How to Future Proof Your Outbound Motion

Hey! I’m Justin 👋 

I founded Starbridge to help businesses win more government and education deals.

Welcome to the Public Sector Sales Brief — a newsletter for sales leaders selling into government and/or education.

This week, we’re diving into a topic that’s been top of mind for me: what the future of outbound looks like for businesses selling to government and schools.

It also happens to be the core product thesis behind why we believe Starbridge will be the best solution 5–10 years from now.

Let’s dive in.

The future of outbound is programmatic, automated, and driven by data

I’m fully convinced: in 3–5 years, most companies selling into this space will be running AI-powered outbound — and the traditional BDR role will look completely different.

At Starbridge, a single GTM engineer is generating more pipeline than the 10+ BDRs I managed at my last company. More founders I know are shifting to this model every day.

That’s not to say the BDR role is disappearing. We just hired two. But the role is evolving — from manual execution to orchestration. BDRs will drive strategy, inject creativity, and test what resonates — not just hit send.

The ROI is clear. But if you already have a BDR team, shifting overnight is risky. In this space, one bad email can burn a relationship. And most teams still have fragmented data, which makes it hard to execute programmatic outbound well.

It takes time to get this approach right

Yes, I believe most companies will move to a programmatic model eventually. And the person behind it might be an SDR, someone in RevOps, or even Marketing. But it’s not a quick switch you can flip —especially if you already have a established BDR team.

There’s a real administrative cost to learning this motion. You either need to up-skill internally or bring in outside help.

When we first started prototyping Starbridge with design partners, we kept running into the same issue: our early version assumed companies already had programmatic outbound capabilities—which just isn’t realistic for 99% of teams today. We could create highly customized emails at scale, but it was hard for customers to know how to fit it into their existing motions.

You need a bridge that doesn’t hurt your pipeline

Through dozens of conversations, it became clear: sales leaders need a clear, incremental path that improves pipeline outcomes over time— and reduces any risk to pipeline in the short-term.

Most companies aren’t ready to fully automate outbound with AI. The question is: what are the small steps you can take today to get there?

Start simple. Imagine your perfect ICP. Now imagine sending them the perfect email.

Break that email down into components — the hook, the relevance, the CTA. Then ask: which of these can I automate?

As you nail that, you can expand. Go beyond the perfect ICP. Test new segments. Run more hypotheses. Use AI to personalize at scale — without sacrificing quality.

This is our core product thesis at Starbridge: 2-3 years from now, 80% of your outbound is going to have a heavy AI component. We’re building the rails so that you can get ROI today and built your AI outbound motion for tomorrow.

We reduce the administrative burden by pre-building data sets and workflows tailored to this market—so reps can wake up to a ready-to-go list of top signals and leads, without needing to build it all from scratch.

Starbridge Lead List

If I were Starting the Transition Today…

1. Start with your ideal email — then work backwards to automate it.

Most teams get stuck thinking about what’s possible today. Instead, write your dream outbound message. Then break it into parts and test how to automate each piece.

2. Get comfortable leveraging data in outbound.

It drives me crazy how few sellers use data today. You don’t need deep customization at scale—start simple. Ask BDRs to spend 5–10 minutes researching their top 10 accounts and incorporate one insight into their messaging. Build the muscle.

3. Track and learn from every experiment.

Too many teams treat outbound like a shot in the dark. Every campaign is a learning opportunity. If you’re not tracking results closely, you’re leaving improvement (and pipeline) on the table.

Feature Spotlight: Identify New Grant Funding

Trigger outbound based on grant & budget approvals at scale.

Here’s the play:

1.) Create a ‘bridge’ with your target list of accounts

2.) Use the AI Analysis agent to search through each account’s URL to find mentions of new grants or budget approvals.

3.)Once you’re satisfied with the results, you can directly sync the data into Salesforce .

Thank you for reading!

Next week, I’m sharing our predictable revenue playbook 2.0 - how we’re revamping the traditional outbound motion to one that can take advantage of

As always my LinkedIn inbox is always open. Reach out if you have any questions.

See you next week,

— Justin