Outbound Engine Development for Upshift by Hubert WitkowskiOutbound Engine Development for Upshift by Hubert Witkowski

Outbound Engine Development for Upshift

Hubert Witkowski

Email Automation

Email Marketer

Business Workflow Automation

Apollo

HubSpot

Lemlist

Recruiting

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

The challenge

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.

The solution

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

Stack & flow

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

Scale & sequencing

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)

System logic

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

My role

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

Outcomes

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