Onboarding

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Deliverability

Purchase at least 2 .com domains that will be used exclusively for your outbound campaigns. Since we don’t want to use your primary domain for outbound; if you have any dormant domains, we can also use those as well. We prefer .com domains for outbound if you are buying fresh ones, but other TLDs like .co and .io work too if you already own them. This is because .com domains have the highest sender reputation, but a domain with a history and good reputation is also a good choice.

Set up 6 mailboxes through an email provider which we can use for sending out our outbound campaigns. The names used for these mailboxes should correspond with the name of the person that’s sending out the emails. Many of our customers use Google Workspace to set up the domains and mailboxes; they have the highest sender reputation. Alternatively, we can also recommend Mailforge, where you can purchase both domains and mailboxes in one place. Mailforge is a lot cheaper and easier to set up, so we suggest getting started with Mailforge and switching over to Google Workspace in case too many emails end up in spam.

After you’ve set up the mailboxes, we also recommend setting up email warming. We recommend using a provider like MailReach or Instantly which can connect to the mailboxes you created. Learn more about deliverability on our free email deliverability guide.

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Campaign

Write a summary of what your company/product is offering. The summary serves as contextual knowledge for our AI model and should be anywhere from 500 to 1000 characters long. This content is not directly used in the emails, but it helps the AI to understand the context of your product and company, and to generate more relevant emails.

Export a CSV file of contacts you don’t want to reach out to as a Suppression list. You can import a list of email addresses, contact names, LinkedIn profile URLs, company names, or company domains. Alternatively, you can connect your HubSpot account and exclude all contacts that are already in your CRM.

Develop one or multiple clear ICPs (Ideal Customer Profile). Write down who exactly you need to reach, ideally being as specific as possible. For example, the ICP for FirstQuadrant is “Founders of late seed to series B, B2B SaaS startups in the US that sell to other US software companies”.

Write a personalized email sequence for your first outbound campaign. FirstQuadrant works best if the outbound sequence is truly personalized to the recipient. To get started, it’s easiest if you pick one real person that matches your ICP and write an email + follow-ups to that specific person. We will then help you to generalize this email during our onboarding call.

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Example sequence

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First contact

Subject: Connecting with YC founder

Hi Samrah, I came across Koxa and saw that you’re selling an accounting-to-banking API. We can help you find the right CFOs at the right software companies and scale up sales without increasing your headcount.

I’m the co-founder of Y Combinator funded FirstQuadrant. An AI sales automation platform. We’re helping some of the fastest growing startups in Silicon Valley to scale sales on autopilot with our GPT-based platform. We’re in private beta right now but I thought you may be interested in giving 1Q a try. Happy to prioritize you.

Cheers, Carlo

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Follow-up 1

Hi Samrah, just bumping this up since I haven’t heard back from you yet. Other API-first companies like Svix have already increased their sales by 30% through us. Happy to jump on a call and discuss how we can help you guys out too.

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Follow-up 2

Hi Samrah, since I haven’t heard back from you yet, I assume automating sales with AI is not relevant to you at this point. If there’s someone else in your team who might be the right point of contact, please connect me. Sorry if I bothered you, and wish you all the best!