Sönke Venjacob’s playbook for turning inbound interest into booked meetings

It’s a familiar pattern. A buyer visits your website or engages with your content, but they don’t take the next step of booking a meeting.

What happens next? For many teams, the answer is nothing. The lead sits in the CRM. Reps focus on prospects who did book a meeting or fill out a form. Interest goes cold.

Sönke Venjacob has seen this play out across dozens of go-to-market teams. As the founder of Platinum Agency, a GTM firm that helps US and European companies accelerate pipeline through content and outbound, he spends his time inside the systems that sit between buyer interest and sales conversations.

“Money is in the follow-ups,” Sönke says. “But a lot of companies are losing because they don’t have systems in place that target interested people and nurture them over time.”

The issue is not just follow-up. It is the entire system around how teams capture interest, qualify fit, route leads, and decide when a human should step in. When any part of that system relies on manual effort or memory, leads slip through.

That is why Sönke focuses on removing manual work and keeping humans focused on strategy, content, and closing. For him, modern inbound is not a passive funnel. It is an always-on conversion system.

Here is how he builds it.

1. Ensure every lead is engaged and nurtured automatically

Most sales teams prioritize leads that are ready to book a meeting immediately. Everyone else is deprioritized, even if they have shown real intent.

Sönke sees this as the biggest leak in inbound.

“When reps are dealing with hundreds of different contacts, it’s just natural that leads are going to slip through if you don’t have a system in place,” he says.

His solution is to remove reliance on the rep. The moment someone shows interest but doesn’t book a meeting, they are automatically moved into a nurture sequence.

“Whenever a lead is interested, move them into a subsequence dedicated to nurturing,” Sönke says. “That means providing even more value.”

He recommends using existing marketing collateral that is relevant to the prospect, based on the context you are able to collect.

“If you already have marketing collateral, look at it and ask what we can provide that makes them book the call and stay engaged,” he says.

Teams can start with a single nurture sequence for all interested leads, then add segmentation over time.

“You can get super nerdy and create different nurturing subsequences,” Sönke says. “A prospect from a super big enterprise company probably has different pain points than a small startup.”

The workflow

Sönke’s system is designed to ensure no interested lead ever goes untouched by implementing four steps:

Identify: Capture who is visiting your site using website visitor identification tools.

Qualify: Send that data to an enrichment platform to check CRM status and existing relationships.

Enrich: Fill in missing contact details for qualified prospects.

Engage: Automatically place them into email and LinkedIn outreach sequences.

For high-intent visitors, Sönke recommends immediate human follow-up.

“Set up a dedicated channel,” he says. “Push it to the rep so they can call immediately. Because you already have the phone number enriched, you already have everything you need.”

Lower-intent visitors continue through automated outreach until they show stronger buying signals.

The goal is to make sure interest never dies due to inaction.

2. Turn engagement into prioritized conversations

Inbound interest doesn’t only come from website visits. Content engagement is another strong signal.

“If you have any form of marketing activities, that’s amazing,” Sönke says. “Because then we get some more engagement, and it’s warmer than just doing cold outbound.”

Sönke’s workflow for content engagement mirrors his website visitor system, but starts with a different signal and uses a defined set of tools to move from engagement to outreach.

The workflow

Here’s how Sönke operationalizes content engagement into prioritized conversations:

1. Capture engagement (LinkedIn)

   Sönke tracks who engages with company and personal LinkedIn content using:

   • PhantomBuster for follower tracking and profile visits

   • Trigify for post engagement data

     “Phantom Buster is more for follower tracking and profile visits. Trigify is our tool of choice for getting engagement on our posts,” he says.

2. Enrich and qualify contacts

   Engagement data is then sent to Clay to enrich contact and company information.

3. Cross-check CRM status

   From there, contacts are checked against the CRM to avoid duplicate or conflicting outreach.

4. Confirm ICP fit

   Contacts that don’t match the ideal customer profile are filtered out before any outreach begins.

5. Initiate outreach

   If the contact is ICP and not already in an active sales motion, outreach starts while the engagement is still fresh.

   “If they’re an ICP and not already a client, just reach out,” Sönke says. “They already engaged with your content.”

The same workflow applies to competitor engagement. Sönke uses Trigify to identify people engaging with competitor content, then runs those contacts through the same enrichment, CRM checks, and qualification steps before reaching out.

“You could use Trigify to check what the engagement of your competition looks like, get that data as well, and reach out to them,” he says. “It would need a different campaign, but it can be another way to get warm people into outreach.”

3. Lead with value instead of asking for a meeting

Automation ensures coverage. Qualification ensures focus. But what teams say in the first message still determines whether a conversation starts.

“One of the biggest mistakes I see people doing is that they are trying to hard sell in their first email or LinkedIn DM,” Sönke says. “It used to work years ago. But these days, if you can lead with value, it’s just way more successful.”

In most cases, he doesn’t recommend asking for a meeting in the first message, even when a prospect has already shown interest. There are two exceptions.

• Brand dominance: Some companies can lead with a meeting request because their brand already carries trust and familiarity, lowering the friction to say yes.“ Salesforce can still do this,” he says. “If Salesforce is coming in like, ‘Hey, should we speak?’ so many people would still say yes.”

• Multiple strong signals: A direct meeting ask can also work when several clear signals of intent appear at the same time, making readiness obvious. “There has to be many signals and triggers come together,” he says. “Then you can send a message where people are like, perfect, let’s speak.”

Outside of those cases, he advises starting the conversation differently.

Rather than pushing for a meeting, Sönke focuses on offering something useful that invites a response.

In one campaign, he invited content engagers to join a free Discord community for people in similar roles.

“You get connected to other like-minded people,” he says. “You get exposed to maybe more job opportunities. And it’s completely free with no downside.”

That approach produced reply rates above 30%.

“It’s really a no-brainer,” Sönke says. “There is really zero personalization. It’s just a very good offering to a warm audience.”

The goal is to earn the meeting by starting with relevance instead of a cold ask.

Pro tip: Don’t measure reps on meetings booked

Sönke often sees teams making cold asks and leading without value when SDRs are measured purely on meetings booked.

“People get pushed into a call and they’re like, ‘Yeah, what are we going to talk about?’” he says. “But it’s because the SDR still gets paid by a meeting.”

His recommendation is to tie success to downstream outcomes, not just activity.

“If you look at revenue attribution and push that as a determining factor, that’s how I would look at it,” he says.

When intent is understood before outreach and meetings are not the only goal, conversations become intentional instead of forced.

Final takeaway

Sönke’s playbook addresses a problem most revenue teams recognize but rarely fix. Interested leads slip through because there is no system designed to capture, qualify, and engage that interest at the right time.

His approach is straightforward: use enrichment and qualification to decide who should be contacted and when, automate follow-up and nurture so no signal is lost, and lead with value in all outreach.

Spara supports this kind of inbound infrastructure. When a buyer visits a site, engages with content, or asks a question, Spara can engage immediately with a website chatbot or voice call. It can follow up via email or phone call, qualify fit, answer questions, and route to sales when a human conversation makes sense.

Modern inbound shouldn’t be a passive funnel. It needs to operate as an always-on conversion system, with fewer leaks, clearer handoffs, and conversations that are relevant to each buyer.