u/Capable_Document3744

My SaaS has 4,000+ customers. And the product does what it says, pretty good actually.

And yet every few months I get on a call with someone who used one of those AI outreach tools, sent thousands of messages, and got nothing back. 

Here's what I've noticed after watching this happen for 5 years.

The people who are actually best at cold outreach, the ones running agencies that consistently get 40-70% reply rates, think most of the AI being built for this category is making it actively worse. 

Because these tools flood inboxes with generic messages, train buyers to ignore everything, and make it harder for everyone who's doing it properly.

What the best cold outreach agencies actually do looks nothing like what AI SDRs do.

They spend more time on targeting than on copy. They figure out a specific angle for a specific market rather than personalizing the same message a thousand different ways. They use Clay to build signal-based lists, Smartlead or Heyreach for sequencing, and increasingly Claude Code for custom campaign logic. When they're done, they might send 200 messages instead of 2,000, and they get more replies.

The intelligence in good outreach isn't in the automation layer. It's in the judgment that happens before the first message goes out; which segment, what angle, why this account is worth reaching right now.

That judgment is what none of the tools currently being built actually have. 

Every sequencer, every AI SDR, every agentic outreach platform executes whatever strategy you give it. My product does this too. Give it a bad strategy and it will execute that bad strategy perfectly, at scale, until the account runs out of leads to disappoint.

I've been watching this problem from close range for 5 years. And after being on more than 1800 sales calls where I kept seeing the same pattern, I started building a second product.

The idea is straightforward. 

Take how the best cold outreach agencies actually think: which segments they go after, what angles land, what a qualified reply looks like, and turn that into something AI can execute. So the strategy comes built inside the product, not something you figure out before you start.

It’s still early, I don't have any results to share yet. 

But if you've run into this problem from either side, I’m curious to know what you've tried.

A UK agency came in a couple of years ago with 5 seats. Standard white label deal. Their branding, their domain, their clients never knowing SalesRobot existed. We charged them $100/month white label fee plus $59/seat. Roughly $400 a month total.

They bundled us with GoHighLevel and sold the whole stack to their clients as a complete outbound system. Every new client they onboarded got LinkedIn automation included as part of the package. They grew quietly. We did nothing except keep the product running.

5 seats became 80 seats over the next 12 months.

At some point I found out they were doing $50,000 a month in revenue just from the SalesRobot white label.

We were charging them $400 a month.

I kept thinking about that gap.

They were building a $50K/month revenue line on our infrastructure and I had priced it like I was selling a $400 tool. Because that's exactly what I was doing, pricing on my cost. Seats, hosting, support. Not on their outcome.

Their outcome was a $50,000/month business. Mine was $400.

The mistake wasn't that we undercharged. The mistake was that I never asked what they were building before agreeing to a price. I assumed they were running a few campaigns for a handful of clients. I never thought to ask what the white label was actually worth to their business.

When someone asks for a white label deal or any kind of custom arrangement, the first question shouldn't be "how much does this cost us to provide." 

It should be "what is this worth to them." What would they pay to build it themselves? What would they lose if they had to go without it? What are they planning to charge their clients and how many clients do they expect to bring on?

That one conversation changes the entire pricing discussion.

White label resellers are under NDA so I can't share specifics, but the pattern has repeated. 

Agencies building real businesses on top of a product priced like a SaaS subscription. The tool costs don't change. The value to the agency is completely different.

The lesson for me, I guess, is to charge a more fair value.

How do you guys think about pricing for such custom deals?

I run SalesRobot, a LinkedIn automation tool at $75K MRR.

Here's the manual method I started with, why it wasn't enough, and what I built instead.

First, the manual method.

Find a LinkedIn post where your ICP is already engaging. Could be a competitor's post, an influencer in your niche, or a viral thread about the exact problem you solve.

Paste the URL into SalesRobot. It scrapes every commenter and imports them as a campaign audience directly. That's it.

A comment on a relevant post tells you more about buying intent than any filter Sales Navigator has.

The reply rates show it clearly:

Cold outbound on a standard Sales Nav list: 28% acceptance, 43% reply rate. 

The same message sent to a comment scraped list: 56-70% acceptance, 40-47% reply rate. 

But here’s the problem I was facing with doing it only manually.

You're dependent on finding relevant posts at the right time. Plus you're also capped at whatever posts happen to go viral in your niche that week.

So I built the automated version of it.

98.3% of people who visit the SalesRobot website leave without filling out a form. I was losing almost all of them.

RB2B identifies those visitors by name, company, email, and LinkedIn profile. Cost: $179/month.

It sends the data to a Zapier webhook. Zapier: $49/month.

Clay enriches the profile. If I only have email, it finds the LinkedIn URL. If I only have LinkedIn, it finds the email.

A code step then rolls a five-sided dice and randomly assigns the lead to one of 5 active SDR accounts so the load distributes evenly.

SalesRobot enrolls them automatically into the assigned outreach sequence.

Total tool cost: $228/month.

The sequence looks like this: 

Step 1 : blank LinkedIn connection request 

Step 2 : email: "I noticed you visited our website. Just looking, or do you want to evaluate SalesRobot?" 

Step 3 : LinkedIn message with the same qualifying question after they connect 

Step 4 : LinkedIn message with trust signals 

Step 5 : email with a personalized image

About 1,000 net new leads per SDR account per month. 16% net reply rate from complete strangers. The whole system generates $22,000/month in pipeline at $228/month in tool costs.

Both methods run simultaneously. Post comment scraping finds people engaging with relevant content right now. RB2B finds people already on my website right now. Together they cover the two warmest signals available without buying a bigger database or running higher volume.

If I was starting today: set up the RB2B workflow on day one. It takes an afternoon and runs itself after that. While it's running, spend 20 minutes a day finding posts in your niche where your ICP is commenting and scrape those lists manually.

The best leads aren't in a database. They're already telling you who they are by what they engage with.

I run SalesRobot, a LinkedIn automation tool at $75K MRR.

Here's the manual method I started with, why it wasn't enough, and what I built instead.

First, the manual method.

Find a LinkedIn post where your ICP is already engaging. Could be a competitor's post, an influencer in your niche, or a viral thread about the exact problem you solve.

Paste the URL into SalesRobot. It scrapes every commenter and imports them as a campaign audience directly. That's it.

A comment on a relevant post tells you more about buying intent than any filter Sales Navigator has.

The reply rates show it clearly:

Cold outbound on a standard Sales Nav list: 28% acceptance, 43% reply rate. 

The same message sent to a comment scraped list: 56-70% acceptance, 40-47% reply rate. 

But here’s the problem I was facing with doing it only manually.

You're dependent on finding relevant posts at the right time. Plus you're also capped at whatever posts happen to go viral in your niche that week.

So I built the automated version of it.

98.3% of people who visit the SalesRobot website leave without filling out a form. I was losing almost all of them.

RB2B identifies those visitors by name, company, email, and LinkedIn profile. Cost: $179/month.

It sends the data to a Zapier webhook. Zapier: $49/month.

Clay enriches the profile. If I only have email, it finds the LinkedIn URL. If I only have LinkedIn, it finds the email.

A code step then rolls a five-sided dice and randomly assigns the lead to one of 5 active SDR accounts so the load distributes evenly.

SalesRobot enrolls them automatically into the assigned outreach sequence.

Total tool cost: $228/month.

The sequence looks like this: 

Step 1 : blank LinkedIn connection request 

Step 2 : email: "I noticed you visited our website. Just looking, or do you want to evaluate SalesRobot?" 

Step 3 : LinkedIn message with the same qualifying question after they connect 

Step 4 : LinkedIn message with trust signals 

Step 5 : email with a personalized image

About 1,000 net new leads per SDR account per month. 16% net reply rate from complete strangers. The whole system generates $22,000/month in pipeline at $228/month in tool costs.

Both methods run simultaneously. Post comment scraping finds people engaging with relevant content right now. RB2B finds people already on my website right now. Together they cover the two warmest signals available without buying a bigger database or running higher volume.

If I was starting today: set up the RB2B workflow on day one. It takes an afternoon and runs itself after that. While it's running, spend 20 minutes a day finding posts in your niche where your ICP is commenting and scrape those lists manually.

The best leads aren't in a database. They're already telling you who they are by what they engage with.

Hi everyone, 

I paid LinkedIn influencers $500 each to post content in our niche. Here's everything that happened. 

First, why LinkedIn influencers at all.

LinkedIn B2B influencers are genuinely underpriced right now. There's nowhere near the demand there is on Instagram or TikTok, but the audience quality is higher because it's B2B and these people have budgets. 

$500 for one post to an engaged audience of founders and sales leaders is not a lot of money if your product has real LTV. You close one customer and you've already broken even.

How I found them.

I didn't look for influencers with the biggest follower counts. I looked at who my ICP was already following and engaging with. The signal to look at was whether their comment sections looked like my customer base: real questions, people tagging colleagues, actual conversation about outreach problems.

I got this wrong on most of the first batch.

Pod engagement looks completely different from real engagement, but you don't always see it until after you've paid. Same 10-15 accounts cycling through with emoji reactions on every post, no real replies. 

Out of the first 11, most had some level of pod activity I only discovered after the fact.

One took the money and ghosted us. The team had to follow up aggressively before they posted at all.

That's the part nobody tells you about influencer campaigns. The vetting process is the whole game. If you get it wrong, you're just paying for fake reach.

How I structured each campaign.

Each post was about a LinkedIn outreach problem my ICP deals with every day. None of them mentioned SalesRobot directly. The goal was comments, not impressions. When someone comments on a post about a problem you solve, they've just raised their hand.

I asked each influencer to reply to every comment with a link to a free resource, a short Notion guide on the exact problem the post covered. A genuinely useful doc. People are lazy. If it's not a direct click, very few will go searching for your product name on their own. The Notion doc was the click. SalesRobot was the next logical step inside it.

What I did that most brands don't.

Most influencer campaigns stop at the post. Someone sees it, clicks the link, maybe signs up. That's the whole funnel. The conversion rate on that path is low because there's no follow-up.

I scraped every single commenter from the posts that worked and enrolled them into outreach sequences via SalesRobot. Our AI Appointment Setter reached out to each one, followed up across multiple touchpoints, handled replies, and booked calls.

For context, cold outbound running in the same period with the identical message and identical ICP was getting 28% acceptance and 43% reply rate.

Here's what the comment lists got from three campaigns that worked:

Influencer 1: 88 connections accepted (61%), 42 replies (47%) 

Influencer 2: 97 accepted (56%), 44 replies (45%) 

Influencer 3: 47 accepted (70%), 19 replies (40%)

Total MRR closed from all three: $7K+

Influencer 3 had the smallest audience of the three and the highest acceptance rate at 70%. Their followers were the tightest ICP match. Follower count mattered much less than audience relevance.

I'm now at 5-6 influencers who consistently deliver decent results now. Getting there cost me bad spend on pod accounts, one ghost who needed chasing, and a lot of manual vetting I should have done upfront.

If you're running influencer campaigns and not scraping the commenters for follow-up outreach, you're leaving most of the value on the table. The post gets you the list.

What you do with the list is the actual campaign.

At $500 a post the math makes sense for anything with meaningful LTV. 

Happy to answer questions.