41 meetings booked with lookalike company search

Sales targets are increasing, making it harder than ever to book meetings. The flood of generic emails, phone calls, and LinkedIn messages—often created with AI templates—means most outreach gets ignored.

My goal with this campaign was to test highly tailored messaging in combination with personalized videos and LinkedIn voice messages in our outbound campaign.

Social selling was key to our success. Through educational posts, personal videos, and product content, we had already built familiarity with many prospects before reaching out.

Right now, I am doing it manually and testing on a small batch of leads. The next step is to automate the process as much as possible without sacrificing the personal touch. With that in mind, I've partnered with the HeyReach team to create this content together and explore automation strategies.

This is how the process looks:

The first step is to build the foundation of the campaign, which is a targeted list of accounts and 2 to 3 go-to contacts in each company.

For that, I take our top 5 customers within the same industry and niche with detailed case studies and their testimonials. Then I generate a list of lookalike accounts, companies with the same profile, operating in the same industry and niche.

When the list of accounts is ready, I find 2 to 3 contacts on average in each company with their contact details.

I recorded a quick video to show you how this works in Ocean.

After preparing the lead list, I send connection requests without a note. From 173 requests, 97 people accepted and later engaged with my messages. Once someone accepts the connection, I follow up with a LinkedIn voice message.

Hi [NAME], I'll be bold as we are both in sales and I will go straight to the business.

[RELEVANT OBSERVATION], that comes with [WHAT THEY WANT TO AVOID IN CONNECTION TO THE OBSERVATION].

With [MY COMPANY] your sales team can [DREAM OUTCOME], resulting [DESIRABLE RESULTS].

Worth having a chat?

If there is no reply to the voice message, the next day, I send another message—this time a 2-minute video showcasing the platform tailored specifically to each company.

If a LinkedIn connection is not accepted, I send the video as the first touchpoint through email. I use HubSpot cadence to get it done.

It includes a brief written message (similar to the LinkedIn voice message content), but the main goal is to stand out by adding a personal touch with face and voice. This helps establish trust and rapport more quickly.

My ambition is to make the video in a way that takes the recipient the same amount of time to read text and watch video. With video, I can convey tone, emotion, and enthusiasm—elements that are often lost in written text.

A few days later, I send a follow-up email with another personalized video tailored specifically for their company.

Hi [NAME]

What’s the most powerful way to grow?

You don't want to [UNDESIRABLE STATUS]. You want to [DESIRABLE STATUS].

You can do that with [MY COMPANY]. Our AI Lookalike feature allows you to [DREAMOUTCOME].

This makes it so easy to [OVERCOMING STEPPING STONE TO REACH DREAM OUTCOME].**[VIDEO]

Your sales reps can do the same in a matter of minutes. [LOW-FRICTION CALL TO ACTION]

Best, Vicky

By this stage, I usually receive a reply. If not, I make a call to confirm they received the email and potentially get feedback on the video.

It is also a great opportunity to get some information to later follow up with even more tailoredemail.

During the conversation, I mention a few current customers who are in the same industry and niche.

If I didn’t manage to reach out through the call, the last action I would take in the cadence is tosend a final email.

Hi [NAME],

I wouldn't be so persistent if wouldn't truly believe you and your sales team can benefit from using [MY COMPANY] (says former BDR).

Here's how to [FUNCTION - END RESULT] in less than 5 min:

Step 1. [...]
Step 2. [...]
Step 3. [...]
Step 4. [...]
Step 5. [...]

Now, let’s put this into action [LOW-FRICTION CALL TO ACTION]

[CREATE URGENCY OR SCARCITY]

Best, Vicky

To summarize, this 3-step workflow combines LinkedIn and email outreach. Using this approach, I booked 41 meetings from 97 replies. While LinkedIn is my most effective channel, I also leverage other outreach methods like email to maximize our chances of connecting.

Side note: it is always a good idea to target several people from one company to increase the chances of outreach and the probability that if it's not relevant to one person, it might catch the attention of another.

How to automate this type of a workflow?

Vicky shared an excellent campaign for reaching out to prospects who match your ideal customer profile.

Building on her success, we developed an automated version of this GTM workflow, particularly since Ocean and HeyReach share many mutual users. Here's one of the ways to do it:

1. Find lookalike leads using Ocean ✅

2. Connect Ocean to Clay using their integration

3. Use Clay and GPT to clean data and personalize tags

As you know, possibilities with Clay are endless. To get the wheels in your head rolling, take Vicky’s [DREAM OUTCOME] tag in one of her messages as an example.

You could tell Clay to analyze their LinkedIn presence and website to extract information about their business goals, target audience, and similar details.

You can check this GTM workflow from Gunner who shared a bunch of GPT hacks for this.

After this process, each lead receives customized messaging, and the [DREAM OUTCOME] tag updates automatically across all LinkedIn messages and cold emails. As mentioned, the possibilities are endless.

4. Send leads to the HeyReach campaign to automate LinkedIn outreach

To replicate something similar to Vicky’s LinkedIn flow, here’s how this will look like.

Although I can’t automate voice notes, I could convert this into a text note and send a regular LinkedIn message.

I can also create multiple variations of it and see which one works best. As Alfie Solomons from Peaky Blinders once said “Intelligence is a very valuable thing innit, my friend”. This way, I’ll let the market tell me which copy works the best.

Personalizing videos at scale is where this challenge gets interesting. The way I'd approach it is to find common patterns between leads in my list. Say I group them into 3 buckets, where leads in each bucket share pain points and the way they solve them.

Then I could use a tool like Weezly to customize each video at scale. One video for each bucket, which I can then personalize on individual level. For example, use AI to change first names and company names in the video, or put their LinkedIn profile or website in the background of the video. You can totally automate this using workflows like this.

5. Use Smartlead for cold emails

If connection is not accepted, you could use Make or Zapier to send leads to Smartlead without dealing with situations where you’re sending duplicate messages to the same leads.

We use Smartlead as our preferred cold email tool. You obviously have many options at your diposal, but for us is Smartlead.