AI-native Outbound OS for Sales Teams and GTM Engineers Spend less time clicking, more time closing.
smartlead.ai
Joined July 2022
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"Cold calling is dead." We hear it all the time.
We disagree.
Calling without context is dead.
That's why SmartDialer brings phone calls directly into your outreach sequence.
So when it's time to call, your reps already know the full story:
✅ Every email sent
✅ Every open
✅ Every reply
Better context. Better conversations.
Try SmartDialer and see what's changed👇
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The biggest billboards in San Francisco rent for $200-250K a month.
The maths is brutal.
Most barely drive any attributable leads.
But I spoke to a startup that recently CRUSHED with a billboard + poster campaign.
@smartlead_ai ran ads in New York, SF, Miami, London, and Sydney - the result:
→ 2M+ organic impressions.
→ Direct traffic up 30%.
→ Branded search up 43%.
→ 6,000 ICP conversations.
The playbook is to optimise for virality:
→ Don’t worry about who sees it and signs up.
→ Worry about who sees it and shares it online.
(Full breakdown of the campaign below 👇)
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Want Claude to flag which sending mailboxes need attention before your next campaign goes live?
Connect it to Smartlead first.
With Smartlead MCP, Claude can pull live data from your account to check mailbox health, review campaign performance, and spot leads who replied but are still in a sequence.
Here’s how:
/1 Start with a paid Smartlead plan, Claude Desktop, and Node.js LTS. Node.js lets Claude run the Smartlead MCP server locally.
/2 Grab your Smartlead API key from Settings → Integrations → API Keys. Keep it private and use it in your local config file.
/3 Open claude_desktop_config.json and add the Smartlead config from the guide. If you already use another MCP server, add Smartlead inside the existing mcpServers section.
/4 Fully quit and reopen Claude Desktop. Once it’s back open, check that the Smartlead tools show up.
/5 Run your first check. ask Claude, “Check all my connected Smartlead email accounts and flag any that have disconnected or have warmup issues.”
/6 Once that works, try a question with a time window. Ask for your top 5 campaigns by reply rate over the last 30 days, or check which leads replied in the last 7 days and are still active in a sequence.
Get the config and file paths for Mac and Windows smartlead.ai/blog/smartlead-…
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“getting banned by LinkedIn would be a nightmare for a LinkedIn outreach company.”
you'd think so.
but when LinkedIn banned @nikolak47 profile, @heyreach_io grew by $2M that same month.
today, HeyReach has grown to $18M+ ARR and 7,500+ customers.
But getting there wasn't exactly smooth.
We sat down with Nick, Co-founder & CEO of HeyReach, and a few things from his journey really stood out:
- they launched HeyReach for free. 200 people signed up, but only one became a paying customer.
- they spent 6 months stuck at $8K MRR. Things started changing when they focused on lead gen agencies.
- they still use a churn spreadsheet to figure out what to improve in the product.
- every revenue milestone brought a new set of problems, from $0 to $1M, $5M, $10M and beyond.
- and despite all that growth, word of mouth is still their #1 growth channel.
there's a lot to learn from how Nick built HeyReach after his first VC-funded company failed.
full conversation with Nick on Cold to Close S2 EP07 below 👇
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VISBL generated $85M+ in client pipeline from 500+ cold email campaigns in 2 years.
here’s how Zach Getrost and his team built their outbound system on Smartlead:
1. they built their own prospect database
VISBL built a database of roughly 30M businesses, with data down to the owner level.
One of their early campaigns started with a specific question: who already buys from our client’s competitors?
they built lists around those buyers and put the client’s offer in front of them. That gave the team a clear reason to reach out to the people on the list.
2. they created 15,000 to 20,000 email variations from one template
VISBL used spin syntax in Smartlead to vary the wording across sends.
The prospect list determined who got the email. Spin syntax gave the team a way to change how the message was worded across a large campaign.
3. they kept testing after campaigns went live
VISBL ran A/B tests continuously and checked deliverability daily.
They also set up sending domains and inboxes in each client’s name. The client got to keep them.
4. they gave each campaign a clear owner
As VISBL took on more clients, the team needed to know who was responsible for each campaign and give clients a way to see their own results.
They used Smartlead’s team management to assign campaigns to individual team members and client access to give each client visibility into their campaigns.
5. they sent qualified replies straight to Slack
Smartlead’s AI reply categorization helped VISBL sort incoming replies. Qualified leads were then pushed to Slack so the team could follow up quickly.
At 500+ campaigns, that workflow matters. A reply can come in while the person handling it is working on a different client’s campaign.
6. they connected the tools they already used
VISBL used the Smartlead API to connect its outbound workflows with tools like n8n and Supabase.
The API became enough of a foundation that Zach went on to build a second company using Smartlead’s backend.
7. the results
→ 500+ campaigns launched
→ 250,000+ replies generated for clients
→ $85M+ in client pipeline
here’s what their highest-reply-rate campaign looked like:
→ 1,667 leads contacted
→ 346 replies (20.8% reply rate)
→ 63 positive replies
the biggest takeaway:
look at what VISBL set up on both sides of the send. Before an email went out, the team knew who it wanted to reach and what offer to put in front of them. When a qualified reply came in, it went straight to the people who could follow up.
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We asked Dwayne Clarke from OpenSend about Smartlead.
And well, we couldn't be happier with what he had to say. 👀
Don't just take our word for it. Hear it from Dwayne! 💜
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While we’re in morning standup, Smartlead handles about 2.5M requests.
At peak, that’s 1,500 requests a second.
Zoom out 👇
→ 106M API requests on a weekday
→ 90M API requests on a weekend day
→ 250K+ requests a day through Smartlead’s MCP for ChatGPT and Claude, with a 97% success rate
That took late nights working through edge cases, rewrites to handle 20x the load, and a lot of small decisions about what to fix before it became a problem.
Here’s what customers building their outbound stack on Smartlead had to say about the API.
Kudos to the team behind it. 🙌
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for anyone who wants to dig deeper, full report here ↓
smartlead.ai/benchmarks/stat…
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We've posted on LinkedIn every day for 400+ days.
It took months before it even brought in a single client…
And that's just how content works, it's one of the slowest ways to get clients.
Aaron Ross built the outbound team at Salesforce, and in his book Predictable Revenue he sorted every way of getting clients into 3 buckets: seeds, nets and spears.
Seeds are the clients that grow from something you planted, so referrals, content and SEO.
Nets are the marketing that catches a lot of people at once - things like ads and sponsorships.
Spears are when you pick the company you want and go straight to them, so cold email, LinkedIn messages and cold calls.
Seeds cost you time, nets cost you money, and spears cost you the work of picking those companies one by one.
And only 1 of the 3 can get you sales calls as early as this month.
So Wesley made a video going over all 3, what each costs in time and money, and which one you should start with this week.
Here's what's inside:
✅ What 10 inboxes sending 250 emails a day actually costs you per month
✅ Why you can never send cold email from your own company domain
✅ The difference in conversion between calling someone who replied and someone cold
✅ How to know whether you're ready to run outbound at all
Watch the full video here 👉 youtu.be/NWEL3WNYDhg
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Finding leads, setting up infrastructure, writing emails, managing deliverability, tracking results.
There's a lot that goes into outbound.
With SmartServices, our team handles it all inside your Smartlead workspace.
While you can focus on growing your business.
Book a strategy call now → smartlead.ai/managed-outboun…
Outbound Lead Generation: Your complete guide to understanding the costs, steps, strategies, and when it actually makes sense for your business 👇
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Outbound Lead Generation: Your complete guide to understanding the costs, steps, strategies, and when it actually makes sense for your business 👇
Most sales teams are leaving meetings on the table because they're afraid to pick up the phone.
@MattLucero_ , Founder of Anevo Marketing, explains how calling leads who've already replied to your cold emails can almost double your booked meetings.
🎙️ Cold to Close S2 E05 is LIVE!
full episode 👇
No more silent failures.
Which means no more finding out a week later that a lead’s reply never made it to your CRM. 😬
Until now, there wasn’t an easy way to catch that inside Smartlead.
So we built Webhook Activity, and it’s live now.
Here’s what you can do with it:
→ See every webhook Smartlead sends, and whether it actually went through
→ Find out why one failed, explained in plain words
→ Resend a failed one yourself, with one click
And if an endpoint keeps failing for 7 days, we’ll switch it off and email you, so it doesn’t keep failing quietly in the background.
Take a look under Settings → Webhook → Activity 👀
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Some things are just too good to keep to ourselves.
Like what Krista Poth from Limadata had to say about Smartlead. 🥹
But we'll let you hear it from her.
Thanks for the love, Krista! 💜
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SF might have more AI billboards than coffee shops.
And they all sound the same.
Only one made me stop.
@Smartlead didn’t explain anything, just put up a live counter of emails being sent.
Lesson for founders: you don’t need a better description.
You need one real number.
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Nice work, @ankitLeadplus! 🙌
31 responses from 936 prospects!!
the whole campaign was created by Claude.
i didn’t touch a thing.
Claude did:
> Messaging
> ICP filtering
> Email enrichment
> Person enrichment
> Company enrichment
> Pushed leads to Smartlead
This is how GTM should be.
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GTM builders, assemble! 🫡
Calling all GTM engineers, growth marketers, and creators in London!
I'm co-hosting a GTM engineering hackathon powered by @smartlead_ai
We're challenging you to build the loop that turns content engagement into booked conversations.
Tue 10 Nov, 6-9:30pm
Encode Hub, Shoreditch (@encodeclub)
Free
Interested? Sign up here: luma.com/y3vajpmz
