How QuotaPath Built a High-Performing Outbound Engine, Without an SDR Team
What if you could build pipeline without ever hiring a sales development rep? That's exactly what Ryan Milligan and his team at QuotaPath accomplished. At QuotaPath, Milligan developed a method to run outbound campaigns without a single SDR, generating real pipeline without the overhead of a traditional outbound sales team.
In this article, I’m breaking down how they did it, why it works, and how early-stage founders can borrow the same playbook to drive outbound pipeline without the cost and complexity of an SDR team.
The Problem: When Hiring SDRs Doesn’t Make Sense
I talk to early-stage founders all the time, and they often ask me: “When should we actually invest in SDRs?” And honestly? The answer is rarely straightforward. And it’s possible that the annual contract value means that hiring an SDR team might never make sense. I've seen plenty of companies burn through cash trying to build outbound teams when the math simply doesn't add up.
“Our customers are upper SMB through the mid-market,” Ryan said. “Our ACV is in that range. The cost of an SDR relative to our ACV and win rate is probably not justifiable.”
They had a choice: either force-fit an expensive SDR model into their business or find a different way to build pipeline.
They went with option two.
The Solution: The SDR Team of Zero
Instead of hiring a team of SDRs, QuotaPath built a smart, lean outbound engine that’s completely automated but still human where it counts.
The foundation of their approach is something Ryan calls warm outbound. They only reach out to people who already know about QuotaPath or have interacted with the product in the past.
“We have a big body of people who know or have interacted with QuotaPath in some way,” Ryan explained. “And we just constantly tap back into that group.”
The Playbook: How They Did It
Here’s exactly how they built their human-optional outbound machine.
Step 1: Identify Your Warm Prospect Pools
The first step is zeroing in on warm leads — those who already know and have some understanding of the company. For QuotaPath, that includes:
- Past admins and reps who’ve changed jobs
- Free trial users who didn’t convert
- Closed-lost deals
- Website visitors and content downloaders
Step 2: Enrich & Update the Lists
Once they have their list, they run it through Clay to update and enrich the data. Clay is a one-to-many enrichment service that queries more than 100 different data providers simultaneously.
Ryan explained how it works: “You load a CSV with first name, last name, company name, and email. Clay finds their LinkedIn profile, checks if they still work there, and if they don’t, it’ll try to get their new email at their new company.”
Clay lets you enrich data across multiple platforms using a flexible credits model—no need to negotiate separate contracts with each vendor.
That gives them current, accurate data, so their outreach is relevant. It can also help to disqualify people who may have been relevant leads in the past. For example, if Clay identifies that a former QuotaPath admin has moved into a different, non-commission role at the same company, they won’t send an email to that person. But, if Clay shows that a former QuotaPath admin is now a sales manager at a new company, they’ll receive an outbound email.
Step 3: Personalization That Actually Matters
The team focuses on signal-based personalization: job changes, past product usage, and specific reasons for lost deals — not shallow, surface-level attributes like the university they attended.
“I care more about personalizing the problem and the solution than I do about you knowing I minored in French in college,” Ryan said.
For example, if someone was a past admin who’s now in a new role, they’ll get an email like this:
“Saw you used to use QuotaPath at Jones. Looks like you’ve taken on a new RevOps role at Marker. Is paying commissions still a challenge for you?”
How are these emails written? Some will be surprised that this is intentionally the most manual part of the process.
“I don't use AI to write any of the drafts,” said Ryan. “Honestly, I want them to feel like they're coming from a human. These are 40-word emails, max, and AI can be verbose. So I just write them myself.”
Step 4: Protect Your Domain Reputation
Deliverability is everything. The team uses Smartlead, which helps protect QuotaPath’s primary domain by spinning up alternate domains specifically for outbound.
“You don’t want the core QuotaPath domain to be marked as spam,” Ryan shared. “So you buy these separate domains, and Smartlead warms up those inboxes.”
Here is the process to follow:
- Purchase similar, alternate email domains
Ryan explained that there are a few options for purchasing alternate domains:
- You can buy and spin up domains directly through Smartlead.
- You can buy them yourself through domain registry companies such as GoDaddy.
Ryan advises finding domains for sale that are adjacent to your primary domain. So, if your business is called Softwarexyz.com, consider buying hi.softwarexyz.com, hey.softwarexyz.com, and get.softwarexyz.com.
Domains are typically very cheap to purchase—usually around $10 per year—so this is a small investment that can yield significant returns.
- Set up Google Workspace inboxes for the new accounts
In order for this process to work, you’ll need to connect your new adjacent domains to a Google inbox—just like you have your primary email account.
“Then, you’ll connect all that to Smartlead, which will do the warming for you,” said Ryan. “Over two or three weeks, it will automatically send emails, reply back to emails, and go back and forth to mimic a live conversation. This shows that the email domain is real.”
Once the inbox is “warmed,” you can start using it to send emails. For example, if QuotaPath wants to email 300 former QuotaPath admins, Smartlead will divide the list among several domains.
Ryan emphasized a few best practices:
- Only sending 25-40 emails per domain per day. “You can't just send a thousand emails a day,” Ryan said. “It has to mimic the flow of an actual person.”
- Only have two or three inboxes per domain. “You can start to raise some flags if you're trying to make like 40 different people on a Google Workspace account on one domain, all of a sudden, overnight,” he said.
Step 5: Automate and Sequence Outreach
Once lists are ready and domains are set, the outreach is fully automated through Smartlead.
They use short, simple email sequences, focused on quick yes/no decision points. And they apply spintax—slight word variations—to improve deliverability.
“If you send the same email over and over and over again, spam filters will see that you're just sending the same email to a hundred or a thousand people,” said Ryan. “But if you have thousands of permutations of the email, it increases your likelihood of landing in the inbox.”
Ryan also spoke to the importance of designing campaigns and messages based on the type of interaction the lead has had with QuotaPath, from the top of the funnel down.
For example, leads that have had a free trial of QuotaPath, but never opened an opportunity, would receive a different message than closed-lost opportunities.
“For closed-lost opportunities, we’ll reference the reasons we lost right in the email,” Ryan said. “Maybe it was a product gap, or because of budget or pricing, or whatever the reason is, if you’ve uploaded that information to Smartlead, it can be included in the email.”
While the outbound emails are automated, QuotaPath keeps them on a schedule, targeting one of each campaign per quarter. “This month, we’re outbounding to closed-lost opportunities; next month, it will be former admins; and then the following month, it will be former users,” Ryan said.
Best practice: It’s important to deconflict outreach, so one person isn’t receiving identical outbound emails over and over. This can be hard to manage manually with spreadsheets. “Fortunately, Smartlead sees the email addresses of the people you've loaded and they won't re-register somebody in the same campaign they’ve already been in,” said Ryan.
How about results?
“We don’t track open rates anymore, because you now get dinged for including the pixel that tracks open rates,” explained Ryan. “That’s OK because our reply rates on these campaigns are what I actually care about.”
Those reply rates are between 5%-15%—which exceeds the B2B outbound email reply average of 1%-5%.
“It’s all about sending a very relevant contextual message to somebody who has some awareness of what you're doing,” Ryan said.
Step 6: Add Human Touchpoints — but Only When It Matters
The only time a human gets involved is when someone replies or books a demo. That’s when the sales rep steps in.
Currently, QuotaPath centralizes all email replies into one active inbox. This makes it easy for a single person—Ryan—to monitor replies and direct inquiries to sales reps.
“I usually like to respond to the prospect first, and cc a rep, including a calendar link,” he said. “The reps don’t do a ton outbound. They mainly receive outbound demos that I’ve booked on their behalf. And then from there I'm kind of hands off.”
The Results: What Changed
Before they rolled out this system, outbound efforts at QuotaPath were inconsistent. Reps were responsible for their own outbound, but it rarely moved the needle.
“They generated very little pipeline,” Ryan said. “QuotaPath sales reps did not have a lot of experience doing outbound—but they’re very good at convincing someone who shows up for a demo to buy QuotaPath.”
Once they set up these automated workflows, everything changed:
- Outbound generated meetings jumped from 5-10% of pipeline to 20%
- Pipeline grew 15% year over year
- ARR per rep almost tripled
“Candidly, it allows me to have fewer reps that I load with more demos that are retained really well,” Ryan shared.
So, Is This the End of SDRs?
Not exactly.
Ryan’s clear that there’s still a place for human-led outbound—especially in enterprise sales, or when ACV and deal cycles justify it.
“If QuotaPath cost $100K+, I would certainly have SDRs doing more, sending gifts, flying to prospects, taking them to VIP events,” Ryan said. “But for us, this model is cost and margin supportive.”
While a team of SDRs may not be in the cards for QuotaPath, Ryan does see potential value in a single SDR. “We're definitely sold on automation and will continue to automate as much as possible, so I think we would consider adding an SDR to be an orchestrator of the tools and workflows,” he said. “But that will only come when we feel like we absolutely need another human in the loop.”
The AI Factor
So how much of this is AI magic, and how much is just good process?
A lot of it is simply good workflow design—any company can implement Clay and Smartlead. But Ryan and his team use AI in two smart ways:
- Building the workflow itself: “AI has helped us actually build a number of these flows,” Ryan said. “Show me how I get this data here, here, and here.”
- Campaign ideation: They used ChatGPT to brainstorm new campaign plays and even surfaced the idea of targeting former reps.
So, AI doesn’t write or send QuotaPath emails—but it did help to design the machine.
If you’re an early-stage founder wrestling with how to scale outbound without blowing up your budget, this model is worth a serious look.
The goal isn’t to replace humans across the board. It’s knowing when you don’t need them—and where you can use data, automation, and workflow discipline to do the heavy lifting.
You might find that the best SDR team is the one you never hired.