The Zero to $74m Outbound Playbook

To Marketers,

Okerosi here with Product Weekly.

In this newsletter, I share proven insights I have gathered this week across; product marketing, B2B ad creatives & SaaS growth playbooks from the top 5% minds in the space.

In this week’s roundup:

- Netfiy’s channel partnership move in Github

- Hockeystack’s $74m outbound playbook

- Video strategy in B2B

This simple workflow turned Netlify into the de facto standard tool for letting other developers instantly copy and deploy your code.

Meanwhile, every time someone added a Deploy button to their public repository, they distribute another Netlify funnel into GitHub's 100M+ userbase.

The result? Within 4 years, Netlify surpassed 1+ million developers, and millions of projects shipped via the ‘Deploy to Netlify’ button.

Today, they have 5+ million devs, 35+ million live sites, and are generating 10,000 sites a day (mostly from AI codegen platforms.

These are business dynamics that connect to a problem you solve. We can call these ICP Themes. They often map to a business priority. E.g.

Remote Workforce Productivity

Data Privacy

Sustainability

Recruiting Top AI Talent

Innovation in Manufacturing Process.

Companies matching 1 or more themes are likely to be a good fit. Companies mapping to many themes will likely be the best fit.

- Company size, funding stage, industry

- Role of champion vs. signer

- Time-to-close

- Deal size

That narrowed us down to:

- B2B SaaS

- Series B or later

- $50K+ ACV

Titles: Demand Gen, Rev/Marketing Ops, Performance Marketing, Digital Marketing, etc.

Every persona had

- Known pain points

- Budget authority

- Short sales cycles

Cold outbound is a leverage game: If it doesn’t scale with software, you’re doing it wrong.

Speed beats personalization: The first rep to call after an intent signal wins.

Calls convert: Our top 5 outbound deals in the last quarter all started with a call, not an email.

Not every company should do emails: for our marketing ICP cold calling works much better.

Don’t waste cycles on bad fits: Cut 98% of the market. Go deep on the 2% who will buy.

Obsession with control is a feature: Every workflow is owned end-to-end by our growth team.

March 2025: ~$36k spent, 105 leads generated. 40 Opps created with $180k in revenue associated. Let's break down the strategy.
We’ve been working with this client for nearly 2.5 years, and last month marked one of their best months ever for lead volume.

1. Conversational Ads That Actually Work

We leaned hard into LinkedIn conversational ads. They’re perfect for reaching technical audiences, especially in cybersecurity who are often shielded by spam filters and don't respond well to cold emails.

These ads live inside LinkedIn’s walled garden, meaning:

- No deliverability headaches.
- Fully trackable open/click rates.
- Granular insights on which CTA paths users are taking.
- Personalization backed (in this case backed by product marketing to nail technical language.)
- We tested three distinct offers, each with its own tailored flow.

2. Image Ads for Reinforcement

Here’s the catch: with conversational ads, you can only hit a person once every 30 days from the same company.

So we added image ads to reinforce the same three offers. While the image ads converted at a slightly lower rate (and higher cost), they worked great as air cover, reminding folks of the offer even if they didn’t click the convo ad the first time.

Running them together gave us the best of both worlds.

3. Strategic Awareness Campaigns

Most of the results in this post are from demand capture efforts, but we didn’t ignore top-of-funnel.

We also allocated budget to awareness campaigns, like:
- Thought leadership content
- Document ads
- Video ads

All designed to build trust and demonstrate credibility before asking for a meeting.
Even with the awareness spend included, blended CPL and cost per opportunity remained strong.

TL;DR:

- We used personalized, technically sound LinkedIn convo ads.
- Launched image ads that reinforce each offer.
- Developed smart awareness plays to warm up a niche, skeptical audience.

Here's our exact 6-step process at Compound Content Studio for creating founder-led content that converts to leads (we use this with every client):

🎙️ Content Interview
We start with a 45-minute interview with the founder. These sessions are where we gather our marble blocks – we extract the unique stories, insights, and perspectives that only they can share. We come prepared with tailored prompts based on their industry and goals and previous conversations, but leave room for spontaneous insights.

🧠 Batch Planning
Next, we plan out how we're going to carve the marble by mapping the transcript to our funnel mix (this varies by client):
• 20% Top of funnel
• 70% Middle of funnel
• 10% Bottom of funnel

✍️ Drafting
Our writers then start to work on carving the marble. They craft posts based on the interview content, focusing on capturing the founder's authentic voice and points. This is where having the interview recording is crucial – we study speech patterns, favorite phrases, and how they naturally explain concepts.

👀 Multi-stage QA
This is where we add those fine details that turn the posts into true works of art. Every piece of content goes through our rigorous QA process:
1. Writer self-review
2. Editor review
3. Head of Content review (me!)
4. Final founder review (depending on the post)

📝 Client feedback
We send the content to each client to see what (if any) changes they make. This informs future content interviews, tone, and strategy adjustments.

📊 Results
We look at the performance of each post. We track:
• Follower growth
• Engagement rate
• Profile views
• Inbound DMs
• Direct attribution

This 6-step process has worked for us for over 2 years.