February 6, 2024 | 6 min read
How Payrails went from founder-led sales to a scalable SDR motion with lemlist
Testimonial
When Stephen Tarrant joined Payrails as Head of SDR, his mandate was clear: take a company built on founder-led sales and put a scalable SDR motion underneath it. lemlist was brought in to power that motion. Here's how it's coming together.
98.5%Imbox placement rate
55.6%Reply rate on top campaigns
3,647Leads completed through outreach sequences
Ready to launch?
Convert strategy into pipeline
Launch your first outbound campaign with verified leads, AI sequences, and multichannel outreach from one platform.
Payrails chooses lemlist to set up outreach sequences for success
Payrails is a payment operating system for enterprise companies that manage card payments, covering orchestration, FX, and the rest of the payment stack. Their target customers are large-scale global enterprises that process high volumes of card payments across multiple regions and payment methods.
Before Stephen joined, sales had been driven by the founders and word of mouth. As Payrails scaled, the team needed a structured Sales Development and Account Executive function on top of that. Stephen came in to build it.
We're shifting from founder-led sales to a scalable SDR motion. The main reason for lemlist was outreach sequences, SDR outreach functionality.
— Stephen Tarrant, Head of SDR @Payrails
Before lemlist: scattered tools, dropping reply rates
Before lemlist, outreach was losing momentum at every step. Reply rates had dropped, follow-up open rates fell to 10% after a strong 52% on the first touch, and the replies that did come in were generic.
There was also no way to run multichannel outreach because email, LinkedIn, and calling all lived in separate places.
A daily sales workflow that lives inside lemlist
A few months in, the SDR team runs their daily workflow inside lemlist.
Leads can be pulled into lemlist in several ways: directly from LinkedIn Sales Navigator, from lemlist's own lead database, or via CSV import. Once in, sequences are built, launched, and managed inside the same tool. Replies land back in the same inbox, so SDRs don't lose context when switching between tools.
Before sending, lemlist verifies email addresses, finds phone numbers, and pulls data from LinkedIn profiles to make sure contact details are accurate and emails are likely to reach the inbox. HubSpot runs alongside as the CRM, with lemlist syncing sequence activity into each contact record automatically. If a lead no longer matches the HubSpot filters, lemlist pauses them from the sequence automatically.
lemlist became the single place for prospecting, sending, follow-up, and tracking, with the rest of the stack connecting around it.
Full visibility across every campaign
The lead funnel view in lemlist shows the team exactly where every prospect stands, from leads ready to send all the way through to opens, LinkedIn acceptance, replies, and interested prospects, all in one workspace. Across 137 campaigns and 3,647 completed leads, that visibility makes it easy to see what's working and where to focus next.
The results on the strongest campaigns back this up: 100% open rates, up to 100% LinkedIn invitation acceptance, and reply rates reaching 55.6%. Those numbers come from reaching the right people at the right time with the right context, not from sending at high volume. With 2,552 leads still actively moving through sequences, the system keeps running and improving as it grows.
Outreach across every channel
Payrails is not running a single-channel outbound motion. Inside lemlist, SDRs combine email, LinkedIn messages and connection requests, profile visits, voice messages, cold calls, and manual follow-up tasks inside coordinated sequences. That means social engagement, direct prospect interaction, phone outreach, and personalised follow-ups all happen in one structured workflow. The goal is to build familiarity with a prospect over time, not send the same email repeatedly.
Sequences are also built with branching logic. If a prospect accepts a LinkedIn connection request, lemlist can automatically send them a message. If they don't accept, it can trigger a call instead. The sequence adapts based on what the prospect does, rather than following a fixed path for everyone.
The report in lemlist shows how activity is spread across channels day by day. Instead of only measuring end results, Stephen can also see the underlying activity: how many touchpoints are happening, across which channels, and where engagement is strongest.
Intent Signals: reaching out when something is actually happening
Once sequences were running, Stephen added a second layer: Intent Signals.
Intent Signals in lemlist track events that suggest a company might be ready to talk: funding rounds, new hires in target roles, website visits, job changes, LinkedIn engagement, tech stack changes. Each event lands in a real-time watchlist that can be reviewed manually or pushed straight into a campaign, with signal context used to generate personalised icebreakers.
Stephen built a playbook of around 14 signal plays focused on the moments that matter most in payments. The approach: test first, verify results, then automate.
Once I'm confident with these signals and I'm happy that they're getting good results, I will then choose to automate it.
Two plays stood out early.
- Website visits with a multi-page filter.
A single page view can mean anything: a Google result, a random click. Two or more page views suggest deliberate research. Stephen set the watchlist to flag accounts only after two page views, filtering out noise and surfacing companies that look like they are actively evaluating.
- Funding events as account-creation triggers.When a company raises money, budgets open and priorities shift. Stephen treats funding announcements as a signal to act fast. If the company fits the ICP and isn't already in HubSpot, it goes straight into the CRM as a new account to pursue, before competitors have noticed.
If I see a funding trigger, I'm like, throw that into the CRM, that's an account to go after.
The results
Since moving to lemlist, Payrails has reached over 5,000 leads with a 98.5% inbox placement rate and a deliverability score of 79.8, meaning messages consistently land in the primary inbox, not spam. Open and reply rates improved across campaigns, and the SDR team adopted the tool quickly thanks to a workflow that is straightforward to use day to day.
Reporting also became more reliable. Lemlist's bot detection filters out false opens and clicks, so the data the team acts on is accurate. Combined with the HubSpot sync, Stephen has a clear picture of what is happening across every campaign at any point.
See what your team can do with lemlist.
Want to build a signal-driven outbound motion like Payrails? Try lemlist to track the moments your prospects are most likely to respond (funding rounds, new hires, website visits, job changes) and turn them into outreach that lands at the right time.
Payrails is a payment operating system that helps enterprises manage card payments, from orchestration to FX optimization.
WEBSITE
HEADQUARTERS
Berlin, Germany
INDUSTRY
Payments / Fintech
SIZE
91
FOUNDED
2021
