Explore how outbound campaigns can be used to test market hypotheses, validate product-market fit, and gather strategic insights - especially for startups and companies launching new solutions.
Before you start scaling sales, it’s worth finding out whether there is a market to sell to in the first place. An outbound campaign can help not only with lead generation but also with validating market hypotheses, understanding your target audience and avoiding costly mistakes.
Product-market fit (PMF) is one of those terms that often comes up in discussions about scaling, attracting investors or entering a new market, yet it’s surprisingly rarely validated in practice. And that’s an issue, because aligning your product with real market demand is the foundation of growth for any company that wants to expand in a sustainable way.
PMF isn’t a product team’s declaration or an investor’s opinion. It’s a raw, unfiltered confrontation between a company’s vision and market reality. Unfortunately, in that clash, it often turns out that what seems obvious internally may appear unclear, unappealing or simply unnecessary from the customer’s perspective.
In situations like this, the worst thing you can do is scale. Investing in advertising, marketing automation, or a sales team without clarity is a fast track to burning cash. Launching full-scale operations before you’re certain whose specific problem your product solves often leads to random guesswork rather than strategic growth. Without a clear answer to that question, everything else becomes a shot in the dark.
Fortunately, instead of guessing, there’s a way to test it - relatively inexpensively. That’s where outbound comes in. We’ll show you how we use outbound campaigns as a strategic tool for market research and validating business hypotheses - and why this approach works especially well when there’s nothing to sell yet, but it’s already worth starting conversations.
In most companies, outbound is associated with one thing only: a way to generate sales leads. And rightly so. A well-executed cold email campaign can produce concrete inquiries that eventually turn into closed deals. But that’s just one side of the coin.
At Vanderbuild, we use outbound not only when a client wants to increase sales. More and more often, we run campaigns where the primary goal is to gain insight into the market - how it responds to a specific message, whether it understands the described problem, and if it sees value in the proposed solution. Instead of generating leads for the pipeline, we generate feedback, signals, and insights that support smarter business decisions. Sometimes, the most valuable outcome of an outbound campaign is, surprisingly, a lack of enthusiasm from the market.
In sales-oriented campaigns, the lead is the goal in itself. In the campaigns we design for market testing, a lead is just one of several outcomes - valuable, but not the only one.
Before we invest time and money in developing a sales narrative, we first verify whether there’s actually someone to talk to, and whether what we have to say truly resonates with the market.
We observe the reactions - not just in terms of numbers, but in the actual content of the responses.
This gives our clients real data that supports further business decisions and influences the company’s strategy and direction.
The starting point is a business hypothesis. Together with the client, we define what exactly we want to test:
At this stage, we’re not looking for sales opportunities. We’re looking for information that enables better decision-making.
Example:
The client assumes that their solution might be attractive to mid-sized manufacturing companies struggling with problem XYZ.
Our task is to test this hypothesis under controlled conditions. We create several versions of the messaging. We vary not only the narrative, but also the angle of perception. Sometimes we emphasize the problem, other times we focus on the potential outcome - the value created for the client.
Once the campaign goes live, our primary metrics are the number of replies and their quality. We continuously analyze the market’s reactions and - crucially - adjust the campaign in real time. If we see that the message isn’t landing, we iterate, refine, narrow or broaden the target group.
The client receives not just a numerical summary, but more importantly, a strategic picture that clearly answers the following questions:
Learn more about how to build an effective cold email campaign in 2025.
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A SaaS company with a newly developed product approached us with a clear objective: to quickly identify potential customers and validate several go-to-market hypotheses within a three-month timeframe.
At Vanderbuild, we designed a structured outbound campaign process aimed at testing 10 distinct sales hypotheses over the course of three months.
Each sales hypothesis involved defining:
Each segment consisted of 300 to 500 contacts - decision-makers identified within relevant buying committees. For every hypothesis, we deployed tailored outreach via email and LinkedIn, matching the language and context to the role and responsibility of each recipient.
After three months, the client gained:
Our collaboration with Andritz began with a straightforward objective: to generate qualified sales leads. The campaign focused on pellet mill dies and was directed at companies in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia involved in pellet production or those that could potentially expand into this area through their existing wood-processing operations. The key challenge for Andritz was the need to explore market potential without deploying their sales team on-site. Our task was to assess the commercial viability of the region before any scaling decisions were made.
As part of the preparation phase, we worked closely with the client to define two key target segments:
After completing the initial prospecting phase, we compiled a list of 162 companies and manually verified their business activities and contact data. The campaign generated 31 replies and 7 qualified leads. However, the most valuable outcome turned out to be an unexpected one.
In the early days of the campaign, we observed that some companies, although systematically labeled as biomass producers, were not actually involved in pellet production. This observation triggered a strategic iteration. We expanded the database with 62 additional companies that better matched the revised targeting criteria.
This case highlights how, even in a sales-focused campaign, a well-structured outbound process can uncover fundamental gaps in market assumptions. As a result, our client gained not only new business opportunities but also a clearer understanding of the actual market potential - without needing boots on the ground.
For Andritz, this translated into significant resource savings and a highly valuable strategic insight: the initial hypothesis regarding sales scalability in these markets was not confirmed.
You can read more about the campaign for Andritz.
Below are three real-world scenarios where using outbound strategically can be far more effective than spending months guessing, analyzing, or debating behind closed doors.
Challenges:
Consequences of skipping PMF validation:
Benefits of validating and achieving PMF:
Challenges:
Consequences of skipping PMF validation:
Benefits of validating and achieving PMF:
Challenges:
Consequences of skipping PMF validation:
Benefits of validating and achieving PMF: