Sales & CRM

How to build an outbound email sequence as Small RevOps Teams

Sales & CRMFor Small RevOps Teams3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

You're a two-person RevOps team supporting 30 reps, and outbound sequence management is a rotating disaster. Apollo has sequences, HubSpot has contact records, Gmail has the actual thread history, and none of them agree on who's been contacted, when, or what the next step is. You manually reconcile enrollment lists before every SDR sync, rebuild the same 'who hasn't been touched in 14 days' filter in HubSpot every week because someone keeps breaking the saved view, and spend Friday afternoons chasing reps to log their LinkedIn touches that never made it into the CRM. The sequence itself takes an afternoon to build; the data hygiene around it takes the rest of the week.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Sales & CRMFor Small RevOps Teams3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A connected outbound pipeline that pulls your HubSpot contacts and Apollo sequence data into one place, so enrollment lists are built from clean, current data — not a manually filtered export from Tuesday

An email sequence drafting and follow-up automation that uses Gmail thread history to know what's already been said, so reps aren't sending 'just checking in' to someone who replied last week

A running view of sequence performance by rep and stage, surfacing who's overdue for follow-up and which accounts have gone cold — without you pulling a report every time someone asks

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Sales Agent CRM CRM LinkedIn Automation

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your HubSpot data on a schedule (contacts, companies, deals, owners) and connects to Apollo.io via Starch's integration catalog, queried live when the sequence enrollment view runs. Gmail is synced on a schedule for thread history — Starch reads message labels and full threads to check prior contact. LinkedIn outreach steps run through browser automation — no API needed, so your reps' accounts stay within LinkedIn's normal usage patterns.

Prompts to copy

Connect my HubSpot and Apollo accounts. Build me a sequence enrollment view that shows every contact in 'Prospecting' or 'Outreach' stage who hasn't had an activity logged in the last 10 days, grouped by rep. Flag anyone where the last touch was a LinkedIn message that isn't in HubSpot.

Draft a 4-step outbound sequence for our mid-market ICP — SaaS companies 50-200 employees, VP of Sales title. Step 1 is a cold intro email referencing their recent funding round if available. Steps 2 and 4 are follow-ups. Step 3 is a LinkedIn connection request. Pull the contact's Gmail thread history before drafting step 2 so we're not repeating ourselves.

Build me a weekly sequence performance dashboard: emails sent vs replied by rep, reply rate by step, accounts with no activity in 14+ days, and a list of contacts who bounced or unsubscribed this week so I can suppress them in Apollo.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect HubSpot: Starch syncs your contacts, companies, deals, and deal owners on a schedule. This becomes the source of record for enrollment logic — no more exporting filtered lists by hand.

2 Connect Apollo from Starch's integration catalog. The agent queries it live when building enrollment lists, so sequence status and contact ownership reflect what's in Apollo today, not last week's export.

3 Connect Gmail so Starch can read thread history. Before any follow-up step is drafted, the agent checks whether a reply already exists in that thread — if someone responded and the rep didn't log it in HubSpot, Starch will surface that gap.

4 Start from the Sales Agent CRM app in the App Store as your baseline, then describe the customization you need: 'Add a sequence stage field, an 'enrolled in Apollo sequence' checkbox synced from Apollo, and a last-touch date field that pulls from Gmail or HubSpot activity — whichever is more recent.'

5 Build the enrollment hygiene view: describe in plain language what you want Starch to flag — contacts in active stages with no logged activity, mismatches between Apollo enrollment status and HubSpot stage, reps with sequences running but no replies logged in 7 days.

6 Generate the sequence copy. Give Starch your ICP definition, your value prop in two sentences, and the number of steps. It drafts the full sequence; you edit and approve. For any step that references external data (funding round, recent job change), Starch can pull that through browser automation on public pages.

7 Set up LinkedIn outreach steps through the LinkedIn Automation app. Describe the connection request criteria — title, industry, company size — and Starch runs those invites through browser automation at a human pace so the account stays safe.

8 Wire a weekly automation: every Monday at 8am, Starch pulls HubSpot contacts enrolled in sequences, checks Apollo for reply status, checks Gmail for unlogged replies, and posts a summary to your Slack channel with a list of contacts that need attention before the SDR sync.

9 Build the performance dashboard: reply rate by step, sequence completion rate by rep, accounts that have gone completely cold (no touch in 14+ days across email and LinkedIn), and a weekly suppression list of bounces and unsubscribes to push back into Apollo.

10 Set a recurring automation for list hygiene: every Sunday night, Starch runs a check against HubSpot for contacts where deal stage advanced but Apollo sequence wasn't paused, and flags those for your Monday triage so reps aren't continuing outbound on a closed deal.

11 Publish the hygiene rules and enrollment logic as a shared Starch app your team can reference. When the CRO asks 'why is this contact getting emails,' you have one place to point them instead of recreating the logic in a slide.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

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Worked example

April 2026 mid-market push — 30-rep team, 3 active sequences

Sample numbers from a real run

Contacts enrolled across 3 sequences (HubSpot source)	847
Contacts with no activity logged in 10+ days (flagged by Starch)	203
Contacts with unlogged Gmail replies (HubSpot vs Gmail mismatch)	31
Apollo enrollments where deal stage = Closed Won (should be suppressed)	14
LinkedIn connection requests sent via browser automation (week 1)	120

Going into April's mid-market push, your team had 847 contacts enrolled across three sequences in Apollo. Before Starch, you'd spend Monday morning manually cross-referencing Apollo enrollment status against HubSpot deal stage — a 90-minute exercise in frustration. With the weekly automation running, Starch surfaced 203 contacts with no logged activity in 10-plus days, including 31 where a rep had actually received a reply in Gmail but never marked it in HubSpot. Those 31 were about to get a 'just checking in' follow-up that would have torched the conversation. Starch also caught 14 contacts still active in Apollo sequences on deals that closed — 8 won, 6 lost — and queued them for suppression. The LinkedIn automation ran 120 connection requests in week one at a pace that keeps rep accounts inside LinkedIn's normal limits. Your Monday SDR sync went from 45 minutes of data reconciliation to 15 minutes of actual coaching because the hygiene report was already waiting in Slack.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Sequence reply rate by step and by rep (are reps' sequences actually working, or is step 3 dead for everyone)

Data hygiene gap rate: contacts with activity mismatches between Apollo, HubSpot, and Gmail as a percentage of total enrolled

Follow-up overdue rate: contacts past their next scheduled touch with no activity logged

Suppression lag: average days between a deal closing and the contact being removed from active sequences

LinkedIn outreach acceptance rate by ICP filter (title + company size + industry) over 30-day rolling window

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Outreach or Salesloft

Gives you a dedicated sequence platform with deep analytics, but adds another tool the 30 reps have to log into, another data silo to reconcile against HubSpot, and a seat-based contract that gets expensive fast for a team your size.

Apollo sequences alone

Apollo runs sequences fine, but it doesn't read your Gmail thread history or HubSpot deal stage in real time, so the suppression and hygiene problems you have today don't go away — you're still doing that reconciliation manually.

HubSpot Sequences (Sales Hub)

Tight HubSpot integration is the upside, but you're capped to email-only, LinkedIn steps are manual tasks with no automation, and building the hygiene views you actually want still means a developer or a lot of workflow builder time.

Clay + Apollo + HubSpot manual stack

Clay is powerful for list-building and enrichment, but stitching it with Apollo sequences and HubSpot hygiene still requires a human to run the imports, manage the field mapping, and rebuild the workflow every time something breaks — which is exactly what you're trying to stop doing.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — sales agent crm, crm, linkedin automation all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Does Starch actually write into HubSpot, or is it read-only?

Starch syncs your HubSpot data on a schedule for reading — contacts, deals, owners, activity. Write-back to HubSpot (logging a note, updating a deal stage) goes through Starch's integration catalog connection, which queries HubSpot live when an automation triggers it. For most RevOps hygiene workflows, the pattern is: Starch reads from HubSpot, surfaces the gap, and either notifies your team or takes an action in a downstream system like Apollo.

We use Salesforce, not HubSpot. Does this work?

Yes. Salesforce is reachable from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live when your app runs. It's not on the scheduled-sync list the way HubSpot is, so it won't have the same deeply typed schema or automatic background refresh, but you can build enrollment views, hygiene checks, and performance dashboards that query Salesforce directly. If you're a Salesforce shop, describe that when you're building the app and Starch will wire it accordingly.

Will the LinkedIn automation get our reps' accounts flagged?

Starch runs LinkedIn outreach through browser automation — it mimics human-paced activity rather than hitting LinkedIn's API, which is what most automation tools do and what triggers LinkedIn's rate limits. That said, LinkedIn's enforcement is unpredictable and changes. Starch's LinkedIn Automation is designed to stay within normal usage patterns, but no tool can guarantee zero risk from LinkedIn's side. We'd recommend starting with conservative daily limits and ramping up.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We have a security review process.

Not yet — Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified. If that's a hard requirement for your procurement process, that's worth knowing upfront. There's no workaround; it's on the roadmap but not available today.

Gmail shows a connector name I don't recognize during the OAuth flow. Is that a problem?

The Gmail OAuth consent screen currently shows the name of Starch's verified connector client rather than 'Starch' — it's a cosmetic issue, not a security one. A Starch-branded OAuth screen is on the roadmap. If your IT team asks, that's the honest explanation.

Can Starch suppress contacts in Apollo automatically, or does someone still have to do that manually?

Starch can identify contacts that should be suppressed based on your rules — deal stage, bounce status, unsubscribe events from Gmail — and surface them as a list. Pushing that suppression action back into Apollo happens through Starch's live integration catalog connection to Apollo. You'd set that up as an automation step: when Starch flags a contact for suppression, it triggers the Apollo action directly. Describe what you want the automation to do and Starch builds the chain.