This single play generated $7M in pipeline

Hey there, Austin here 👋

Welcome to The Pipeline—the newsletter to help scale your revenue team’s creativity.

The response to last week’s edition was insane. I shared how we generated $15M in pipeline from founder-led content.

Today, I’m going to walk you through how we use Unify internally to power our Automated Outbound motion—and generated $7M in pipeline from it last year.

Shall we?

📒 GTM Playbook

This single strategy generated $7M in pipeline

An inside look at how we scaled Automated Outbound from $0 to $7M in pipeline

Automated outbound has become one of our core GTM channels. And its one of our most efficient. As you read in the title, the motion generated $7M in pipeline for us in 2024.

It wasn’t always like this.

In April, we did not have an automated outbound program. Skyler (our founding AE) was manually doing cold outbound and working opportunities. It was working well, but it was a grind.

We brought on Garrett Wolfe to our team in April, and his first project was to build the foundation for our automated outbound program.

And over the course of the last 7 months, we’ve built a system that consistently drives dozens of new opportunities every week. Last week we set a record and booked north of $1 million of pipeline in a single week.

From product releases, to additions to the team, to strategic brainstorm sessions on plays, to rapid iterations of processes, revops automations and tons more, it took a lot of energy to build out an outbound program of this size.

In this essay, we’re going to pull back the curtain on how we built our automated outbound program, and exactly what it took to get to booking >$1M in pipeline per month.

If you take away nothing else, outbound is still one of the most effective growth channels there is. You just need to make sure you’re running the 2025 playbook for it.

So what is Automated Outbound?

Let’s start at the foundation.

Automated outbound is a strategy that outside in looks like an SDR. But under the hood there’s a small team using AI and software to operate like an army of sellers.

With platforms like Unify, many plays that outbound sellers used to run manually can be run fully on autopilot.

Under the hood, here’s what Unify does to power automated outbound:

1. Ingest data from Salesforce, Hubspot, and intent signals like your website to know which prospects are in a buying motion

2. Qualify accounts using an AI Agent

3. Enrich accounts with high quality emails from our contact data waterfall

4. Enroll those prospects into sequences specific to their personas

5. Personalize messaging using AI

This is simplifying a bit. But the point is that we take the same actions that a seller would.

The result?

A scalable, predictable process that cuts down on repetitive tasks and helps teams not have to think so hard about prospecting.

Why have Automated Outbound as a channel?

2 reasons: 1) It’s a big channel (33% of our pipeline this month) and 2) its efficient.

Our customers often think about Automated Outbound as a replacement for a big ads budget or to supplement a human outbound team. The goal is big reach, and for the channel to be a big percentage of pipeline.

One stat I’m proud of: Unify booked 100 meetings using our own product last month.

Automated Outbound is a no-brainer channel from a ROI perspective (regardless of your company size). To put it in perspective, we do more closed won revenue today from automated outbound than all of performance marketing. And our performance marketing budget is ~$1M/year. We’d pay a fraction of that if we were a Unify customer.

How to get started with Automated Outbound

(1) Ownership & Accountability

Ideally start with a team of 2. One person to own the strategy and building plays (often growth or revops). And other person to support with one-off operations tasks, manual CSV uploads, etc.

(2) Understand Your ICP and Target Personas

Determine the characteristics of accounts you could sell to and then select the titles that define your target buyer personas.

(3) Choose Your Signals

Select intent signals that indicate a company or individual is interested in your product / industry or in-market. A few examples of these could be: new hires, recent fundraising, website visits, LinkedIn engagement (gave away my LinkedIn playbook here, by the way).

(4) Build copy

Draft your emails with best practices for subject lines and email body. Here’s a link to some templates to get you started.

(5) Start small.

Launch 1-2 Plays based on intent signals that matter to you. When we first launched Automated Outbound, we launched with website intent and new hires.

(6) Monitor volume.

Monitor the volume of emails going out week over week. To find success you should aim to be sending at least 2,500 emails per week.

(7) Track metrics.

Keep a close eye on open and click rates, and reply / positive reply rate. As a rule of thumb, a very healthy automated outbound program is booking meetings with 1% of the contacts and 2-4% of the accounts that you’re reaching out to.

If you want a save-able resource, just screenshot this:

Now, once you’ve got the initial set-up done, you’ll want to do the following steps on an ongoing basis:

(1) Spin up new plays.

Try to launch 1-2 new plays per week. Don’t get stuck running the same initial set of plays over and over and over again. Each new play is a chance to unlock scale in your outbound program. Linking some play inspiration here.

(2) Iterate & revise copy.

Make sure you are revising copy and using plenty of variables / spintax to improve deliverability.

(3) Monitor plays.

Monitor, revise, and A/B test existing plays to see how that affects performance and ROI. You can tweak the email copy, update subject lines, test different intent signals, etc.

(4) Review & action.

At steady state, begin to determine which plays are performing well, mediocre, and poorly. Try to determine if you can improve the performance of any of these on a play by play basis. Turn off any plays that you have determined are not yielding positive results.

Pipeline we generated using our own product.

Since spinning up the program in April of 2024, Unify has generated more than $7M in new business pipeline using the Unify platform.

This step function increase in yield from automated outbound comes from tinkering with plays that are running, launching new ones, and iterating on copy, personas, send schedules, and more.

Below, you can see the results of Unify’s automated outbound program from inception in April, all the way through YTD 2024.

As you can see, it took roughly 2 months to see things start to click, and now it is all about refining these experiments quickly to improve output.

What’s also interesting is that pipeline is diversified across a number of Plays.

The graphic below shows our breakdown of booked meetings by play. When you’re just getting started, you will only have a few plays running.

This explains our initial traction with College Alums, LinkedIn Likes, and Website Visits in May.

In July we see G2 come online. As time has gone on, we have become less dependent on each individual play as we have built a well diversified strategy across each play we are running today.

It’s important to call out that success doesn’t happen overnight.

Over the months, we have made changes to copy, have tightened up our target titles to ensure we have the right inclusions, and have built an even stronger set of exclusions to ensure partners, customers, and competitors are never reached out to. It also took us many months to test and validate the 10+ plays that we have running today.

When starting your own automated outbound program, you shouldn’t over index on needing to see success right away, rather focus on building incrementally in order to see results and then double down where you’re seeing wins.

We also felt struggles when managing responses (as you can see the amount of pipeline generated in July), as well as improvements in process that needed to be made as the program has continued to grow and mature.

I know I’m biased, but you're sitting on a gold mine if you're able to get automated outbound in place in 2025. We found this to work particularly well with founder-led LinkedIn content.

For example: Garrett will feed a CSV of all the folks who liked a niche-viral LinkedIn post of mine into an automated outbound play. Works super well. We’re building this natively into the Unify product as we speak 🙂 

If you want a deeper dive into how I plan my content, what topics I write about, how I built a scalable content engine, and more…I’ll link that playbook here. See you over there!

WHAT’S NEW AT UNIFY

Pylon saw a 4.2x ROI with Unify. Here's how they did it:

Marty Kausas, their Co-Founder and CEO, had a problem. Their GTM stack was multiple tools strung together with an overwhelming number of integrations.

They began a hunt for a solution that would simplify their automated outbound plays without sacrificing performance.

Pylon found Unify in early 2024. Since then, they've found success from two core plays:

1/ Website visitors: personalized and tailored to the recipient's company size and industry

2/ New hires: Unify identifies key decision-makers in Account Management, Customer Success, and similar departments who have recently started new roles.

Now their GTM efforts are Unified (🥁) — and they don't have to worry about dozens of integrations.

As for results: $300K of new pipeline in the first few weeks of running Plays.

As Marty puts it:

"Unify is the go-to-market OS that every company needs. It has transformed the way we approach outbound prospecting and allowed us to focus on what really matters - building great products and delivering value to our customers"

If you want to use Unify to drive more pipeline in 2025, book a demo here.

BEFORE YOU GO…

Thanks again for following along. I’m excited to grow The Pipeline in 2025. The reception so far has been great.

What questions do you have about our strategy? Reply and let me know. Happy to clarify anything that wasn’t clear in the write-up.

Austin

PS: If you want to use Unify to drive more pipeline in 2025, get in touch here.