How I Rebuilt an Outbound Campaign System

When I joined Xplor Pay, one of my biggest opportunities was to help strengthen our approach to outbound campaign strategy.

The goal was to build a more consistent, repeatable campaign system that could support sales conversations, speak more directly to vertical SaaS audiences, and create stronger engagement across the funnel.

That meant looking at outbound as more than a sequence of touchpoints. It needed to function as a coordinated demand generation program, with clearer messaging, stronger industry relevance, useful content, and better alignment between marketing and sales.

The Challenge

The existing outbound program had a strong foundation, but there was room to make it more strategic, structured, and audience-specific.

Campaigns needed to move beyond general payments messaging and speak more clearly to the needs of different software verticals. A field services software company, a dental software platform, an event management system, and a pet services platform may all need embedded payments support, but the way they think about revenue, adoption, operations, and customer experience is different.

The challenge was to create outbound campaigns that felt more relevant to each audience while still supporting a scalable, repeatable campaign framework.

There was also an opportunity to better connect outbound messaging to the larger sales motion. Emails, calls, content, and follow-up needed to work together so that campaigns could do more than generate opens or clicks. They needed to help start better conversations.

My Role

My role was to help rebuild and manage the outbound campaign strategy from planning through execution.

This included developing campaign themes, refreshing email cadences, writing vertical-specific messaging, and coordinating with sales development representatives on campaign timing and follow-up.

I also reviewed performance data to understand which messages, industries, and touchpoints were creating the strongest engagement. From there, I used those insights to refine future campaigns and improve the overall program.

My work sat at the intersection of strategy, messaging, content, and sales enablement. I was focused on making each campaign more useful, relevant, and connected to pipeline goals.

What Changed

The biggest shift was moving from a more general outbound approach to a structured campaign system built around vertical relevance, repeatable planning, and stronger sales alignment.

Trade show campaigns became more industry-specific, with messaging tailored to the realities of different software providers. Instead of relying only on broad payments language, the campaigns connected payments to themes that mattered to each audience, such as revenue growth, customer adoption, operational efficiency, retention, and long-term platform value.

Vertical campaigns were also refreshed to create clearer progression. Each touchpoint had a stronger purpose, whether that was introducing a relevant business challenge, sharing a useful resource, reinforcing a key point of differentiation, or creating a reason for sales to follow up.

Content became a more intentional part of the outbound motion. Blog posts, podcast episodes, white papers, and other resources were used to support the message and give prospects more ways to engage with the topic.

Sales alignment also improved. Campaigns were planned with follow-up in mind, giving SDRs clearer context for outreach and helping marketing activity connect more directly to sales conversations.

Over time, the outbound program became more consistent, more measurable, and easier to repeat across industries.

Results

These campaign refreshes helped drive stronger engagement and pipeline outcomes across outbound programs.

Vertical campaign performance improved significantly, with open rates increasing from 19.7% to 31% and click rates increasing from 1.68% to 7.6%.

The broader outbound motion also contributed to measurable funnel growth. MQLs increased by 1.5x from 2024 to 2025. SQLs increased by 4x.

The work also helped establish closed-won opportunities from outbound programs where there had previously been none.

These results showed that a stronger outbound system supported better conversations, created more qualified opportunities, and contributed to revenue growth.

What This Shows

This work reflects how I approach demand generation: as a system that connects audience insight, messaging, content, sales alignment, and performance measurement.

Strong outbound campaigns require understanding the audience, translating complex products into relevant business conversations, and building repeatable programs that sales teams can actually use.

For me, this project showed the value of taking ownership of a campaign system, improving it over time, and connecting marketing execution to larger business outcomes.