Cold outreach in India: what actually worked

Hey — I’m Rinat.

We at Sally help 25+ US & EU B2B teams scale sales through structured outbound systems. Every week, I share lessons from the field — the actual playbooks that work (or don’t) across different markets.

This time, let’s talk India.

When most people think about entering the Indian market, they expect chaos:
language barriers, low reply rates, unpredictable behavior.

But here’s the thing — when the targeting is right, it works like any other high-volume, high-friction market.

✅ The client: a last-mile delivery platform

Borzo (ex-WeFast) is a same-day logistics platform operating across India.
By the time we joined, they already had a local sales team of ~20 reps on the ground — doing calls, meetings, and qualifying inbound requests manually.

The engine was working — but not efficiently. Inbound had its limits: many requests came from one-off or lower-value segments, which made it harder to build a repeatable sales motion.

The team was looking to add a structured outbound layer — to consistently reach B2B clients with higher LTV and long-term potential.

🧪 What we tried first (and why it flopped)

Before we landed on the working system, we tested what seemed obvious:

• Local-language cold calls (Indians calling Indians)

• WhatsApp outreach using numbers from Google Maps

• LinkedIn

Result? Lots of noise. Minimal conversion. Spam filters were brutal. Relevance was low. LinkedIn was slow.

🎯 What worked instead

We switched from guessing to filtering.

We built lead lists using signals like:

• Shopify & similar tech stacks

• Geography

• Business category (furniture, flowers, electronics)

These were e-com businesses with predictable ops and actual logistics pain.

💡 Quick insight: even small Indian businesses reply in English. After week one, we dropped Hindi/Hinglish — open and reply rates weren’t better, so we stuck with English.

✉️ What we said — and how

We tested several message variants across email and WhatsApp.

The best-performing sequence opened with a logistics pain point — and a clear value promise:

Are you by any chance looking for ways to reduce logistics costs?
Many [Industry] businesses in [Location] save up to 20% using Borzo’s motorbike transport—without sacrificing speed or reliability.

✅ Same-day, on-demand deliveries at lower rates
✅ Bulk order automation
✅ COD & live tracking
✅ Dedicated service manager

Would it make sense to explore this for your business?

It was short, skimmable, and spoke directly to the use case.
Nothing fancy — just clarity.

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In email, we used short 3-step sequences.
In WhatsApp, we mirrored the same messaging — reaching out to the same leads with slight adaptation.

📌 We run all WhatsApp outreach through the official WhatsApp Business API — not at huge volumes, but it keeps our accounts stable and avoids blocks. For now, that’s the most sustainable way to scale without risking delivery.

If you’re considering WhatsApp outreach, don’t cut corners with burner SIMs. Set it up through the Business API from the start — cleaner, safer, and fully compliant with Meta’s policies.

Both channels converted steadily: 2–3% lead rate across the board.

📍 3-month summary

On average, we now close 1 deal per 500 outbound contacts — and every closed client has placed multiple orders.

🌍 Where we are now

We’re now scaling the same motion across four Indian cities: Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, and Pune.

💡 TL;DR:

We started this project with a simple question: can outbound deliver quality B2B leads in India, at scale?

Turns out — yes. But only if you:
– skip spray-and-pray tactics
– build narrow ICPs
– and use the right channels with a clear offer.

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📚 Want more context before we chat?
Explore case studies from fintech, SaaS, and enterprise teams — and see how structured outbound actually scales.