By Mishti Sharma, Eric Nowoslawski, and Team Clay ✨

<aside> 💡 If you’re a B2B business looking to run smart, technical prospecting campaigns, you’re in the right place.

Running winning cold email campaigns, in 2023, is all about using smart sales technology to personalize your outbounding at scale.

That means using AI, data scrapers, and other tools to automate (and massively boost responses to) your campaigns. The best sales teams of the future will automate writing emails—and let their SDRs focus on higher-leverage work instead.

This is the guide we wish we had when we were learning about sales prospecting. It’s meant to help anyone from first-time founders to sales agency owners run smart, technical email campaigns.

You’ll learn how to:

• Set up a modern sales tech stack
• Use deep targeting to hone in on good leads
• Use AI to write personalized emails that boost response rates
• ….and more!

We draw upon our experience sending millions of prospecting emails, running hours of demos, closing deals, and learning from the world’s best sales leaders.

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How to use this guide

To get started, just skip to whichever section feels relevant. If you’re a founder who has never set up an early sales motion, you might benefit from each part. If you’re a sales agency leader who’s looking to boost existing campaign response rates using never-before-possible personalizations, focus on that section.

Skip around:

📍 [You’re here] Homepage: Start here!

Assess your B2B sales prospecting level

How to set up smart B2B sales prospecting tools

How to identify your target customers

Cold email templates for crafting effective messages

10 creative personalizations that boost response rates

Demo, qualify, and close deals

Acknowledgements

[Bonus: Set up your outbound process with Clay!]

If you need to be convinced to start prospecting, read this—

Prospecting via cold email is the most scalable, time effective, and predictable way for most B2B businesses with substantial contract values to grow. Why?

→ You only need one person to do it: With the right tech stack, all you need to run an entire company’s cold email process is one person with smart marketing skills.

→ It’s the cheapest, fastest sales channel to scale: Prospecting channels like phone calls and social media DMs are more expensive, time consuming, and harder to automate.