Prospecting Both Sides of a Marketplace at Once

A supplier being recruited onto a marketplace cares about listing terms, fees, and exposure to real buyers, while a buyer being recruited cares about selection, pricing, and trust in the platform itself. A message written for one rarely lands with the other, and running both from a shared domain means a deliverability problem on one side can quietly damage the other.

Separate sending domains for supply and demand outreach. Separate templates built around what each side actually cares about. Separate reply routing, since a supply-side reply and a demand-side reply usually need different people on the follow-up call. Getting this split right before scaling volume prevents a lot of the confusion that shows up later in trying to explain which list is underperforming and why.

Split these three things before scaling volume:

• Sending domains for supply and demand outreach, so a deliverability problem on one side cannot damage the other.
• Templates built around what each side cares about, such as listing terms and fees for suppliers, and selection, pricing, and trust for buyers.
• Reply routing, since a supply-side reply and a demand-side reply usually need different people on the follow-up call.

Building out marketplace supply often means reaching a long list of potential sellers or providers who don't yet know the platform exists, which is a volume problem more than a personalization one early on. Instantly's rotation across warmed inboxes fits recruiting supply broadly before narrowing to the suppliers worth a more personalized follow-up.

Recruiting buyers, especially larger accounts, often benefits more from personalization: a landing page showing relevant available supply, a LinkedIn step for procurement leads who don't respond to a first email. Lemlist's model fits that better than a volume approach, particularly once the platform has enough supply to make a specific pitch to a specific buyer credible.

A single outreach email with no follow-up plan gets far fewer replies than a sequence carried through three to five follow-up steps¹, and this matters on both sides of a marketplace for the same reason: neither a supplier nor a buyer commits to a new platform on the first message, and a real follow-up cadence is what gets the second look.

Say a new B2B marketplace needs its first twenty suppliers in a specific category before demand-side outreach has anything credible to offer. That early supply-side list benefits from real personalization even though the eventual steady-state motion will run at higher volume: each of these first suppliers is disproportionately important to the platform's early credibility, and a generic volume blast risks the exact suppliers most worth landing simply ignoring it.

Reference something specific about each prospective supplier: a product line that fits an identified gap on the platform, a channel they're currently underserved in, a reason this specific marketplace helps them reach buyers they can't easily reach otherwise. Once the platform has real supply in a category, demand-side outreach can then reference actual available inventory, which is a meaningfully stronger pitch than a promise of future selection.

This sequencing, personalized supply-side outreach first, broader recruitment once there's a base to work from, tends to build a healthier marketplace than trying to run both sides at volume from day one.

Even with separate sending domains for supply and demand, both motions eventually need to land in one place where the team can see the whole marketplace's pipeline, not two disconnected views. A supplier conversation and a related demand-side conversation, say, a buyer specifically interested in a category a prospective supplier could fill, are useful to see side by side, even though the outreach that generated each one ran through completely separate sequences.

Route both into the same CRM with a clear tag for which side of the marketplace each contact belongs to, rather than running supply and demand entirely through separate systems end to end. The domains and templates should stay separate; the visibility into the combined pipeline shouldn't. A marketplace that skips this step tends to discover the gap only when a supply-side and demand-side rep unknowingly reach out to the exact same company from two different angles within the same week, which looks disorganized to a prospect evaluating whether the platform is worth trusting.