u/fi4ngel

we're a 25-person sdr team doing mostly outbound to mid-market saas companies. been on zoominfo for 3 years and the renewal quote just came in at $32k. thats a 40% increase from last year. my vp almost spit out his coffee when he saw the invoice lol

started evaluating zoominfo competitors and honestly shocked at how much the market has changed since we last looked. we need accurate emails, direct dials, and technographic data. intent data would be nice but not mandatory.

been testing a few options. Prospeo's accuracy has been solid, getting like 85%+ match rates on our test lists and their mobile data actually connects. Apollo is cheaper than zoominfo for sure but accuracy seems hit or miss depending on the segment. also looked at RocketReach but still feels pricey for what you get.

anyone here make a similar switch? what are you using as a zoominfo replacement? we're leaning toward Prospeo since the cost difference is insane but want to make sure we're not missing something obvious before we commit.

most people who talk about reply management at scale are either lying about their volume or drowning in it. i handle 5 clients right now, all running outbound, and between them we push somewhere around 500-600 replies a week across maybe 35 inboxes. nobody ever walks through what that actually looks like day to day so ill try.

monday morning i open Smartlead first thing, usually around 7:30am before the coffee shop gets loud. i sort all replies across all client accounts by "interested" and "not interested" using their auto-classification, which gets it right maybe 70% of the time honestly. the other 30% is stuff like "who is this" or "send me more info" that the AI cant figure out. those are the ones that matter most because theyre warm but ambiguous and if you wait even 6 hours your chance of booking drops hard. i go through every single one of those manually. takes about 45 minutes for all 5 accounts.

after that i handle the obviously interested ones. these get a personalized reply within the first 90 minutes of my day, every time. i have templates but i rewrite the first line for each one because copy pasted followups kill momentum. if someone says "sure lets chat" they get a Calendly link plus one specific thing about their company so it doesnt feel robotic. if someone asks a question i answer it directly and then nudge toward a call. no "great to hear from you!" nonsense. just answer and ask.

by about 9:30 monday im done with replies and i move into list building for the week. this is where the actual work happens. i pull from a mix of Apollo and LinkedIn Sales Nav depending on the client. one of my clients sells into logistics companies so Apollo actually has decent coverage there. another one targets series A fintech founders and for that Sales Nav is way better, Apollo data is stale for that segment.

once i have raw lists i run them through Prospeo for enrichment, sometimes supplementing with Hunter if theres gaps in a specific region. email accuracy on the Prospeo side sits around 82-85% before verification which is solid for what i need. after enrichment everything goes through a verification step, i use Scrubby for the catch-alls because those will destroy your sender reputation if you just blast them unverified. the whole enrichment and verification process for one client list of maybe 400-500 contacts takes about 2 hours including cleanup.

tuesday is campaign launch day. i load sequences into Smartlead, usually 3-step for cold and 4-step for warmer leads that came from linkedin engagement. send limits are 28-32 per inbox per day, nothing crazy. i used to push 45-50 per inbox and thought i was being efficient but all i was doing was burning domains. took me about 4 months and two clients complaining about deliverability before i figured that out. now i keep it conservative and just add more inboxes when volume needs to go up.

inboxes i get through Puzzle Inbox. nothing fancy to say about it, they work and the price is reasonable at around $3.50/inbox/mo when you buy in bulk. i rotate domains on a 3 week cycle meaning each domain gets 3 weeks active then 1 week rest. this keeps deliverability stable and ive been running this pattern for about 8 months now without any major issues.

wednesday is my least favorite day because thats when the ghosting hits hardest. i have a system where i track every discovery call booked, and wednesdays i follow up with anyone who had a great call the previous week but went silent. this is the most frustrating part of this job honestly. you get someone on a call, they say all the right things, they ask about pricing, they say "send me a proposal"... and then nothing. radio silence. ive started sending a 3-line followup on wednesday and then one more the following monday and after that i move on. chasing ghosts is a waste of time and energy. my close rate on discovery calls is around 22% and i think ghosting accounts for at least half the losses.

thursday is optimization day. i pull reply rates and positive reply rates from Smartlead for all 5 clients. anything below 1.8% reply rate after 500+ sends gets paused and rewritten. i look at which subject lines are pulling, which first lines are working, which offers are landing. one thing i do that most people skip is i track reply sentiment not just reply volume. a 4% reply rate means nothing if 3.5% of those are "remove me" or angry responses. i keep a simple spreadsheet for this, nothing elaborate.

friday is admin and prep. i invoice clients (all on retainer, $1500-2200/mo each depending on volume), i do inbox health checks, i warm up any new domains that need it. warmup takes about 14-18 days before i feel comfortable sending from a new inbox. i also use friday to do the Prospeo enrichment runs for the following weeks lists so monday i can jump straight into replies without waiting on data.

the thing nobody talks about with reply management at volume is that speed matters more than quality past a certain point. a mediocre reply sent in 20 minutes beats a perfect reply sent in 4 hours. i learned this the hard way when i was spending 3 minutes crafting each response and watching my booking rate sit at like 8%. now i spend maybe 45 seconds per reply and my booking rate from positive replies is closer to 31%. the people who are interested dont need to be convinced, they need to be moved to the next step fast.

some random stuff that doesnt fit anywhere. HubSpot is my CRM for 3 of the 5 clients, the other 2 use their own systems and i just export to them weekly. i dropped Clay about 5 months ago because at $149/mo i couldnt justify it when Prospeo handles the enrichment step fine for less. clay is powerful but for my volume and use case it was overkill. Expandi i use for one client who wants linkedin outreach layered on top, its fine but the proxy situation is annoying and it breaks more than id like.

anyway thats basically my week every week. its not glamorous. most of it is just moving fast on replies and keeping lists clean. the actual "strategy" part is maybe 15% of the work, the rest is execution and not letting things slip through cracks