VP Sales is the most email-fatigued ICP in B2B SaaS. SecondBody had tried two agencies before us: one burned through 30,000 contacts in 90 days with generic spray-and-pray, the other booked 4 meetings total in 3 months and charged $4,500 per month for them. Reply rates were stuck below 1.8%. The product was strong, the founder could close, but the top of the funnel was completely broken. They were spending $9K per month on outbound with nothing to show for it.
We rebuilt the targeting from scratch. Instead of pulling VP Sales at mid-market SaaS companies by title and company size, we built signal-based lists targeting only VPs at companies that had hired 3 or more new AEs in the past 60 days. That hiring velocity is a reliable indicator of ramp problems and coaching needs. We ran 12 dedicated sending domains with full SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication, sent approximately 1,200 emails per month across 3 distinct sequences, and A/B tested every variable weekly. Case-study-led email copy, leading with a named result rather than a pain point, outperformed pain-point copy by 2x. We also layered in LinkedIn connection requests to the same contacts 48 hours after the first email, which lifted overall reply rates by 0.9 percentage points. By month 4, we had a repeatable system: 7 to 9 qualified meetings per month at a cost per meeting under $200.
Key Insight: Hiring velocity as a targeting signal produced 2.4x the reply rate versus generic title and company-size filters. The signal made the outreach timely. When a VP Sales just hired 5 new reps, a coaching solution email is not a cold pitch. It is a conversation they are already having internally. By month 6, SecondBody was closing deals from outbound at a 22% meeting-to-opportunity rate, and outbound had become their primary revenue channel.
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