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Magnolia GTM is an outbound agency built for tech startups in founder-led sales. Its clients are founders who have a product, have early traction, and need a reliable way to fill their calendars with qualified opportunities.
For these founders, pipeline is everything. More qualified conversations mean more revenue, and more revenue means the option to raise, grow, or get acquired.
Magnolia GTM’s best campaigns regularly beat the industry benchmark. Its competitor-follower campaigns see 4–5% reply rates, with 30% of replies interested. Its proprietary data campaigns reach 8% reply rates, with 20% of replies interested.
The standard benchmark for most campaigns sits at 2–3%.
Smartlead has been the infrastructure behind it for the past three and a half years. In founder Olga Barry’s words, it unlocked her agency’s growth.
Olga Barry has worked with tech startups for more than a decade, since she was 19. Her focus has always been the same: growth.
She spent the first six years of her career in sales, starting as an SDR in larger organisations and rising to commercial director for a product generating $60 million in revenue, a major success in Eastern Europe at the time.
After moving to the US, Olga shifted to helping startups grow from zero revenue, finding ways to kickstart their first wave of growth. After doing it several times, she decided to offer that expertise to many companies at once rather than one.
“I’m very happy, lucky and proud to be in the same space, which is working with tech startups, for over a decade. For more than 10 years, I was working with tech startups on one fundamental challenge, which is their growth. For the first six years of my career, I started as an SDR in larger organisations and went all the way up to being a commercial director for one of the products that was generating $60 million, and at that time in Eastern Europe it was a big success. Then I immigrated to the US, and things turned to where I was more helping startups with growth where they have zero revenue, and they have to find a way of growth hacking and boosting their initial growth. Because I did it multiple times, I decided I could help more companies by doing it on my own, not working for one particular startup, but giving access to my expertise to multiple projects at a time. That’s how the agency got created three and a half years ago, Magnolia GTM.”
When Olga launched Magnolia GTM, LinkedIn was her channel. She knew how effectively it could drive conversions for startups. Email was unfamiliar territory, and the agency’s early email outreach ran through Apollo from a single inbox.
Then a colleague introduced her to Smartlead.
“When I launched the agency, I was more focused on LinkedIn as a channel, because I knew how LinkedIn could effectively drive conversions for startups. But I wasn’t familiar with email as a channel at that time, three and a half years ago, somewhere around when I started. One of my colleagues who used Smartlead introduced me to the product, and I was amazed by how effective email outreach with the mass approach worked. So that’s how I found Smartlead. I wasn’t necessarily searching. Rather, it found me, through executing the best results on the lead generation side.”
The shift changed the agency entirely. Today, Magnolia GTM is primarily an email outbound agency.
“My outbound was LinkedIn focused. If we really get into the roots of it, because it was so long ago, we were sending email through Apollo. And it was just one email inbox. This is the key difference that I feel changed the whole game: you can use a large email inbox infrastructure behind one master inbox. That was a game changer. We were using Apollo, we weren’t treating email as a source of leads, and now I have a primarily email outbound agency.”
Magnolia GTM works with one type of client, the same type Olga has worked with throughout her career: tech founders.
Most of them are still in founder-led sales. They are the ones closing deals, and what they need from an agency is a steady flow of qualified meetings they can turn into revenue.
“My ICP is a tech founder. That’s who I’ve worked with for my entire career.”
“What we do at Magnolia is help startups, usually in a founder-led sales motion, fill their calendars with qualified opportunities, so founders are ready to bring on more revenue. That way they can either raise more money, grow their company, or get acquired.”
Sending from a single Apollo inbox put a hard ceiling on what email could do for Magnolia GTM’s clients. To make email a real lead source, the agency needed many inboxes working together, warmed up, healthy, and managed from one place.
At scale, inbox placement depends on more than infrastructure. The content itself has to vary enough to stay deliverable across thousands of sends, without losing the personalisation that drives replies.
Magnolia GTM sources data from multiple vendors through Clay, runs AI agents, and builds automations across tools. The sending platform had to slot into that stack, not sit outside it.
Olga runs campaigns for many clients at once. Each one has to launch exactly to plan, and the results have to be easy to read.
Magnolia GTM’s best results come from two campaign types, both built on finding audiences most agencies overlook.
Competitor followers. Magnolia GTM targets people who follow a client’s competitors on LinkedIn. The messaging is positioned around what the client does better. Across a range of clients, these campaigns see 4–5% reply rates, with 30% of replies interested.
“One of the most winning combinations for my clients is a campaign targeting the LinkedIn followers of competitors. I have tremendous success with a variety of clients, where we create positioning around the competitors, knowing what they have and what my clients do better, and tap into the database of those followers. We have a four to five percent response rate, and 30% of those people are interested. The standard benchmark for other campaigns is usually two to three percent response rate. And that one percent changes things drastically, because we’re talking about thousands of leads. So one percent is important here.”
Proprietary data sets. For some verticals, Magnolia GTM builds its own databases from sources that take real creative thinking to find and extract. Olga keeps the specifics private. The results speak for themselves: 8% reply rates, with 20% of replies interested.
“Second is custom data sets. I can’t disclose those data sets on behalf of my clients. When I discover a database for one of the verticals, that database is not easy to obtain. You have to do some creative thinking to first imagine that this database exists, and then do the work to extract it. Once you have that database and it converts very well, that’s the key. I don’t want to tell, because I don’t want my competitors to go and do the same thing. But let’s say there are certain data sources that we find in a certain way, and we position around them. With the data in those sources, we receive an eight percent response rate for this offering and twenty percent interested leads. That’s a successful campaign, and Smartlead helped me achieve it, with a very seamless workflow to connect all the emails and the warm-up infrastructure, execute the copy, and have it all in a master inbox to connect the dots and respond to those leads.”
Her number one is the campaign itself: how well it is structured, how quickly it launches exactly to plan, and how fast she can measure what happened.
“I think it’s the campaign itself. How well it’s structured from an analytics perspective, and how well it can be launched according to the best possible execution strategy that I have planned. Once I’m experienced in the tool, it doesn’t take me much time to launch a campaign according to the best plan I have in mind, and it takes me no time to measure the results. So I’d say overall campaign analytics and the structure of launching campaigns.”
Smartlead connects to the rest of Magnolia GTM’s stack: Clay, Make.com, AI agents and Claude through MCP. For Olga, how easily a platform integrates counts as a feature in its own right.
“The integrations with Clay, the AI agents that you can set up through Make.com, or with Claude through MCP. How integratable is Smartlead? I’ll call that a feature, because it’s very important: how integratable is the solution.”
Content is where Olga focuses most. Smartlead lets her load custom data points into campaigns and combine them with spintax, so every email is personalised and varied enough to land.
“The feature of personalising copy with multiple custom data points inside the campaigns, and using spintax. That is a great feature that actually makes your content deliverable. It increases deliverability if you use enough spintax and enough personalisation with the custom data points that you can load into Smartlead.”
Email warm-up is the foundation. Smartlead also lets Magnolia GTM personalise the warm-up content for each client, so inboxes start warming up around a specific offer and vertical from day one.
“You can turn on the email warm-up for a large number of emails. Then you can actually personalise your warm-up with copy written on behalf of your client, and right away initiate the process of warming up for a specific offering, for specific verticals, on behalf of your client. Those things are about infrastructure. They’re very important, that’s why they’re on the list. But infrastructure is usually not day-to-day, because once the infrastructure is correct, then AI runs the health checks of the infrastructure, as well as the team.”
Olga prefers to find answers herself, and Smartlead’s documentation and AI support make that easy. For straightforward questions, the support team has been fast and responsive.
“I really like the AI feature that Smartlead released for support. It’s good at backing its responses with the articles published in Smartlead’s documentation. Whenever I have a question that can already be answered by an article Smartlead has, the AI points me directly to that part of the article, and I can go and check it out without extra talking to support. I prefer that. I love the documentation that Smartlead does. Very, very detailed documentation, not internally for your team, but for us, the customers. The support on simple or clear questions, such as email infrastructure, has been fast, responsive and straightforward.”
The Smartlead Slack community is one of Olga’s regular resources. She searches it weekly by keyword, and it is how she set up her Claude MCP connection.
“It’s very helpful. Actually a big perk. I feel like it creates a level of loyalty, because you use this community as a data source. Once a week I go to the community and put in a keyword, let’s say MCP. That’s literally how I set up MCP back in the day. I remember there were office hours for the MCP Smartlead connection. I had to find them in the Slack channels, so I searched for MCP, looked at what other people said, and found those videos. So I use it as a knowledge database, and I’m active there sometimes as well.”
The community has also become a networking channel. Before TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, Olga used it to find out who else was attending the events Smartlead was hosting, and then met some of those people in person.
1. Campaign Structure and Analytics. Olga’s number one feature. Campaigns launch exactly to plan, and results are fast to measure.
2. Integrations. Smartlead connects to Clay, Make.com, AI agents and Claude through MCP, so it fits Magnolia GTM’s full data and automation stack. Explore Smartlead’s API and automation capabilities.
3. Custom Data Points and Spintax. Personalisation at scale, with enough variation to keep content deliverable across thousands of sends.
4. Personalised Warm-up. Warm-up content written for each client’s offer and vertical, so inboxes are ready for the campaigns they will run. Learn more about Smartlead’s email warm-up.
5. Email Warm-up at Scale. Warm-up for large numbers of inboxes, monitored by AI-driven health checks once the infrastructure is in place.
6. Unified Master Inbox. Every inbox, every client and every reply in one place, which Olga calls the game changer compared with her single-inbox setup on Apollo. Learn more about the Unified Master Inbox.
Olga is direct about the impact Smartlead has had on her business.
“I wanted to end on this: Smartlead basically unlocked my agency’s growth, and that’s why I’m so thankful. I feel like that’s the key of it. A product that makes your business grow is the ultimate best B2B SaaS that could ever exist. Smartlead unlocked my growth. I could onboard more clients, because I was confident in the lead generation quality and quantity on behalf of my clients with Smartlead.”
Her advice to anyone starting out is simple:
“Take it one step at a time. That’s the overall advice. But if you were trying Smartlead right now, my advice is to connect it straight to Claude through MCP. Don’t even try to figure out the interface in Smartlead. Start chatting with Claude about what Smartlead can do, and you would be amazed at what it can do for you.”
Ready to turn the right data and the right message into a full calendar for your clients?
Founder, StackOptimise
Smartlead's combination of automation, unlimited inboxes, and easy campaign management has completely transformed how we run cold email campaigns.
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Founder, Cold Email Hackers
We have about 15 companies and we use Smartlead for all of them.
Founder, DutchSave Media
One of the things I love about using Smartlead is the deliverability feature. If they landed in the bounce or spam folders, we could resolve this quickly.
Co-Founder, Growth Today
I want to continue to use Smartlead to make operations more seamless - the plan is to bring more clients here and build more SOPs.
Founder, FueltoFly
Smartlead listens to the agencies and customers and builds according to what people want, that has really made things easier for us.
Founder, OutboundSync
We build an infrastructure product, and OutboundSync communicates with Smartlead itself. I love the webhook and API. They're really well done and keep getting better.
Founder, Axoleads
With SmartDelivery, you can put all of that in the hands of the tool. It ensures your emails land in inboxes, and by running a simple test, you can see if you're hitting the mark.
Founder, Claygen
Deliverability is the cornerstone of cold email outreach. You could have the best email copy in the world, but if no one is seeing it, it's useless. I really love the feature where you can actually give client accesses to your clients.
Co-Founder, Cymate
I do not want to switch to another software. Pick a solution you trust, stick with it, and keep refining your copy.
CMO, Avalanche Capital
Managing large volumes of emails through multiple inboxes used to be a logistical nightmare. With Smartlead, the process is seamless. We book thousands of discovery calls through cold emails. These campaigns are generating leads at a scale we never thought possible.
Founder, Growth Engine X
We came for the unlimited inboxes, and we stayed for the API. 1.5M cold emails/month, 7,767+ inboxes managed.
Head of Community & Ecosystem, TxtCart
You cannot replace having 10,000 touches with potential clients. When you have that much distribution and reach, you really start to see incredible results. The simplicity of Smartlead made all the difference. It doesn't require you to be a technical wizard.
Founder, Hyperke
Smartlead has been a game-changer for us. It increased our appointment volume, improved ease of use, and offered valuable features. 80% increase in appointments/month, peak of 276 appointments in a single month.
Founder, Kinetyca
Smartlead has been our cold email backbone from day one. The platform evolves constantly, keeping pace with how deliverability and personalization need to work today. 21% overall reply rate, $175K in 4 months for multiple B2B clients.
Founder, Reachflow
Smartlead is centered around deliverability and constantly evolving. Their API is not like any other platform. Smartlead covers all our needs. The focus on core features like deliverability and API integration is unmatched.
CEO, Halfwarm
Our approach to crafting conversational emails led to reply rates that many of my peers thought were unattainable.
Co-Founder, letstrike
We've grown on zero capital, zero marketing, purely cold emailing - and that's the story we love to tell. The best approach is no approach if you can't handle domain meltdown. The second best is something like Smartlead that's built from the ground up for deliverability at scale.
Founder, Fenixtal
Smartlead's white-labeling and automation let us punch above our weight. The 12M euros sales potential? That's what happens when you combine human creativity with Smartlead's precision.
Co-Founder, Digital Creativs
Nine out of 10. Ninety percent of our clients are on Smartlead unless they come in with an existing setup. That's the default.
Co-Founder, BuildingReach
At the end of the day, you have to take a bet on one tool or another. It was a no-brainer taking that bet on Smartlead. We had to even turn down the volume of our marketing campaigns - Smartlead was capable of driving more volume than our sales team was able to fulfill.
Founder & MD, Prospectiv
Since starting the business in January of this year, we've already generated $200K in sales exclusively from cold email. Smartlead has been central to our operations and has exceeded our expectations.
Founder, Growthlynk
There's so much stuff built on top of it. I would be dead if I had to rebuild it with another tool. I can manage hundreds of senders easily. I can send hundreds of thousands of emails.
Founder, Corebits
The platform's HubSpot integration, real-time Slack updates, and advanced campaign customization have been game changers for our business and our clients'.
Founder, Apex Ascension
From day one, we've never used anything else.
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