Running Outbound for Clients and for Yourself at Once

A prospect evaluating a marketing agency will sometimes check the agency's own outbound quality as a proxy for the work they'd get. An agency that pitches deliverability best practices while sending its own prospecting from an unwarmed domain is an easy thing for a sharp prospect to notice, and it undercuts the pitch before the call even happens.

For the agency's own list, usually shorter and higher-stakes than most client lists, Lemlist's personalization does real work: a landing page referencing the prospect's actual campaigns or public ad spend, a LinkedIn step for the marketing leads who ignore a first email. That level of research on your own pipeline is also the best demonstration of what a client should expect once they sign.

Many client engagements genuinely need volume: testing offers, reaching a long list of small business owners, or running top-of-funnel outreach where personalization at scale isn't realistic within budget. Instantly's rotation across warmed inboxes fits that use case well, provided the client understands upfront what a volume-first campaign can and can't deliver in terms of reply quality.

It's tempting to give client work the best-warmed domains since that's the billable work, but the agency's own pipeline funds everything else. A cold email sequence with no follow-up plan gets far fewer replies than one carried through three to five follow-up steps¹, and an agency's own new business list is exactly where that follow-up discipline should be strongest, not weakest.

Cold email replies average about 3.43% across large samples of B2B sends², and sharing that range with a client before launch, not after a disappointing first week, sets an expectation grounded in reality rather than whatever the client assumed going in. An agency that sets realistic expectations up front avoids the awkward conversation where a client assumes every send should get a response.

Picture a ten-person agency with a genuinely good client roster and an embarrassing founder LinkedIn message as its only new business motion. Fixing that doesn't require a big rebuild: pick a secondary domain the agency doesn't use for client work, warm it for two weeks, and put together a list of twenty real target accounts, companies whose public marketing the agency could specifically improve, not a generic industry filter.

Write the first email referencing something true about each account's current marketing: a campaign that's clearly underperforming, a channel they're visibly not using, a competitor doing something better. That's the same research a strategist at the agency would do for a paying client's competitive analysis, just pointed at a prospect instead. Run that list through Lemlist with a LinkedIn step for anyone who doesn't reply to the first email, and treat the reply rate on this list as a real KPI the agency tracks in its own dashboard, the same way it would track a client's.

An agency that builds its own funnel this deliberately usually finds the exercise sharpens the actual service too, since researching twenty prospects' marketing gaps is functionally the same skill as auditing a client's.

A minimal build for the agency's own outbound funnel:

1. Pick a secondary domain the agency does not use for client work.
2. Warm that domain for two weeks before sending at any real volume.
3. Build a list of twenty real target accounts whose public marketing the agency can speak to specifically.
4. Assign the funnel an owner, the way an account lead owns a client relationship, so it stops falling to whoever has a free hour.
5. Carry each sequence through three to five follow-up steps instead of a single email.

We're too busy with client work is the most common reason an agency's own pipeline goes untouched for months, and it's rarely true in the way it sounds. The actual blocker is usually that nobody owns the agency's own new business the way an account lead owns a client relationship, so it falls to whoever has a free hour, which in practice means nobody.

Assign it like a client account: a named owner, a monthly check-in on pipeline status, and a domain and tool setup that's separate from anything touching client sends. That single change, treating the agency's own pipeline as a real account rather than a side project, is usually what actually fixes the neglect, more than any specific tool choice between Lemlist and Instantly ever could.