> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.millionverifier.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Why Outbound Fails Twice: What Soumya Surabhi Finds When She Audits It
- URL: https://www.millionverifier.com/blog/why-outbound-fails-twice-what-soumya-surabhi-finds-when-she-audits-it/
- Published: 2026-09-29T07:12:55.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-29T12:05:34.000Z
- Author: Zsófia Cséfai

Most companies that come to GTM Walnut have already tried outbound twice. First they ran it in-house. Then they paid an agency. Neither worked.

Soumya Surabhi, co-founder of GTM Walnut, audits those programs for a living. In a July 23, 2026 conversation with Zsófia Cséfai, General Manager of MillionVerifier, she explained what she usually finds.

It is rarely the copy. It is three things that break before anyone writes a word: the sending infrastructure, the list, and a kind of personalization that stopped working once everyone started doing it.

## **Who is giving the advice**

Soumya spent almost five years heading demand generation at Y Combinator- and Sequoia-backed startups. About a year and a half ago, she co-founded GTM Walnut with Prashant.

The company builds AI-native revenue pipelines for B2B companies. Inbound, outbound and revenue operations usually run in separate silos. GTM Walnut puts them into one AI system. It has worked with more than 30 clients around the world.

Her advice comes from volume. The system GTM Walnut built is designed to run 50,000 to 100,000 emails a day. At that scale, a small mistake does not stay small. It repeats tens of thousands of times.

## **Failure #1: The infrastructure was never built for cold email**

![](https://www.millionverifier.com/content/images/2026/09/image1-1.png)

When Soumya audits a failed program, the first cracks are usually in the sending setup. Campaigns run from the company's primary domain. New mailboxes go live without being warmed up.

Her rule is blunt: "Never ever run your campaigns from primary domains."

**Her setup looks like this:**

- Buy a secondary domain and create new email IDs on it.
- Warm those mailboxes for 14 days before any campaign goes out.
- Start at low volume from the new mailboxes, then scale.
- Check domain reputation and blacklists once a month.

The mistake teams discover too late is links. A website link or a Calendly link in a cold email feels harmless. Soumya's advice: "When you're doing a cold reach-out, please don't ever use links."

Links push emails into spam and junk folders. That burns domain reputation, and reply rates drop with it. Inbox providers track all of these signals when they judge your domain.

Infrastructure is the first thing she thinks about for every client campaign. Copy comes later.

## **Failure #2: The list went straight from the vendor into the sequence**

The second finding is the list. "They would just buy data from a certain database provider and they would never verify the list," Soumya said. The step they skip, she added, is the one MillionVerifier does: run the list through verification before it goes into a sequence.

The cost shows up twice. Reply rates and interest rates stay low, because many messages never reach a real person. And the invalid addresses damage the domain's reputation, which hurts every campaign after it.

Verification is not a one-time setup task either. "It does not matter if you have verified the list two months back," she said. "The list might have gotten stale."

Her cadence: verify whenever a campaign runs. If she reruns the same list a month later, she verifies it again. Some teams re-verify weekly. She prefers monthly.

![](https://www.millionverifier.com/content/images/2026/09/image4.png)

At high volume, she named list verification as one of the two things that matter most. The other is automation.

## **Failure #3: Personalization that everyone else is also sending**

Tools like Clay made intent signals easy to find. The result, Soumya says, is that everyone now personalizes the same way: "Congratulations on raising your Series A, let's have a chat."

"When everybody is using that same kind of intent signal, that's not personalization anymore."

She avoids the usual triggers entirely: funding news, new hires, "congratulations on the promotion," "congratulations on the new job." Her rule has two parts:

1. Find the one signal that is highly relevant for your niche.
2. Only if you can't find it, fall back to funding or new-hire signals.

![](https://www.millionverifier.com/content/images/2026/09/image2-1.png)

Messaging also expires. "The messaging that has worked six months back might not work for you right now," she said. Her fix is to revise messaging every three months.

## **How she scales without sounding automated**

Soumya doesn't treat automation and personalization as a trade-off. "They're not polar opposites of each other, but rather they're complementary," she said. "Automation is something that does the heavy lifting for you."

The split is clear. Automation researches accounts, finds signals and enriches contacts. A human decides whether the signal the system picked is relevant, and whether the messaging angle fits this persona at this account.

The numbers show why both are needed. One person researching and writing each email by hand can't get past about 50 emails a week.

![](https://www.millionverifier.com/content/images/2026/09/image5-1.png)

Her model works differently:

1. AI agents draft emails for around 10,000 contacts.
2. A person reviews 10 to 20 of them.
3. If the messaging fits, the campaign gets the go-ahead.
4. The data flows into sequencers such as Instantly and EmailBison.

The human review is what keeps volume from turning into spam. In her words, automation handles outbound at volume, but human judgment keeps the emails from being classified as spammy.

## **The full stack, stage by stage**

During the interview, Soumya shared her screen and walked through the in-house system GTM Walnut runs for itself and its clients. Here is every stage and every tool she named.

![](https://www.millionverifier.com/content/images/2026/09/image6-1.png)

The last two stages are where most outbound programs stop too early. Booking the meeting is not the finish line. The SDR walking into the call with context is.

## **The order matters**

None of Soumya's fixes are exotic. What sets her approach apart is the order she does them in:

1. Secondary domain, 14-day warm-up, no links.
2. A verified list, re-verified before every run.
3. One signal that matters to this niche.
4. A small batch reviewed by a human.
5. Only then, volume.

![](https://www.millionverifier.com/content/images/2026/09/image3.png)

The companies that come to her after two failed attempts usually did step five first.

**Follow Soumya:** [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/soumya-surabhi-42638444/?ref=millionverifier.com) · [GTM Walnut](https://gtmwalnut.com/?ref=millionverifier.com)

**Before your next campaign, verify your list with MillionVerifier**

---

[Create Your Free Account Now](https://app.millionverifier.com/register?ref=millionverifier.com)

---