Over the last few years I've seen thousands of outbound GTM strategies.
Some from £5M ARR startups.
Some from £500M ARR enterprises.
Some written on a whiteboard in 20 minutes.
Some written in a 60-slide deck nobody will ever open again.
And almost every one that worked had the same four things in place.
Almost every one that didn't was missing at least one of them.
So I figured I'd just write about it.
Four rules. Non-negotiable.
- ICP. Who are we targeting?
Know exactly who your ideal customer is.
Not "B2B SaaS". Not "mid-market". Not "anyone with a sales team".
Specific. Title. Industry. Headcount. Stack. Stage. Buying triggers.
Without this, nothing else you do is worth doing.
Your copy lands flat. Your ads burn money. Your reps chase the wrong accounts.
Where does your ICP hang out? What do they read? What language do they use to describe their own problem?
If you can't answer those three in one sentence, you don't have an ICP yet. You have a guess.
- Offering. What are we giving them?
You need to be offering something that's valuable to their specific position and their specific pain.
Not your product. Your product is the how.
The offering is the outcome they're trying to buy.
If they feel like you understand them, they begin to trust you.
That's sales 101 and it hasn't changed in 30 years.
A buyer doesn't book a call because your subject line was clever.
They book because the message in front of them named the problem they're already trying to solve.
- Channels. How do we reach them?
Without a channel, you can't tell them about anything.
Email. Phone. LinkedIn. Direct mail still works in some markets.
The size of your TAM should shape this.
Large TAM (5,000+ accounts): more automated. Email-led. Programmatic. Volume with quality controls.
Small TAM (under 500 accounts): manual. Deep research per account. Email plus phone plus LinkedIn on every priority target. ABM-style.
Trying to run the small-TAM motion across 10,000 accounts burns your team out in a month.
Trying to run the large-TAM motion across 200 accounts wastes the accounts and tells the buyer you don't know them.
Pick the motion that matches the list.
- RevOps. How do we operate?
The part most teams skip.
Having good systems to make outbound easy and consistent for your team is what separates a one-month spike from a year of compounding pipeline.
How are we updating the CRM?
How do reps get fresh lead lists every week without building them by hand?
What's the daily cadence? Who calls when? Who follows up when?
What's our SLA on inbound? Who routes the lead and how fast?
If you can't answer these, you haven't built outbound.
You've built a sequence and called it a strategy.
The RevOps layer is the difference between "we did outbound this quarter" and "outbound is now a system that produces meetings on a predictable cadence".
- Bonus rule. Be open-minded about the approach.
Something that worked in 2023 might not work in 2026.
Cold email that booked meetings two years ago is in spam folders today.
LinkedIn DMs that converted last year are getting ignored now.
The channels move. The buyers move. The signals move.
Try everything. Measure honestly. Act on the data, not the slide deck.
I share these because the four rules above are the bar.
If you don't have ICP, offering, channels, and RevOps locked down, you're not running outbound.
You're running an experiment and calling it a strategy.
Tom