Someone new in a seat is still deciding how things should work. Someone settled is defending decisions they've already made. That one idea drove the best-performing campaign I ran at UpHire, and it closed two clients within about a month.
The signal
Sales leaders (VP Sales, CRO, Head of Sales) who had started at a SaaS company in the last 90 days. New leaders rebuild or grow their team in the first two quarters, so for a recruiting firm the timing does most of the work.
The list: two Clay tables
Companies first. Filtered by city, size and industry into a clean shortlist before touching a single person.
Then people. I imported LinkedIn URLs from a filtered search, enriched the profiles, and used a formula to confirm the recent job change. An AI column checked that each person was actually a relevant buyer. More AI checks removed companies we'd already contacted, anything on the DNC list, and other staffing firms, which overlap too much with our own offer. Formulas cleaned first and last names and normalised messy titles and company names. A waterfall found verified emails, and every row got a message preview before anything was sent.
The sequence
It ran in Lemlist across email and LinkedIn, branching on what we knew about each lead:
- Verified email found: email first, then a LinkedIn invite.
- Invite accepted within 2 days: chat, voice note, then email and chat follow-ups 2 days apart.
- Invite not accepted: a second email, then the LinkedIn path if they accept later (up to 80 days).
- No email found: LinkedIn only, waiting up to 90 days for acceptance.
The copy
Open with the congratulations, offer something useful to a new leader (market intel, comp data, who competitors are hiring), and ask permission to send a short video instead of asking for a call.
The LinkedIn voice note lifted replies more than any other step. The first chat promises it, and the follow-up asks if they listened.
What it shows
Lemlist reported 521 leads, 99.5% of messages delivered, 42.8% of LinkedIn invites accepted, and 5.2% of contacted leads answering. Two of them became clients within about a month. The order of work is the lesson: signal, then list, then copy. The copy is the last thing to get right, not the first.