From 10–20 Leads/Week to 50+ — Fully Automated Cold Email Pipeline With Smart Reply Handling
Varvier Filtration
Varvier Filtration, a French industrial filtration company, needed to scale B2B outreach without scaling headcount. Manual cold email was capped at 10–20 qualified leads per week per rep. We built a fully automated pipeline: daily lead sourcing from Apollo, AI-personalised first lines, automated Instantly campaigns, and intelligent handling of every reply type — including OOO, redirects, and interest signals.
The Problem
Manual outreach was hitting a hard ceiling — too few leads, too slow, no scalability.
Varvier operates in a niche industrial market in France. Their ideal customer is a specific type of manufacturer in specific sectors — the addressable market is small but high-value. Getting in front of enough of these prospects manually was the bottleneck.
Each salesperson was doing everything by hand: searching Apollo or LinkedIn for leads, qualifying them mentally, finding email addresses, researching the company to write a personalised opening line, sending the email, tracking it, following up, and handling replies. Every step done manually.
The result: each rep could contact 10–20 qualified leads per week at best. This wasn't a skills problem — it was a systems problem. The reps were spending their time on work that could be automated, which left less time for what they were actually good at: closing.
Edge cases made it worse. OOO replies got ignored. Auto-forwarded emails confused tracking. Interest signals ("Can you send me more info?") sometimes fell through the cracks when reply volume spiked.
- Reps maxed at 10–20 qualified leads contacted per week — manual bottleneck
- Hours per day spent on lead research, email writing, and reply management
- OOO replies ignored — missed opportunities to contact the right person at the right time
- Interest signals falling through the cracks at high volume
- No way to scale outreach without hiring more salespeople
What We Built
An end-to-end automated outreach pipeline: daily lead sourcing, CRM deduplication, AI personalisation, automated campaign sending, and smart reply handling for every edge case.
Phase 1: ICP definition and setup (one-time)
Defined ICP criteria with the client: target industries, company size range, job titles (decision-maker roles), and regions in France. Saved an Apollo search matching these filters and configured an Instantly campaign with the email sequence, sending schedule, and domain rotation settings.
Daily lead sourcing from Apollo
A scheduled n8n workflow runs daily. It calls the Apollo API, pulls 50 new contacts matching the saved ICP search, and extracts: name, title, company, email, company website, and LinkedIn URL.
CRM deduplication check
Before any email is sent, each lead is checked against the CRM. If the contact or company is already in the system — previously contacted, existing customer, or in a deal pipeline — they're skipped. No duplicate outreach.
AI personalisation
For each new lead, the automation visits their company website and LinkedIn profile. AI (Claude) reads the content and writes a personalised first line specific to that company — a relevant observation about their business, product area, or a recent development. Generic openers are avoided entirely.
Added to Instantly campaign
The lead is added to the Instantly campaign with their personalised first line prepended to the email sequence. Instantly handles sending schedule, domain rotation, deliverability optimisation, and reply detection.
Smart reply monitoring
This is where most cold email automation fails. The system monitors all replies and handles each type: OOO messages ? extract the redirect name and email, add them to the campaign as the new contact. Auto-forwarded emails ? detect the forward pattern, route to the correct recipient. Interest signals ("Send me more", "What's the pricing?") ? alert the sales rep immediately for manual follow-up. Negative replies ? remove from sequence, suppress from future sends.
Technical Breakdown
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