Engineering Outbound Sales

Table of Contents

• Traditional Outbound Sales Flow
• Why Has Outbound Sales Become an Engineering Domain?
• From Human-Centric to Automated Pipelines
• Problems with the Automated Pipeline
• Automating Prospecting with AI Agents
• Implications for Leaders
• Conclusion

Traditional Outbound Sales Flow

Traditional outbound sales typically follow these steps:

1. Lead collection: Gather data from LinkedIn, company websites, news sources, etc.
2. Data organization: Structure the collected information in a spreadsheet.
3. Personalized cold email creation and sending: Conduct research for each lead to send a customized message.
4. Meetings and closing deals: Engage with clients and finalize contracts.

The first three steps before the meeting are known as prospecting, the key phase of finding new potential customers. However, due to the repetitive and manual nature of the tasks, they are often handled by junior sales representatives and require a significant time investment to generate meaningful results.

Why Has Outbound Sales Become an Engineering Domain?

The main strategies for prospecting are generally divided into two approaches:

1. High-targeted: Reach out to 10-20 highly qualified leads with hyper-personalized cold emails or calls.
2. Spray and Pray: Contact over 1,000 leads with standardized cold emails or calls.

While the “Spray and Pray” method can still be effective, its lack of personalization limits open and reply rates. Ideally, the strengths of both methods would be combined—targeting a large number of likely buyers with personalized outreach. However, manually handling this scale is unrealistic, and increasing headcount poses financial challenges.

To overcome these limitations, companies are redefining prospecting as an engineering problem and are building automated pipelines using external SaaS tools.

From Human-Centric to Automated Pipelines

Modern prospecting typically consists of four stages, which can be structured into an automated pipeline as follows:

1. Sales strategy: Use Perplexity.ai to analyze target customers and define the ideal customer profile (ICP).
2. Lead discovery: Use tools like HyperSales to collect potential leads and send them to a CRM.
3. Personalization and message creation: Use Crunchbase to generate customized messages for each lead.
4. Campaign execution and management: Use Spread to send cold emails to each lead.

Combining the right tools for each step is now a trend in modern outbound sales.

Problems with the Automated Pipeline

Although attractive, building an automated pipeline comes with challenges. Currently, there are hundreds to thousands of specialized SaaS tools for each stage of prospecting, making it difficult to select the right ones. Moreover, each tool often requires complex initial configuration and integration, which demands time, technical knowledge, and skilled personnel. Even then, some tasks still require manual intervention.

To address these challenges, companies either hire experienced experts or go through trial and error to find the optimal toolset. However, for early-stage startups or companies with rigid sales cultures, setting up such automation pipelines can be difficult.

Automating Prospecting with AI Agents

A promising technology addressing these issues is AI Agent-powered software. AI Agents use multiple large language models (LLMs) working together to handle complex tasks. They can even interact with external services (e.g., LinkedIn, Salesforce) without human input, offering immense potential for automating prospecting.

Currently, these AI agents are limited to specific functionalities, but in the future, we can expect them to design the entire automation pipeline, execute all prospecting tasks autonomously, and continuously optimize the pipeline based on sales performance. This suggests that the nature of prospecting work itself will shift toward overseeing AI agents, rather than manual execution.

Implications for Leaders

The sales paradigm is changing. Rather than simply adding more headcount, focusing on system design and automation is becoming the key to competitiveness. In this rapidly evolving era of AI, leaders must also rethink how they structure and operate their sales teams.

Conclusion

The success of outbound sales today hinges on building an efficient prospecting pipeline. Only companies that move away from traditional manual methods and adopt automated systems will achieve sustainable results. If you’re unsure where to start, begin with small tools. Experimenting with AI Agent-based solutions is also a great way to prepare for the future.