When I was the entire marketing team
GTM Strategy · Sales Enablement · Founder-Led Content
How I run LinkedIn outreach
Reverse-engineered from 104 real threads. Every number is a measured reply rate.
Sabai System · LinkedIn outreach decision tree · from 104 real threads · April 2026
TL;DRSabai System is a Retool agency that builds internal tools and AI automations for enterprise teams, 200+ apps across 14+ countries. I joined as the first marketing hire and built the go-to-market from zero, from positioning and content to the internal Retool tools that run it, with no ad budget.
The challenges
Ops and data leaders at mid-market companies do not wake up looking for a "Retool agency." They feel a pain, a manual process, a spreadsheet held together with tape, and they do not know a senior team can hand them a working tool in weeks. The job was to meet that pain in language they already use for it.
There was no marketing engine at all: no positioning, no content, no outbound, no pipeline. Just a founder who could sell and a product that was hard to explain in one line. I had to build the whole system, and make an agency’s work legible to a buyer.
It had to be profitable and repeatable without paid spend, a way to find and close high-value clients that one person could run day to day and then hand off.
Research
- Studied the founder’s past wins and the clients behind them, from QBack to Pernod Ricard and Moet Hennessy, to find why they actually bought and the exact words they used for the pain.
- Built an ICP and a pain matrix by role and vertical, so every message spoke to the specific problem a given buyer was feeling, not a generic pitch.
- Ran outbound as research: every opener was a test, and I logged reply rates across 104 real threads to see which framing landed before scaling it.
The build
Positioning & founder narrative
Turned a hard-to-explain agency into one clear promise: senior Retool and AI builds, in weeks not quarters. I ran it in three voices, the CEO’s, the company’s, and mine, so the brand read like people instead of a pitch deck.
The outbound engine
I wrote cold email and LinkedIn DMs per prospect and tested them line by line, then distilled the winners into a reply-rate decision tree, every opener mapped to its measured reply rate. Outreach stopped being guesswork and became a system.
Enablement, built in the product
I replaced HubSpot with a lean stack (Attio, Klaviyo, Claude) and built our own SDR dashboard in Retool to run prospecting, qualification, and follow-up in one place. At a Retool agency, I market the product by building with it.
Content that compounds
Founder-led content turned the team’s expertise into a steady inbound signal, so outbound was never the only door in. The brand started sounding like the people behind the work.
Metrics & impact
| Metric | Result | Context |
|---|---|---|
| Qualified leads | 400+ | Sourced organically in ~6 months, no paid spend |
| Reply rate | 3.2× | Versus the previous cold-outreach baseline |
| Martech cost | 77.5% | $560 → $126/mo after rebuilding the stack |
| Discovery calls | ~24/mo | Driving roughly 2 closed deals a month |
