12 leads for an HR-tech startup — through cold outreach
Breaking into a tough niche in Southeast Asia with data hacks and tailored offers
August 27, 2025
Most people think HR-tech is an easy sell: everyone’s hiring, everyone needs efficiency, so the TAM is massive. In reality, it’s one of the hardest verticals for outbound.
Budgets are tight. Solutions sound similar. And in regions like Southeast Asia, inboxes of decision-makers are full of offers that look almost identical.
That’s the challenge our client Aivy faced. They help companies automate interviews and candidate scoring. The product is solid — but getting the first calls in Asia and South Africa felt like pushing against a wall.
So we built a funnel from scratch: testing segments, scraping data from unexpected sources, tailoring offers role by role. The result is 12 qualified leads in 3 months — with first deals now in closing.
Here’s how we did it step by step.
Building the funnel
1. Data collection: from standard tools to creative sources
We began with the usual suspects — Apollo, Clay, Parsley. But they didn’t cover the full market. To expand TAM, we had to get creative:
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Pulled companies from Google Maps (call centers, contractors, local agencies).
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Used Yelp, Yellow Pages, and Asian business directories.
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Scraped company websites directly for emails.
This enriched the list with contacts you won’t find in open datasets — giving us access to segments competitors often miss.
We also used our own internal SaaS–tool to clean and validate data faster than off-the-shelf solutions.
👉 Standard databases give you a baseline. Real coverage comes from local catalogs, manual scraping, and custom tools.
2. Segmentation by role
We split messaging across HR, C-level, and department managers, tailoring each sequence to context.
👉 For HR, speed of hiring was the key value. For C-level, it was cost reduction. Different roles = different angles.
3. Industry-specific offers
Generic messages got lost, especially in overheated regions. What worked: concrete examples and case studies from the right industry.
Examples from our sequences:
At Aivy, we help Telecom companies increase hiring speed of drivers candidates [XX]x and [XX]x interview completion — by replacing manual interviews with async AI screening
One of our clients, [Company Name], used Aivy to evaluate [XXX] candidates and preselect [XX] — saving over [XX] hours of work and reducing cost per hire by more than [XX]%.
👉 The closer the offer is to the segment’s pain, the higher the reply rate.
Results in 3 months
Across 18,000 contacts (mix of LinkedIn and email outreach): → 168 replies → 58 positive responses → 12 qualified leads → First deals now in closing
And before you start booing us for “low conversion rates” — read this.
Not every campaign was a home run. Some segments flopped, some delivered just around benchmark, and a few outperformed.
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On LinkedIn, best campaigns reached 5–6% reply rate (above benchmark).
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On email, strongest campaigns held at 1–2% reply rate, which is industry standard.
These numbers are the aggregate. The lesson here is: you don’t need every test to work. You need to identify the cohorts where traction exists and double down until deals start closing.
Takeaway
Outbound in HR-tech (or any horizontal market) isn’t about magic scripts. It’s about systematic testing, smart targeting, and doubling down on what works.
✍️ At Sally AI, we’ve run dozens of projects like this, helping startups and B2B companies build safe, effective outreach systems.
Want the same for your team? We can set it up end-to-end or train your SDRs to do it themselves.
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