our dirty little outbound secret
HeyReach Debrief 👋
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Image HeyReach Debrief 👋 Hi LinkedIn operator! It’s HeyReach Debrief — the newsletter that tackles tough outbound dilemmas so you don’t have to. 😎 This one’s a bit different, though. I have a confession to make. Every company that sells an outbound tool has a dirty little secret, and ours was that for a while, we didn’t do outbound. In the early days, Ilija and I ran every campaign ourselves. We chased first replies and tried to get respected GTM operators to notice a brand-new tool. Back then outbound wasn’t a strategy, it was oxygen, and it worked. Then inbound took over. We brought in Vuk ( https://x.com/VukConfidential?utm_campaign=GTM+confession&utm_content=GTM+confession&utm_medium=email_action&utm_source=customer.io ) to help us build it when we were at $15K MRR. Twelve months later we crossed $2M ARR, thanks to word of mouth and using our brand as a moat. Somewhere between $500K and $1M, outbound stopped pulling its weight, so we paused it. But I always had a feeling that no matter how strong our inbound was, we couldn’t afford to skip outbound. A company selling an outbound tool that doesn’t do outbound is a gym owner who doesn’t lift. Two things happened next. First, Ilija, our CRO, ran an experiment in January 2025. We were getting 2,000–3,000 free trial signups a month, and he split them into two buckets. Self-serve leads went to marketing. Sales-led leads, segmented into three tiers, went to sales for a human touch. That split is the main reason we nearly doubled trial conversion, from 9% to 17%. Second, we brought in a Head of Sales to own the entire outbound motion. Nadja joined in Q2 2025 ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadjakomnenic?utm_campaign=GTM+confession&utm_content=GTM+confession&utm_medium=email_action&utm_source=customer.io ) and built two powerful funnels for us. The first was inbound-led outreach, built together with Vuk. With thousands of trials coming in every month, the two of them looked at everything around the trial: the people who showed up but didn’t convert, and the ones who’d been paying attention for months and never clicked. For example: * How many qualified website visitors considered a trial and bounced? * How many saw a LinkedIn post, nodded, and kept scrolling? * How many showed up to a webinar, took notes, and never opened the tool? And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Here’s one campaign. We co-hosted an event in Barcelona with Clay, Instantly, and HubSpot, where Nadja was speaking. On top of the marketing push, sales used outbound to get the right people in the room. Nadja sent 1,084 email invites and 152 LinkedIn messages. 198 people showed up, and 24 opportunities came out of the evening. Those deals have brought in $68,454 MRR so far, from a single event a few months ago. Ofc, we made many mistakes along the way. Our first attempt at qualifying companies matched job titles like “SDR,” and it filtered out exactly the GTM engineers we wanted. The second used LinkedIn department data and let in account managers who have never sent a cold message in their lives. We also sent agencies a polished, bullet-pointed email that flopped. A lowercase, “WhatsApp-style” message beat it easily. Once we fixed those, cold outbound at scale started paying off: * 94.2k+ emails sent * 3.58% reply rate (1.8k replies) * 13.89% positive reply rate (248 deal opportunities) That’s what this rebuild became: an outbound engine booking 36 meetings a month. Next week, Vuk and Nadja are going live to show you everything: our cold vs. warm numbers, workflows, templates, you name it. Then they’ll take your questions live, including the uncomfortable ones. Behind the Curtain of HeyReach’s Outbound Engine 📅 October 13 ⏰ 6 PM CET / 12 PM ET Register here → ( https://www.heyreach.io/webinars/behind-the-curtain-of-heyreachs-outbound-engine?utm_campaign=GTM+confession&utm_content=GTM+confession&utm_medium=email_action&utm_source=customer.io ) Can’t make it live? Register anyway and you’ll get the recording + some cool GTM resources Nadja and Vuk are prepping for you. That's a wrap for today. Happy hunting (ethically, of course), Nick ( https://x.com/nikolak47?utm_campaign=GTM+confession&utm_content=GTM+confession&utm_medium=email_action&utm_source=customer.io ), Co-Founder & CEO @ HeyReach Website ( https://www.heyreach.io/?utm_campaign=GTM+confession&utm_content=GTM+confession&utm_medium=email_action&utm_source=customer.io ) YouTube ( https://www.youtube.com/@heyreach?utm_campaign=GTM+confession&utm_content=GTM+confession&utm_medium=email_action&utm_source=customer.io ) X ( https://x.com/HeyReach_io?utm_campaign=GTM+confession&utm_content=GTM+confession&utm_medium=email_action&utm_source=customer.io ) To no longer receive these emails, unsubscribe ( https://track.customer.io/unsubscribe/dgSFzQsDANiECdeECQGhIMAB4UiXdBdlj2vv3ZY= ) here.
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- nse/heyreach/2026-10-09/3686
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- Nick from HeyReach · nick@heyreach-updates.com
- Sent
- 9 October 2026 · 13:00 UTC
