u/solemnly_gracious

exported my subscriptions last night because i had this nagging feeling i was bleeding money on tools i barely touch. turns out i was right about the bleeding part. figured id lay out what actually stuck after 2+ years of doing outbound as a solo growth consultant.

i run campaigns for 11 clients right now. some months its 11, some months its 7, thats the freelance life and if youve done it you know the feast or famine thing never fully goes away no matter how stable you think your pipeline is. one bad month where 3 clients churn and suddenly youre scrambling. anyway the stack matters because i cant afford bloat and i cant afford downtime.

FINDING LEADS

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the backbone. $99/mo and its the one thing i will never cut. i pull lists there first, filter by headcount, industry, recent job changes, whatever the client needs. for some verticals i supplement with Ocean.io which is decent for account level targeting when youre going after a specific ICP. its not cheap though, i think im on their $150/mo plan and honestly i only use it for maybe 4 of my 11 clients. the rest are fine with just Sales Nav.

i tried Lusha for a while, maybe 5 or 6 months last year. data was ok but the credits burned fast when youre pulling for multiple clients and i kept running into situations where id get a direct dial but the email was wrong. dropped it around february.

ENRICHMENT

this is where i spent the most time experimenting. Clay is powerful, i wont pretend otherwise. but at $149/mo on the plan i needed, plus credits burning through faster than expected, i couldnt justify it for my volume. maybe if i had 25+ clients or was running an agency it would make sense. for what i do, its overkill and the learning curve ate like two full weekends before i felt comfortable building workflows.

my actual process now is pretty boring. pull from Sales Nav, run through Prospeo for the email finding step, verify with Bouncer, load into my sending tool. thats it. i dont need a waterfall of 6 enrichment sources. for 80-85% of my lists thats enough to get clean emails and move on.

SENDING

i landed on Instantly about 14 months ago after bouncing between Reply.io and Smartlead. Reply.io was fine but the pricing kept creeping up and their UI felt like it was designed by committee. Smartlead i tested for maybe 3 weeks in mid 2024 and it worked but something about the deliverability reporting felt off, like the numbers were too optimistic compared to what i was seeing in actual replies.

Instantly at $97/mo for the growth plan does what i need. campaign management across clients, decent analytics, and the warmup is built in which saves me a separate tool. not perfect though. their support is slow, like genuinely 3-4 day response times sometimes, and the campaign builder has these little UX quirks that make me want to scream. like if you duplicate a campaign and edit the copy, sometimes it doesnt save the first time. small stuff but it adds up when youre managing 11 accounts.

INBOXES

this part i underestimated for way too long. for the first year i was convinced that 2-3 google workspace accounts per client was enough. turns out thats a great way to burn domains. i lost two client domains to spam blacklists before i figured out you need dedicated sending infrastructure thats completely separate from their main business domain.

now i use Maildoso for most clients. $3-4 per inbox per month, i run 3-5 inboxes per client depending on volume. so thats roughly $120-180/mo total across everyone. warmup takes about 18-21 days before i send anything real. some people say 14 days is fine and maybe it is but ive had better inbox placement giving it that extra week.

VERIFICATION

Bouncer. thats it. $40-60/mo depending on volume. catches enough bad emails to keep my bounce rate under 1.8% consistently. i tried running without verification for one client early on as a test and the bounce rate jumped to like 6.2% which tanked deliverability for that whole domain within a week. never again.

CRM

Pipedrive at $24/mo. its not fancy. it does contact management and pipeline tracking and thats all i need. tried Salesforce through a client once and it felt like driving a semi truck to the grocery store. Pipedrive is fine.

THE NUMBERS

total monthly spend across everything: roughly $680-750 depending on which month and how many Ocean.io credits i burn. thats across all 11 clients. my revenue sits around $18k/mo right now which is the highest its been, but 3 months ago it was $12k when i lost a couple accounts. feast and famine.

average reply rates across all clients land between 2.8% and 4.3% depending on the vertical. b2b saas prospects respond more than manufacturing. shocking i know. booking rate from reply to meeting is around 22-28% which my clients seem happy with.

if i added it all up wrong somewhere dont come for me, i did this at midnight after a long day. the point is you dont need 14 tools and $500/mo in Clay credits to run outbound that works. you need clean data, verified emails, enough inboxes to protect deliverability, and copy that doesnt read like it was written by chatgpt.

ok im done. back to feast mode while it lasts