Hans Dekker

I’ve developed outbound prospecting campaigns for over 200 B2B companies in various industries, ranging from private jet charters to B2B SaaS.

As a former Head of Growth & Head of Marketing I know both the world of bootstrapped, lean teams as well as funded sales machines and what it takes to supply each of those with outbound leads.

Previously one of the top Clay educators and one of the original GTM Engineers.

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Everyone’s obsessed with “personalization” in outbound.

And then they wonder why nobody replies.

- Adding the prospect’s name 3 times.

- Dropping their company’s funding round in the opener.

- Mentioning their favorite podcast from 2017.

Here’s the truth: personalization is overrated.

We see millions of emails every month at Instantly.ai: 

What actually drives replies is relevance.

If your offer solves a problem I care about today…

If your message is simple and makes me think “yep, this matters to me”…

You’ll get a response.

I don’t need you to compliment my LinkedIn post.
I don’t need you to fake research.

I need you to show me, in 2 sentences, why you’re worth my time.

The best outbound doesn’t sound personalized.

It sounds relevant.

AI-powered GTM strategist | Head of Education & Outreach Innovation at Instantly.ai

I just packaged up 30+ Claude skills for GTM and sales teams.

Free. Drop in and use them.

What's in the library:

→ Prospect Research Autopilot 
→ Discovery Call Prep Brief 
→ Objection Response Generator 
→ Sales Pitch Customizer 
→ Campaign Brief Generator 
→ Competitive Battle Card Generator 
→ Audience Pain Discoverer 
→ Persona Generator from Research 
→ GTM Launch Checklist Generator 
→ Email Re-engagement Sequence 
→ Campaign ROI Benchmark Report 
→ Blog to Social Repurposing 
→ Video to Blog Repurposer

...and about 20 more.

Each one is a pre-built skill you load into Claude.

No prompting from scratch. No staring at a blank chat. Just describe your situation and let it run.

This is the stack I use day-to-day at Instantly.ai for research, content, and campaign work.

Comment SKILLS below and I'll send it over.

One of the most underrated tools for sales professionals right now isn't a CRM or a sequencer.

It's Claude Projects.

Most people use Claude for one-off tasks. Write me an email. Summarize this. Whatever.

But Projects let you build something way more powerful: a sales brain.

Here's how it works.

You create a project and load it with everything about your sales org:

→ Your go-to-market playbook → Case studies and proof points → Copywriting rules and frameworks → ICP details and target verticals

Now every time you ask it to write a cold email, it doesn't start from zero. It reads your playbook first. Pulls in the right case studies. Matches your voice.

I built a 28-page sales playbook for Instantly.ai inside one of these projects. 

Now when I say "write a sequence targeting B2B SaaS founders under 100 employees," it already knows what we sell, what works, and what proof to reference.

But here's where it gets really interesting.

You can pull in your campaign analytics. It sees what's performing and what isn't. Then it optimizes.

You can drop in a call transcript from a demo. It cross-references your playbook, flags objections you didn't cover, and helps you draft the follow-up.
It becomes your command center.

And with connectors like the Instantly.ai MCP, you don't even have to leave Claude. Create campaigns, add leads, launch sequences, track results. All from one place.

No more jumping between 20 tabs.

Claude Projects are genuinely one of the most slept-on tools in B2B sales right now. If you're not using them, you're leaving a lot on the table.

Feeling stuck in Clay, want to build a highly targeted lead list, or is outbound not performing well?

I help business & revenue leaders who rely on cold outbound to get more sales in 3 different ways:

- Clay consulting for who wants to build in Clay but is feeling lost or isn't sure what's possible

- List building for who wants highly targeted lists of their exact ICP's and segments

- Outbound strategy and execution for those who want an expert to come in and handle everything from A - Z

Feeling stuck and curious if I can help? Don't hesitate to reach out!

Anthropic just published a guide on building "skills" for Claude.

Most people will skip it because it sounds like a developer thing.

It's not. It's the clearest signal yet that the future of AI isn't better prompts. It's better systems.

Here's what caught my attention.

A skill is just a persistent instruction set.

You write it once. Claude loads it every time it's relevant. No re-explaining. No starting from zero.

Sound familiar?

It's the same principle behind the Sales Brain concept I've been talking about. 

Passive context that's always there, always shaping the output.

Recent research by Vercel backs this up. They found that giving AI everything upfront (passive context) crushed retrieval-based approaches. 100% pass rate vs 53%.

Skills are that idea, productized.

Why this matters for cold email.

Right now, most people prompt AI the same way every time.

"Write me a cold email for this prospect."

That's like hiring a new SDR every morning and giving them zero onboarding.
A skill changes that. You define your ICP once. Your angles. Your voice. What not to say. Your best-performing email patterns.

Then every email Claude writes comes from that foundation.

Where https://lnkd.in/ey35kRv8 fits.

The real unlock is when your skill has context from your actual campaign data.
Which subject lines are getting opens. Which angles are booking meetings. Which segments are responding.

That's what makes https://lnkd.in/epuSrVze centralized setup powerful. Campaign data, lead info, and results all in one place. You're not stitching together five tools hoping the AI figures it out.

You're giving it a single source of truth.

The gap is closing fast.

The difference between people getting 1% reply rates and 4% reply rates isn't the tool. It's the system behind the tool.

Skills are another step in that direction.

If you're still writing one-off prompts for every email, you're already behind.

Building Skills for Claude

144K emails. 89 opportunities. $271K in pipeline.

A user just shared his results with me from a year of running cold email for a B2B SaaS client using Instantly (https://lnkd.in/ey35kRv8).

What makes this interesting isn't just the numbers. It's the setup.

He ran outbound for four different SaaS products under the same company. 

Four separate ICPs. Four different messaging angles. All in parallel, all year long.

The stats across 144K sends:

→ 80.61% open rate → 1.53% reply rate → 89 opportunities created → $271,000 in pipeline value

He ran heavy A/B/C testing across all four products. Not just tweaking subject lines. Full sequence variations, different angles, different approaches per tool.

The thing that held it all together was infrastructure.

His words: "Our infrastructure, domain, email settings, warm-up, everything was excellent."

When you're managing four product campaigns at that volume for a full year, the sending foundation is everything. One deliverability slip and you're burning through leads you can't get back.

That's 144K emails that actually landed in inboxes. At scale. For 12 months straight.

The copy and targeting get all the attention. But the infrastructure that runs for a year without breaking down = the real money maker.

Awesome job Tunahan Tolga Yıldız

AI-powered GTM strategist | Education & Content Lead at Instantly.ai

Google AI mode might be the most underrated free tool for GTM engineers right now.

Most people use it for casual research. But if you combine it with a scraper, it becomes a legitimate data enrichment engine.

Here's what I mean.

You can ask Google AI mode to estimate the revenue of any SaaS company. It does extensive research across multiple sources, pulls funding data, growth context, efficiency metrics. All in seconds.

Cool, but not scalable on its own.

Now plug in a Google AI mode scraper like Scraping Dog. Suddenly you can run this at scale.

Feed it a list of companies. Extract exactly what you need. Run the response through a cheap AI model to pull out the clean data point. Done.

You can use this to find:

→ Company revenue estimates → Founder and owner names → Company websites from just a name → Funding status and growth signals

All for free. Data you might be paying a provider hundreds or thousands a month for.

From there, you enrich your dataset and plug it straight into your Instantly campaigns.

The real unlock here is for GTM engineers who know how to build internal tools around this. Use Claude Code to turn these scrapers into proper APIs. Build a pipeline that researches companies, enriches them, and feeds them directly into your outreach.

I'm actually building a course on exactly this inside the Instantly Academy that's launching very soon. 

How to use Claude Code to build these tools, create your own APIs, and run the full pipeline from research to live campaigns.

If you want to get notified when it drops, comment below.

Small Claude trick I've been using lately.

If you have a bunch of skills set up in a project, Claude will usually figure out which one to use. But not always.

A quick fix: add a trigger command to the skill itself. Something like [weekly-analytics] or [campaign-check]. Now it only fires when you type that specific command.

I use brackets because Claude doesn't use them natively. Slash commands it already does, so there's potential for conflict.

The other nice thing is you can chain them. I have a weekly analytics skill and a campaign optimization skill that I combined into a single [weekly-campaign-check] that runs both in one go.

Nothing groundbreaking. Just makes managing a growing list of skills a bit cleaner.

Walked through it in today's Instantly Academy video. Want to join the academy when it goes live?

Let me know!

Excited to go live today with HubSpot, co-hosting a panel to help startups build more pipeline.

Want to learn how modern startup teams are building pipeline with cold email + AI? Join us at 3PM GMT / 4PM CET today.

Link below 👇

Cold email still works.
But the rules changed.

On Feb 17, we’re co-hosting a live session with HubSpot For Startups on how teams are building pipeline with AI, without hurting deliverability or deal quality.

Save your spot: https://lnkd.in/dtSQrauR

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