Flexible-workspace B2B company · 2025–26
Outbound infrastructure rebuild
Rebuilt cold outbound from a 0.4% reply rate and $900 per meeting into a smaller team producing more.
$900 → $115 cost per meeting
The problem
Outbound had a 0.4% reply rate and cost $900 per meeting. The SDR team was burning through leads with no signal behind them.
What I built
- Sending infrastructure. Cold email spread across multiple domains, with spintax to vary the wording.
- Lead routing. Contacts with a verified email go straight to sequencing. Contacts without one go through enrichment first. Call-only contacts go to the CRM for the phone team.
- Short AI personalization. One line of AI-written personalization per email, not a paragraph. If there was no usable company context, the line was skipped.
- Persona shift. I moved targeting away from People and HR toward Facilities, Real Estate and Workplace leaders.
Design decisions
- One line of personalization reads like a person wrote it. A paragraph reads like a model did.
- Skip beats generic. No context means no personalization, not a filler line.
- Prompt caching cut AI cost by more than 65%.
- The persona change was the biggest lever by far. Better copy can’t fix the wrong buyer.
Result
The reply rate went from 0.4% to 1.48%. Cost per meeting dropped from $900 to $115. The SDR team went from four people to two while total output doubled.