When Your Domain Gets Blacklisted by Your Own Ideal Customers

Siit had a problem that would make any startup founder lose sleep: they were building a product specifically for IT teams, but they couldn't actually reach IT teams without getting flagged as spam.

"We didn't just struggle to reach IT managers—we actually burned our main email domain trying to prospect them," admits Arnaud, Founding Sales at Siit. The more emails Siit sent to IT leaders, the worse their deliverability became. IT managers were blacklisting Siit's domain faster than the startup could find new prospects.

"We saw promising results with handcrafted, personalized emails," Chalom explains. "But scaling that approach seemed impossible without building complex infrastructure ourselves—which we didn't have bandwidth for as a growing startup."

The Solution

Rebuilding Email Infrastructure

• Complete email authentication setup (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) configured to enterprise standards

• Sophisticated sending patterns that respected ISP throttling and reputation algorithms

• Multi-channel orchestration designed for relationship-building rather than volume optimization

"If we're selling a technically sophisticated product to technical buyers, our outreach infrastructure needed to match that sophistication," Chalom notes.

Targeting Based on Intent Signals

Topo helped Siit identify prospects based on behavioral signals rather than demographics:

• Companies actively expanding Slack/Teams implementations

• IT departments posting support-related job listings

• Leaders engaging with content about employee experience or service automation

• Recent adoption of tools in Siit's integration ecosystem

"We stopped thinking in terms of 'IT Manager at 500+ person company,'" explains Chalom. "Instead, we looked for specific indicators that an IT team was experiencing the exact problems we solve."

Messages That Proved Understanding

Topo helped Siit craft messages that demonstrated real credibility:

• Integration-specific pain points: "You use Okta for SSO—here's the #1 user complaint we're seeing around access requests, and how we solve it."

• Peer credibility: "Here's how [Similar Company] reduced their IT ticket volume by 40% while improving employee satisfaction scores."

The Results

Four months later, Siit's outbound metrics transformed:

• 3x improvement in response rates from IT Directors and VPs

• 70% reduction in time spent on prospect research and campaign management

• 67% decrease in email bounce rates

• 78% reduction in spam complaints from IT professionals

"Before Topo, this level of sophisticated outbound would have required hiring a dedicated ops person to manage all the technical complexity," concludes Chalom. "Now our salespeople can execute advanced campaigns themselves without needing to understand deliverability infrastructure or spend hours on prospect research."