LaGrowthMachine is the automation tool helping sales teams personalize multi-channel, outbound leads at scale and reduce over 40% of their daily manual workloads. 

We sat down with Adrien Moreau Camard, Founder of LGM, to learn how startups should select their earliest outbound sales channels and measure for success. 

“It’s a basic principle in any business: Put yourself in the shoes of your prospects. Understand who they are and where they go so you can meet them there.” 

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Factors in choosing your first outbound sales channel

As an early-stage team ramping up to go to market, you’re likely considering where to start your multi-channel campaign. Should you lead with social media? Email? LinkedIn? 

To nail down your ideal first channel for outbound prospecting, it’s all about knowing your ICP and going where they go. Adrien breaks this down into three factors: 

1. Your main source of outbound leads
2. Where leads are likely to respond
3. Your channel enrichment rate

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1. Where are you sourcing your leads from? 

All sales start with a list of leads. Are you primarily sourcing this from an internal database or CRM, or perhaps from LinkedIn through a platform like LGM? 

If your outbounds are coming from LinkedIn, you’re sure to reach 100% of these leads through LinkedIn, but the amount of info you have will vary based on individual user profile completion. 

Meanwhile, if your outbounds are coming from an existing CRM, you’ll likely find your lead data includes (at most) first and last names, company names, and email addresses. 

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2. Where are your leads most likely to respond? 

Don’t aggressively message a lead on every possible channel. Instead, ask questions like: 

• Where is my audience most active on a day-to-day basis? 
• Where is it easiest for me to build a relationship with them? 

For instance, software developers may have LinkedIn profiles, but they’re typically less active and less responsive. Don’t start with this channel for them; use it as a fallback instead. 

Conversely, tech founders are frequently active on LinkedIn, making this an ideal first channel for this segment. Adrien also recommends Twitter (especially with American founders) for: 

• Scoping out their company’s needs, opinions on SaaS/tooling, management style, etc. 
• Forming a more casual touchpoint by (still professionally) sliding into their DMs

Quite simply: Put yourself in your prospect’s shoes and go where they’re spending their time. 

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3. What’s your channel enrichment rate? 

Enrichment is the process of building full profiles on all of your leads. You’ll want to hit: 

• Contact info on as many channels as possible: LinkedIn, email address, phone, etc. 
• Essential details like company name and category, titles or seniority levels, divisions, etc. 

As mentioned, if you're sourcing all your leads from LinkedIn, enrichment varies based on how many details the individual chooses to publicize on their profile. 

To get more specific, let’s say you’re a growth marketer trying to reach freelancers. 

1. You’ve identified a bunch of freelance creatives on LinkedIn
2. However, this ICP is less likely to have professional emails attached to their profiles
3. As a result, your enrichment rate for this user segment via this channel will be far lower

In that case, it doesn’t make sense to prioritize email as an outbound channel for freelancers. 

Alternatively, let’s say you’re, again, trying to identify and reach out to founders and operators at tech companies. That’s an ideal case for leveraging LGM plus LinkedIn to enrich their profiles. 

You’ll be able to contact them more easily and also personalize your outreach more accurately. 

“There’s no one right or wrong answer here. Choosing your first outbound channels is all dependent on your unique leads and what’s relevant to them.” 

Tracking the metric success of your outbound channels

When tracking the success (or lack thereof) of these outbound sales channels, Adrien emphasizes an end-to-end, full-funnel approach to KPIs. 

If you’re early on in building this funnel, focus on tracing awareness through to lead replies. 

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1. LinkedIn connection rates

If you’re sourcing most of your leads from LinkedIn, that platform is your first touchpoint and what helps potential customers learn you even exist. 

Here, you’re establishing basic user awareness. 

If a lead chooses not to click on your profile or accept your connection invite, you’re essentially cut off — no chance at sending pitches, follow-ups, or even casual messages. 

So, if you’re leading with LinkedIn, you want to maximize connection rates right off the bat. As Adrien puts it, you can’t think about reply rates if you’re not being heard in the first place. 

Try laying the groundwork with a connection success rate of 35–40%. 

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2. Open rates

Once you’ve established awareness and a connection, the rest becomes pretty straightforward. Stronger open rates on LinkedIn outbounds mean you’ve sparked that line of communication. 

Here, aim to build an average open rate of roughly 80% before shifting focus farther along. 

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3. Click rates

After you’ve found your footing with solid connection and open rates, you’re free to improve the rest of your pipeline or sales funnel experience — such as through click rates. 

You’ll want to gauge how relevant, appealing, and effective your actual outbound copy is in terms of hyperlinks, potential attachments, etc. 

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4. Reply rates

Finally, you need to know how many of your outbounds result in actual responses and interest and maximize your reply rate as much as possible. 

(As mentioned in Adrien’s interview about personalizing outbounds, micro-segmentation is the way to go to ensure replies from your various ICPs.) 

At the same time, reply rates can be misleading, seeing as you can hit a 30% reply rate and have most of those responses be rejections. With that, you can also qualify your response tracking. 

“People often go straight to measuring reply rates without considering the full funnel of issues. Start by making sure you’re being heard in the first place.”