Outbound for tech companies when the founder sells
How to set up B2B outbound without a sales team: micro-ICPs, one message per customer type, sending infrastructure and what to measure.
In many small tech companies, the person who sells is the founder. They prospect when they have a gap and stop when a project arrives. The result is a pipeline that goes up and down without anyone knowing why. Building an outbound system is a way to stop prospecting from depending on spare time.
Start with micro-ICPs, not «B2B companies»
A micro-ICP is a group of customers who share a specific problem. «Companies that need e-invoicing» is a market; «a foreign-trade agency that issues many invoices every month» is a micro-ICP. The difference matters because each micro-ICP receives a different message, written for its problem.
A good starting point: write down five types of customer you already have or would like to have and, for each, the sentence you would use to explain why they need it.
One message per type of customer
When the same text serves everyone, replies drop. For each micro-ICP write:
- The problem, in the words that customer uses.
- A short proof that you know how to solve it.
- A yes-or-no question at the end.
The infrastructure almost nobody sees
Outbound often fails for something other than the message: deliverability. It pays to:
- Send from secondary domains, not from the main domain, to protect its reputation.
- Warm up the mailboxes before sending at scale.
- Limit daily sends per mailbox and put an unsubscribe link in every message.
- Take care of the list: verified contacts, two people per company at most and no one from the do-not-contact list.
The CRM is not optional
Every reply, every «not now» and every meeting has to be recorded with its history. Without that, the next message does not know what was said before and you repeat mistakes. The aim is that whoever receives the conversation knows what happened before answering.
What to measure at first
- How many conversations open per micro-ICP, not how many emails go out.
- Which message works best with each type of customer.
- How many replies turn into a meeting.
A real example
For Afip SDK, a software company, we built the complete outbound with this approach: micro-ICPs, sending infrastructure and multichannel campaigns. The meeting with Mercado Libre has already taken place and conversations are open with ten companies. Here is the full case.
What we do
We do all of the above and run it: data, domains, sequences and CRM. Your team only steps in when there is real interest. See how we approach it on our page for tech companies.