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Hey, I’m back! I’ve been onboarding two new customers and working with their outbound teams.
This weekend, I’ll be posting a new format: How I build an outbound strategy → execution in 60 minutes for a B2B SaaS product. Paid members will get the prompts I used to build this.
A few weeks ago, I watched an SDR team waste three months targeting the wrong prospects.
Built a list of 500+ prospects in Sales Nav.
Personas: Marketing leaders.
Hit send.
The result? Low reply rate.
That’s when they hired me to fix their messaging.
But I didn’t start with their emails. I started with their list.
Before I even looked at a single subject line or value prop, I asked: “Show me your account list.”
Here’s what I found: Only 20% of their list worked at ICP accounts.
They had marketing leaders at B2C brands. All the right titles. All the wrong companies.
The problem wasn’t the message. It was who they were sending it to.
They started with personas and never picked their accounts first. I could have spent weeks A/B testing subject lines, rewriting copy, and adding more personalization. It wouldn’t have mattered.
You can’t message your way out of a targeting problem.
This is a pattern I still see in 2025.
The diagnosis? They said: “Cold outreach is dead.”
The reality? Their process was broken.
Here’s the thing most outbound teams get backwards:
They’re still doing lead-based outreach in a world that requires account-based thinking.
They’re wasting hours hunting for personalization on LinkedIn profiles, looking for college info and podcast mentions, when their personas aren’t even active on LinkedIn.
Security leaders? Not posting thought leadership.
Data leaders? Not sharing personal stories.
SMB founders? Running businesses, not building personal brands.
So you waste 5 minutes per lead finding nothing useful. Multiply that by 500 prospects. That’s 40+ hours of research that yields terrible targeting.
If you can’t answer “Why this company?” in one sentence or build lists based on titles, you’re doing lead-based outreach. And it’s killing your pipeline.
The Account-Based Framework
The fix isn’t working harder. It’s reordering your process.
Accounts first.
Personas second.
Not the other way around. Let me show you exactly how this works and why it changes everything.
Step 1: Pick Your Accounts First (Not Your Personas)
This is where most teams go wrong from line one.
Instead of searching “VP of Marketing” and adding 500 people to a list, you start by defining your ideal customer profile at the company level.
Build your target account list first. Start with 50-100 companies max. Get specific.
Why this matters: A Marketing Leader at your ICP company has the same problems you solve. A Marketing Leader at a random company you found on LinkedIn? Completely different world.
Step 2: Layer in Personas (3-5 Per Account)
Now, and only now, do you add personas.
For each target account, identify 3-5 people in the buying committee:
VP Marketing
Head of Revenue Operations
CRO
CEO (for smaller companies)
Director of Sales Enablement
Step 3: Research at the Account Level (Not the Lead Level)
This is where the magic of the account-based approach happens.
Instead of trying to find 3 unique personalization points for every individual prospect (which doesn’t exist for 90% of your prospects), you research the company once and apply those insights across all personas.
Look for digital breadcrumbs:
Job postings → Hiring 5 sales reps signals growth challenges
Tech stack changes → Migrated from X to Y indicates pain with old solution
Product launches → New feature means they’re investing in that area
G2 reviews → Real customer complaints = pain points
Compliance changes → New regulations = urgent problems (especially for security/finance personas)
Annual report → sharing strategic initiatives = company focus
Spend 10 minutes on the company. Build a point of view. Then customize it slightly for each persona’s role.
Example:
You find that Acme Corp just posted 3 SDR roles and their Head of Sales complained on a podcast about pipeline inconsistency.
Email to VP Sales: Focus on pipeline generation challenges
Email to CRO: Focus on scaling the sales org
Email to RevOps: Focus on process and data consistency
Same account insight. Different angles. All relevant.
Why This Works for Non-LinkedIn-Active Personas
Here’s what nobody talks about: Most personas aren’t LinkedIn power users.
If your ICP is technical CTOs, security leaders, or SMB founders, you’ll find NOTHING on their LinkedIn:
Last post: 2 years ago
No Bio
No articles, no comments, no breadcrumbs
Persona-level research yields nothing. But company-level signals are everywhere.
The CTO isn’t posting, but the company just raised $20M and is hiring 10 engineers. That’s your in.
The SMB founder has 3 LinkedIn connections, but their company has 47 one-star Google reviews about slow customer support. That’s your opening.
Account-based works BETTER when personas are quiet online.
Let’s get cooking!
See you in the next newsletter.
👨🍳 Elric
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