted to the deal anyway

Now I’m checking my inbox like we’re in a long distance relationship

Sales reps don’t get attached to closed deals
We get attached to the possibility of one

Follow Nick Palasz for more

At some point, waiting becomes a personality trait in sales😅

You’re not even anxious about it anymore
You’ve kind of made peace with it

It’s just part of the routine now
Drink your coffee
Send those emails
Randomly think, huh… whatever happened there?

You don’t talk about it but you know it’s there

Sales doesn’t always humble you in big dramatic ways
Sometimes it just trains you to sit in silence and call it normal

After running enough outbound campaigns, you start noticing certain replies that tell you your lead list is actually good

Here are a few I always pay attention to and what they mean:

1. Wait… how did you get my email?

This means the contact data is correct and the message reached the right person.They’re surprised but not annoyed.

2. Interesting timing actually…

This means your prospecting picked up the right signal at the right moment. Timing did half the work for you.

3. Happy to chat, how’d you find us?

They’re curious, which usually means the outreach feels relevant.

4. Send me some info.

It is not a meeting yet, but it’s rarely a bad sign. It means you’ve reached someone who sees potential value.

5. Yes… this is exactly what we’re working on.

This is what happens when the right person, right timing and the right message line up.

I started noticing I get these kinds of responses much more often when I filter and clean my leads before launching campaigns.

Lately, I’ve been doing that with Icypeas when pulling prospects from Sales Navigator.
It helps enrich contacts and find verified emails so the outreach actually reaches the right person instead of bouncing or hitting dead inboxes.

P.S. How do you usually filter your lead lists before sending cold emails?

I didn’t know this job was basically professional rejection training

At the beginning, every no feels loud and personal

You read it twice
Then a third time for emotional damage
You start replaying the message in your head wondering if that one line ruined everything

For a second, you even question your career choices.

But a few months later the same rejection becomes part of the routine and you just go
yeah… never mind
Moving on to the next lead without any hesitation

Which is slightly concerning when you think about it 👀

Follow Nick Palasz for more sales moments that everyone in outbound understands

If I had to rebuild my outbound stack from 0, these are the tools I wouldn’t negotiate on

Because when things start breaking you quickly learn which tools you really depend on

The ones that help you:

 → target the right accounts
 → reach the right decision makers
 → keep deliverability healthy
 → and turn activity into pipeline

Here’s what stays in my stack:

1) Sales Nav → where everything starts
 If the targeting is off here, nothing downstream really works.

2) Clay → helps me decide who deserves an email
 Because emailing everyone is not outbound. It’s just noise.

3) Icypeas → makes sure I’m reaching the right person
 Wrong contacts don’t just waste sends, they slowly kill deliverability.

4) Prospeo.io → quick enrichment when I just need clean data fast
 Sometimes you just want answers, not another research task.

5) Maildoso → keeps the infrastructure stable
 I don’t like rebuilding inboxes every time I scale.

6) Warmy.io - Email channel. Reliable. → tells me if emails will actually land
 I’d rather know before I press send than guess after.

7) Smartlead → keeps sequences organised
 Because automation without structure turns messy fast.

8) Instantly.ai → lets me scale without stressing about domains
 Outbound should feel controlled when you scale, not fragile.

9) Aircall → makes sure calls don’t disappear into notes
 Good conversations should become real opportunities.

10) HubSpot → where everything comes together
 If it’s not logged here, it will be forgotten.

P.S. What’s one tool you’d keep even if everything else got cut?

If one hire was supposed to save your pipeline, read this

You made the expensive hire
With a higher salary, higher expectations, and a bigger quota.

This was supposed to change everything.
Finally bring in the deals.

But the targeting didn’t change
The CRM is still half-filled
Handoffs are still unclear
Data is still messy

The name on payroll is different but the friction inside the engine isn’t.

And then the quiet disappointment starts.

“Maybe they’re not as senior as we thought.”

But senior reps aren’t magicians.

They don’t create structure out of thin air
They amplify the environment they walk into

If the inputs are clean, they look elite
If the backend is messy, they look average

Before you question the rep, question the process.

P.S. If your top performer looks stuck, look at what’s sitting behind them not in front of them

Follow Nick Palasz for more

5,000 emails daily… on how many domains exactly?

I’ve learned not to get excited by volume anymore because I’ve burned domains before 😅

Not in one dramatic crash, but in slow fatigue like:

• Replies thinning out
• More emails landing in spam
• Campaigns that used to work suddenly feeling average

And the worst part is you don’t immediately connect it to volume

You think it’s the angle, the copy, or even the market being weird this week.

Meanwhile, the domain’s just tired

There’s too much load on it and not enough support.

That’s why before I scale anything, I check the math.

If I want to send 5,000 emails a day, I want to know exactly how many domains and mailboxes that actually requires.

I’ve been using Warmy’s domain calculator for that.

It shows me the setup I need before I touch the dial

👉 So before you turn the dial up to 5,000, plug your number into the calculator and see what your setup actually needs (https://lnkd.in/gHJ3cf5a)

5000 Emails a Day?

The way you talk to AI says a lot about how you sell

I’ve seen a lot of reps blame AI for average results
But when I look at what they’re typing, it’s this:

 -Give me pain points
 -Write a follow-up to this conversation
 -Help with objections

And then they’re confused when it reads like everyone else’s email

That’s not an AI issue
AI is not here to think for you. It responds to the prompt you give it

So instead of vague requests, here are 8 prompts every seller should actually be using for:

• ICP research
• Personalised icebreakers
• Pain hypotheses
• Objection handling
• Strong CTAs
• Smart follow-ups
• Case study rewrites
• Multi-threading inside accounts

Go through them

♻️ Repost it and audit your prompts today
 Follow Nick Palasz for more tactical outbound breakdowns like this

Corporate English is getting out of control 😂

I love watching how meeting requests slowly become more sophisticated over time.

It starts with:
Free for a call?

Then becomes:
Open to a quick conversation?

Then suddenly:
Would it make sense to explore a potential discussion?

At this point, I’m reading these messages, wondering whether we are scheduling a call or signing a partnership agreement.
All that just to ask if I have 20 minutes.

♻️ Repost this if you've ever had to reread a meeting request twice.
Follow Nick Palasz for more sales realities

There should honestly be a cooling-off period before anyone is allowed to send Quick question

Like a small warning that asks, do you really want to be this person today?

Because nothing good has ever followed these two words

We see it in the subject line every day.
We already know it’s going to ask for something.
Still, we open it 

Just in case this one is relevant.
Maybe this one actually did their homework.

It didn’t

Most of these subject lines aren’t bold. They’re exhausted.
You read the first sentence and your brain is already reaching for the delete button.

Swipe the carousel and tell me the worst subject line that needs to go away.

9 Subject Lines That Should Be Banned From LinkedIN

There’s no confidence like 9:47 PM confidence 👀

All week you were aligned
Clear strategy
Strong angle
Everyone approved

Then you reread it once 
And suddenly you’re convinced this entire sequence is personally responsible for slowing your company's growth 

So, you delete it and rewrite everything:
New positioning
Stronger hook
Different CTA

Launch is in 8 minutes but it feels like the perfect time to reinvent outbound

Because salespeople don’t avoid chaos

We just book it right before it goes live

Follow Nick Palasz for more

P.S. If you’ve ever renamed a doc “FINAL_final_v9,” you’re part of the problem too

I’ve always had a soft spot for movies about sales, business or big deals

There’s something about watching negotiations and pitches play out on screen that is just so entertaining

So, I compiled a list of my top 20 movies that everyone should watch

Some of these are classics, some are a bit chaotic and a few are probably more cautionary tales than inspiration but they’re all fun to rewatch

P.S. Is there any movie I’m missing from this list? 👀

Some sales conversations start in a very interesting way

You open the message and the first thing waiting for you is a calendar link

We haven’t spoken yet
I don’t know who you are
You don’t know what I do but somehow we’ve already skipped to the meeting stage

Sales really does give you moments like this
Where the only logical reaction is to laugh for a second and close the laptop😅

Follow Nick Palasz for more

I spent 4+ years and 1000+ outreach campaigns building what most teams never finish a full outbound strategy system.

Not a template. Not a swipe file. A real system.

📌Today, I'm giving away the entire Outbound Strategy System (2026 Edition) for free.

Built for B2B companies that want predictable meetings, not random spikes.

What's inside:
→ A decision framework to know if outbound is even right for you
→ Unit economics guardrails (where most teams quietly fail)
→ Channel portfolio breakdown cold email, LinkedIn, paid, partnerships
→ Lead demand vs SDR capacity math that actually makes sense
→ The 3 stages of outbound maturity (Chaos → Structure → Infrastructure)
→ Domain scaling model so you stop burning mailboxes
→ Deliverability checklist to run before every single launch
→ Realistic ramp timeline (if you expect full pipeline in 30 days, you're gambling)

I'm keeping this free for the next 7 days only.

Comment "system" below and I'll send it over.
 (Make sure we're connected)

Are you trusting Sales Nav data a little too much?

I did.

If the filters looked right, I assumed the emails were right.
-Good titles.
-Funded companies.
-Recent hiring.

So I’d export it, load it into the sequencer and hit send. It felt quite efficient.

Then bounce rate would creep up by 3%

Not enough to freak me out but enough to slowly mess with deliverability.

And every time replies dipped, I did what everyone else does

Rewrite it with:
-New subject line.
-Stronger opener.
-Different CTA.

I wasn’t fixing the problem. I was just avoiding it

The real issue was the step I barely respected
That middle layer between Sales Nav and send, where emails are enriched, verified, and filtered before they ever touch a sequence.

Once we tightened that using Icypeas, things took a turn for the better

Bounce rate dropped under 2%
Replies started coming from actual decision makers
And I stopped rewriting emails every week.

If you’ve been tweaking copy more than your data process, this might be the reason why

Sales Nav and Send

There’s a version of me that closes deals very fast

Mostly in my head though 👀

I move it to Closed Won
Tell myself the month is saved
And start acting slightly less stressed

Nothing is signed
Nothing is confirmed

But somehow I’m already relaxed about it

Sales really lets you celebrate things that haven’t technically happened yet 

P.S. Do you wait for the signature or just the feeling?

Not to be dramatic or anything but campaign pauses used to be my biggest fear 👀

Because every time one happened I already knew what the problem was going to be.

Some mailbox I didn’t catch in time had been slowly burning out… and now I had to deal with it.

I went through a phase where this kept happening. In one 45-day stretch I remember having:
-11 mailboxes burned
-5 campaign pauses
-Average lifespan ~22 days

And what really annoyed me wasn’t even the problem.

It was the fix.

Because it was always the same cycle:
Buy another domain, spin up new mailboxes, warm them again, redistribute sending… repeat.

At some point it just felt like maintenance work instead of outbound.

So I changed one thing.

Instead of pushing mailboxes until they died, I started pulling them out as soon as health started dropping and letting them cool off before using them again.

Around that time I started testing Maildoso because their self-healing mailboxes basically enforce this process automatically.

If a mailbox starts losing health it just gets paused. Sending shifts to the healthier inboxes and the weak one sits long enough to recover, then it quietly goes back into rotation.

No constant replacements, no restarting warmups every few weeks and no random campaign slowdowns.Honestly… it felt suspiciously peaceful 😅

And this is what the next 45 days looked like:

11 → 4 mailbox failures
5 → 1 campaign interruptions
Mailbox lifespan ~22 → ~54 days
Reply rate 3.6% → 7.8%

Most teams try to fix outbound by adding more mailboxes.
I got better results just from learning how not to burn the ones I already had

👉 If you’ve been dealing with the same issue, this is worth checking out https://lnkd.in/g_M7wEDj

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Oleg Tomenko

Nick Palasz

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The Battle

Oleg Tomenko

Nick Palasz

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Oleg Tomenko's LinkedIn Performance

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Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreOleg Tomenko's LinkedIn Performance