Sales best practices

Start 2026 strong: AI personalization playbook

Jonathan Molina

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December 16, 2025

TL;DR

Outbound only works when it feels contextual (i.e., relevant and personalized).

I used to do all personalization by hand, but now I turn every research workflow (global footprint, hubs, signals) into an automated AI Snippet inside Amplemarket.

The result is targeted and contextual outreach at scale that started conversations with 87% of the people who received it. This playbook breaks down the exact system.

I’m Jonathan, SDR → AE → Senior AE at Deel.
I’ve built my entire outbound strategy around one idea:

If your email feels generic, it dies.
If it feels intentional, it gets answered.

But here’s the problem every AE faces:
Personalization works… but it’s painfully slow.

A surprising stat from a recent Anthropic study shows that sales is notably underrepresented in AI usage compared to most other categories.

Categories such as computer science, education or research are already leveraging AI to work faster and smarter. Sales teams, however, still rely on a lot of manual work, from research, sequences, CRM updates, to prioritization.

The teams that adopt AI now will outperform everyone else, simply because they’ll spend less time on manual work and more time selling.

Percentage of sales professionals not using AI (Feb 2025).

And every rep has their own manual rabbit hole:

Scanning funding rounds
Digging into annual reports
Checking tech stack
Reviewing job postings
Scrolling LinkedIn “People” tabs
Reading org charts
Looking for expansion signals

Different workflows.
Same problem: time.

At Deel, my personas (HR, TA, Ops, Finance) care a lot about one thing: how global their team really is.
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Because global teams = global hiring pain = Deel fit.

For years, I personalized manually.
Today, I automate the entire workflow, without losing 1:1 relevance.

Here’s my exact play.

Hi everyone! So today I want to show you how I hyper personalize my sequences on Amplemarket, the best tool you can use to do that. So I've used that demo account so that's why this is pretty empty. I cannot really reveal who I'm going after. You might be in there. Just kidding. So, I want to go straight into this, very cool feature that they just released, which is called the AI snippet. So before the AI snippet, I used to do that in a less automatic way. I used to go on each profile. I've actually shared a video on this, last time. Go on each profile, grab the info I wanted and while I was sending it to the sequence, I was adding a little note that would be inserted in my first sentence in in my email sequences, which could be used in other emails. But anyway, this was a bit manual, not just a bit, it was pretty manual. But sometimes, you know, when you want to be hyper personalized, you have to go through this. This time I found, I mean, they created a way that allows me now to do this process but automatically that saves me a lot of time and allows me to be even more creative in creating a lot of different plays hyper personalized on my outreach. So I want to take an example right now that I'm going to target. I want to target AI companies and my topic, my main business case is going to be around the war for AI talents and how you need to be able to have solutions like DEAL to be able to hire internationally the fastest possible in the most compliant way possible. So this is kind of my niche. I'm not going to the full picture of EOR. I'm going to a specific niche targeting specific people regarding a specific use case. Okay, so this is what I want to build. On top of that, so this is already personalized but not an industry, but I want to personalize based on the company. And something that really helps me in my company is finding companies that are very international. So what I would do is usually I would go to LinkedIn and try to see on the people tab how diverse, how international the team is and I would add a line on this in the first email of my sequences. But this takes time. I have to go through the company. I have to check the locations and then come back and add it to each of my leads. So now with the AI snippet, what I do is, let's say I create one sequence from scratch. This will be AI talent war. We can work on the subject. This is not the topic of this of this video. The real topic here is, this AI snippet. So I go here. Let's say I will create a new one. And so I already worked on the prompt before, so this works. So this would be my prompt. Check how many countries, company name, operating using LinkedIn data. List the top three countries along with the number of employees in each in a short, clear sentence. And so it would write something like, hey, I noticed company name has offices in all of the countries and how many employees basically it has. So this gives straight away to my prospect the feeling that I've done the work. I'm talking to them in particular. There is a specific reason, specific trigger that I'm reaching out to them. And this is how you hyper personalize an outreach because you are focusing on a specific niche, specific business case. And also I'm letting them know that I'm contacting their company for a specific reason. So this is really a game changer and you have to try it.

1. Choose a trigger that actually matters to your persona

What data points make personalization feel real instead of generic?

Generic personalization is dead.
“I saw your blog.”
“I loved your podcast.”

Nobody cares.

The only personalization that works is trigger-based relevance, something directly tied to the problem you solve.

For my Deel personas, the strongest trigger is:
The company’s global footprint + employee distribution

If they’re hiring internationally, scaling across multiple hubs, or expanding markets, I know the pain is real.

2. Define the niche + the angle

How do I make my outbound feel like it was written just for one person?

Hyper-personalization becomes powerful when you stack multiple layers:

Industry: AI companies
Play: War for AI talent
Persona: HR / TA / Ops / Finance
Angle: Hiring globally fast + compliance
Trigger: Actual global footprint (countries + hubs + headcount)
Solution fit: Deel’s ability to hire anywhere, fast

This is how you build messaging that feels written for them, not for everyone.

3. Turn your manual research into an automated system

What’s the fastest way to research leads without doing it by hand?

Before AI Snippets, I’d go:

LinkedIn → People tab → filter by location → count hubs → write a line → copy → paste → repeat x 50.

It worked.
But it didn’t scale.

So I turned the entire process into an Amplemarket automation.

4. Use this exact AI Snippet to personalize at scale

How do I personalize emails at scale without losing quality?

Inside Amplemarket, I use this prompt:

Prompt:

Check how many countries {{company_name}} operates in using LinkedIn data. List the top 3 countries along with the number of employees in each in a short, clear sentence.

Rules:
Write a short, natural line that reads well in an email, like: “Noticed {{company_name}} has offices in the US (500 employees), India (100 employees), and Germany (50 employees).”

Keep it to one sentence.

Tone should be warm, congratulatory, and sales-friendly, but still factual.

Fallback: I've been following {{company_name}} and thought now would be a great time to reach out.

Amplemarket then generates that line automatically and injects it into every email in the sequence.

The output instantly tells the prospect:

I researched their company
I reached out for a specific reason
I understand their global context
This isn’t a generic automation

It’s the fastest way I’ve found to scale true 1:1 personalization.

5. Deploy across multiple plays, without losing depth

How do I scale personalization across multiple personas and industries?

Once the snippet works, you can build:

Niche sequences for different verticals
Persona-specific triggers
Micro-segmented outbound plays
Industry-led messaging at scale

You still get the impact of hand-crafted personalization, but with the speed of automation.

This is the future of outbound.

6. Extend the system to any trigger you want

What signals should I track for outbound personalization?

The global-footprint play is my strongest because it aligns perfectly with Deel’s value prop.

But your use case may be:

Funding rounds
Layoffs or hiring freezes
New markets
Tech-stack changes
Leadership shifts
Job openings indicating pain
Rapid headcount growth
New product launches

If you can research it manually, you can automate it with an AI Snippet.

Just replace the signal.
Keep the structure.

Takeaway

Personalization still wins, you just shouldn’t be doing it by hand.

Amplemarket turns research into repeatable, scalable, 1:1 relevance.

The results speak for themselves.

I’ve been running these hyper-personalized sequences on small, highly curated pools of ~30 accounts per business case.

With one clear angle + one specific trigger + a multichannel approach (email + LinkedIn + phone), I was able to get in contact with 87% of these accounts within 3 months.

Not meetings booked → actual conversations.

From cold → warm → engaged.
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That’s the power of relevance at scale.

Want more plays?

‍Here are 20 ways AI Smart Snippets can personalize your sales emails at scale.
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‍I share outbound tactics, AI workflows, and my real sequences weekly.

→ Follow me on LinkedIn (Jonathan Molina)

→ Or DM me “AI Playbook” and I’ll send the exact templates I use at Deel.

Frequently asked questions

Funding rounds, hiring, tech stack changes, job postings, competitor interactions, events, reviews, headcount growth, and new product launches. These are just a few of the top candidates.

Keep the personalization factual and contextual, not flowery. AI Snippets help with that by allowing you to automatically generate personalized, natural-sounding email lines based on real lead data, so your outreach feels human and avoids robotic, repetitive language.

The first touch should be the most personal, but keeping personalization throughout the cadence improves reply rates, especially in competitive markets. Besides AI snippets, Amplemarket's Duo Copilot helps you do exactly that by creating unique and personalized approaches for every lead, on every channel, in every stage.

Ask yourself: “Does this signal indicate pain I solve?” If the answer's yes → great trigger. If not → skip it.

Not 100%, but it streamlines it and replaces the repetition. AI handles the data, saving you hours on research and personalization every day, and you handle the strategy. That's what Amplemarket's AI snippets are all about.