Outbound Engine Development for Upshift

Client: Upshift (B2B marketplace) Role: Marketing ops & CRM foundation Duration: 12+ months in production Industry: Staffing (hospitality, light industrial)

Inbound wasn’t reaching hard B2B buyers. To hit targets, we needed a reliable way to manufacture qualified conversations—at scale—without losing replies in the CRM. ICP: Directors of Ops, COOs, and GMs in low-tech sectors with fragmented 6–12 month cycles.

We launched Antaeus—a production-grade outbound engine with deterministic routing.

Apollo → lead sourcing & targeting

Lemlist → 5-step, A/B-tested cold email sequences

Zapier → sync + suppression + routing glue

HubSpot → CRM of record (segmentation, owner rules, SLAs, dashboards)

Mailchimp → light nurture / re-warm for relevant accounts

24+ domains (inboxes on Gmail + Outlook) warmed and rotated

30,000+ emails/month sustained volume

Industry- and season-specific campaigns

~30% open rate, ~2% positive reply rate (varies by vertical)

The orchestration was the differentiator:

Replies routed to the right owner (rules by territory/vertical) with round-robin fallbacks

Global unsubscribe synced across Lemlist, HubSpot, and Mailchimp

Exception catchers for no-owner / phantom-owner cases, plus SLA-based follow-up queues

Dynamic views by region, team, and vertical; optional Slack alerts for positive replies

I didn’t design the first draft—I rebuilt it to production reliability and kept it running:

Refactored HubSpot workflows into a single routing spine + modular branches

Integrated and hardened Zapier logic (suppression, parsing, error handling)

Stood up dashboards and handoff flows; managed deliverability and domain health

Prepared and connected sending domains/inboxes (Lemwarm + Lemlist)

Orchestrated campaigns by seasonality and ICP; supported ~15 sales reps across regions

Month 3: crossed 20k sends with stable routing and exception handling

Sustained ~30k sends/month with ~30% opens and ~2% positive replies

Adopted by marketing, RevOps, and sales; shared dashboards and weekly ops rhythm

Clean owner assignment; no lost replies, no collisions; system ran 12+ months

Method: Antaeus uses the 4R framework — reputation (domain health), relevance (industry + seasonality), routing (deterministic owner rules), rhythm (weekly ops cadence).

“Outbound scale used to mean chaos. Antaeus gave us 30k+ sends/month with deterministic routing—no more lost replies.” — Kamil Kamiński, Director of Marketing, Upshift