Run partnership outreach with OpenClaw in Operator

Opening a partnership conversation means reaching the person who owns partner programs at a target company, explaining a specific mutual benefit, and staying on it through the follow ups that most deals need before anyone replies. That work is repetitive enough to automate and specific enough that you still want to read every draft before it goes out. Operator.io gives your OpenClaw agent a workspace file and scheduled jobs, so it can own the list building and the cadence while you keep judgment on the pitch.

Connect Apollo to find the right contacts and Resend to send from your domain, and the agent turns a target like "platform partnerships leads at mid market fintechs" into a tracked list of named contacts, each with a tailored intro waiting for your review.

What you get

Two services do the legwork, and the agent runs the loop between them:

• Apollo's database covers professional records with filters for company size, industry, and job title. OpenClaw calls the People API Search endpoint to find decision makers at companies matching your description, then enriches the ones you pick through People Enrichment to pull a verified work email.
• Resend sends from your own verified domain through the send email API, so an intro lands as mail from you.

The agent keeps a CSV in its workspace with a row per company and contact, why they are a fit, how many times you have reached out, and when the next touch is due. That gives you a pipeline you can read and query in chat instead of a sequence buried inside a sales tool dashboard.

Partnership intros need to name the specific benefit on both sides. You describe the kind of company you want to work with and what you are proposing, the agent brings back the right people with a draft for each, and you approve or rewrite before anything goes out. Then it follows up with whoever went quiet on your cadence and stops the moment someone replies or asks to be left alone.

Finding the right contact

Partnership ownership varies by company size.

Crossbeam's guide to partnerships roles lays out how the bigger companies split the function. The agent searches Apollo by the titles you specify and the company filters you describe, then shows you the matches before spending an enrichment credit.

The type of partnership you are after changes the search angle too.

Telling the agent which type you are pursuing helps it pick titles and frame the intro around the right outcome.

Apollo also exposes an Organization Search endpoint for finding companies by industry, headcount, and funding stage before you search for people inside them. The agent can use both endpoints to build a target list of companies first, then find the partnership owner at each one.

Before you start

You need an Apollo account, a Resend account, and a domain whose DNS you can edit. Apollo API access depends on your plan; confirm your subscription includes API access before you create a key. The free plan includes a small monthly credit pool for enrichment, and paid tiers raise both credits and rate limits.

Resend's free tier covers 3,000 emails a month and 100 a day on one verified domain, which is more than enough for the handful of well aimed intros real partnership outreach runs on. Resend counts each recipient toward both limits, as documented in their account quotas page.

Apollo can send through its own sequences if you connect a mailbox, so Resend is optional. This guide uses Resend because it sends from a domain you own and lets the agent write each intro itself. Partnership notes need custom framing per company, which fits a compose and send API better than a fixed sequence template.

Step 1: Create an Apollo API key

In Apollo, open Settings, then Integrations, then Connect beside Apollo API. Click API Keys and Create new key. Toggle Set as master key or select the search and enrichment endpoints.

The People API Search endpoint requires a master key. Apollo passes the key in an X-Api-Key header, documented in the Apollo API key guide. Searching costs no credits; enriching a contact to reveal their email spends one credit per match.

Step 2: Verify a domain and create a Resend key

In Resend, open Domains, add your domain, copy the SPF and DKIM records into your DNS, and click Verify. The Resend domains guide walks through the records. After SPF and DKIM verify, an optional DMARC record helps deliverability on Gmail and Outlook.

If your domain is on Cloudflare, OpenClaw can add those records for you once you have connected Cloudflare. Then create an API key under API Keys and copy it; it starts with re_ and shows only once, per the Resend API keys docs.

Step 3: Add both keys to Operator

In your Operator dashboard, open Environment and add APOLLO_API_KEY and RESEND_API_KEY with their values. Both are encrypted and shown once, and OpenClaw reads each by name, so the keys stay out of any chat. Starting from the prompts library collects both inline before the prompt sends.

Step 4: Send the prompt

Connect Telegram or Discord on the channels page, then send the partnership prompt:

Run my partnership and business development outreach, finding the right
people with my Apollo API key and emailing them with my Resend API key.
Create a spreadsheet in your workspace, a CSV with columns for the company,
the contact, their title, email, why they are a fit, the date I first
reached out, how many times I have followed up, when the next one is due,
and the status. When I name the kind of company I want to partner with,
search Apollo for the decision makers who fit and enrich the ones I pick to
get their email, then add a row for each, checking the file first so the
same contact never lands twice. Write a short, specific intro for each one
that says what I am proposing and why it helps them, show me the drafts, and
send the approved ones through Resend from my name and address with a clear
way to opt out. Set up an automation that follows up with the contacts who
have gone quiet on the cadence I set, stops the moment someone replies or
asks to be left alone, and messages me here with what went out and who is
interested. Before you start, ask me the type of partner I am after and the
pitch, the from name and address to send as, how many follow ups and how far
apart, and a daily cap so the outreach stays personal.

The same prompt is in the prompts library, ready to send as is.

Using it day to day

You name a target and the pitch, the agent comes back with the right contacts and a draft intro for each, and you approve or sharpen them. From there the follow ups run on the weekdays you chose, and you hear from the agent when there is a draft waiting for a look. It is not watching your inbox, so when a reply comes in you forward it or tell the agent what the person said, and it updates the status and pauses the chase for that company. When someone replies with interest and then the thread stalls, have it set a reminder to circle back in a couple of weeks.

Since the whole thing is a CSV it maintains, you can ask it which companies have gone cold, who replied but stalled, or which framing of the pitch is landing, with the reply side of that reflecting what you have passed back rather than anything read from your mail. The file holds the company, the contact, their title, and the email you enriched from Apollo, which makes it a working contact list you own and can clean out as deals close or people change jobs.

You can also ask it to research a specific company before drafting, pulling public details like recent funding, product launches, or existing partner pages so the intro references something concrete about them. Ask it to include the source link for anything it puts in a draft, since funding figures and launch dates go stale fast and a wrong one in your opening line is the quickest way to look like you did not do the reading. Queue a fresh batch the same way you started by naming a new company type and pitch.

Writing intros that land

Partnership emails fail when they read like a product pitch with "partner" swapped in for "customer." The intro should name the overlap: shared customers, complementary features, or a joint go to market motion one of you already runs. Partner Fleet's overview of partner manager responsibilities notes that partner managers spend much of their time recruiting and nurturing relationships, which means they see generic pitches constantly. A note that names their existing integration ecosystem, a specific customer segment you both serve, or a concrete co marketing idea stands out against template outreach.

The agent drafts from what you tell it about your offer and what Apollo returns about the contact's title and company. You sharpen the draft with details only you know: a mutual connection, a product gap you noticed on their site, or a metric from a similar partnership you have run before. Every intro still comes to you before it sends.

Good to know

Partnership outreach runs at low volume with high context. The agent finds contacts through Apollo, tracks the pipeline in a CSV, and sends follow ups on your cadence through Resend. You approve or sharpen each intro before it goes out. For a ten company target list with three follow ups each, Resend's free tier and Apollo's search endpoint cover the whole run without touching paid limits on either side.

To set it up, open the prompts library and send the partnership outreach prompt to your agent.