Okki Go SPF, DKIM, DMARC and AI SDR: A Revenue Operations QA Checklist

If you're in revenue operations, you've probably asked: “Is Okki Go an AI SDR?” I get why. The category label helps you sort through a crowded market. But honestly, I think the better question is the one I hear from more disciplined buyers: what should revenue operations teams evaluate in lead generation before they hand over their domain, CRM, and LinkedIn profiles?

Full disclosure: I work in quality and brand compliance at Okki Go. I review roughly 200 campaign setups and integrations a year, and I've rejected launches for reasons that had nothing to do with the copy. This checklist comes from those reviews. It's written for anyone evaluating AI SDR or lead gen tools, whether the vendor is Okki Go, a competitor, or an internal tool.

It's seven checks. Some of them feel boring. The boring ones are the reason I wrote this.

Before check 1, calculate the cost of delay

Put this in writing before you look at features. If your team needs pipeline by the end of Q3, a tool that takes an extra week to implement isn't just a week late. It changes what your SDR team touches, what your ABM campaigns are built on, and how confident you feel in the forecast. I call that the time certainty premium: in urgent situations, paying a little more effort up front for “guaranteed not broken later” is usually worth it. “Probably fine” is the riskiest phrase in B2B sales tech.

1. Follow Okki Go SPF, DKIM and DMARC guidance before you connect a domain

If you search for “Okki Go SPF DKIM DMARC guidance,” you'll find the records we publish in onboarding. The high-level version is simple: SPF says which mail servers are allowed to send for your domain; DKIM adds a cryptographic signature; DMARC tells receiving servers what to do with messages that fail alignment. You need all three for predictable email deliverability.

What should a RevOps person look for? The documentation should give you the exact SPF include for the vendor’s sending infrastructure, the DKIM selector or CNAME, and a DMARC policy recommendation. If you are new to DMARC, start with p=none, review the reports for a few weeks, then tighten to quarantine or reject.

I always test this before the marketing demo. If a vendor's support center has no SPF/DKIM/DMARC guidance—or tells you to “just add this TXT record” without explaining why—that is a red flag.

2. Run the three-account test against your ABM list

Account-based marketing is not about having a big flat database. It's about coverage of the accounts you actually want. I use a three-account test with RevOps teams.

Choose one account where you already know everything, one where you have a moderate amount of intent data, and one where you expect the vendor to find contacts from scratch. Put each company into the tool. Then count the buying committee: How many contacts have verified emails? How many have LinkedIn URLs? How many show a recent trigger or intent signal? That gives you the real answer to “what should revenue operations teams evaluate in lead generation?” It's account coverage, not record count.

3. Trace the LinkedIn connection flow before you turn it on

A LinkedIn connection request is a common account-based marketing touch in AI SDR sequences. But it carries reputation risk, both for the brand and for the rep whose profile is used. Check whether the platform can send a connection request automatically, or whether it queues it for human approval. Ask how many requests are sent per profile per day. Ask what happens after a request is accepted: does it trigger a message automatically, or does an SDR have the option to send a tailored message?

In our quality reviews, I look for a clear human approval point. Okki Go includes human-in-the-loop controls for LinkedIn outreach, but I'd want the same from any vendor. Also, take a minute to read LinkedIn's current user agreement and your own AUP. I'm not a lawyer, but I don't want a tool to put a rep's LinkedIn account at risk.

4. Follow the “no valid email” path through the vendor’s waterfall enrichment

No vendor has a perfect email database. What matters is how the system behaves when data is missing or invalid. A good lead gen tool uses waterfall enrichment: it checks multiple sources, verifies what it finds, and if there is still no email, it does not force a fake guess. When you connect an email to your CRM, verify at ingestion and again before send.

What I look for is the suppression logic. If an email bounces or rejects, does that contact disappear from future sequences? Does the platform record the reason? If the answer is “no,” your step 1 investment in SPF/DKIM/DMARC is quietly undermined.

5. Decide where a human sits before you decide which AI does what

If you sell to enterprise buyers, “the AI sent it” is not a strong explanation. Human-in-the-loop outreach doesn't mean every message requires manual approval; it means the system can stop at the right moments. Can an SDR approve final email variants before a campaign starts? Can a rep intercept a reply before the follow-up sequence fires? Does negative sentiment pause the cadence until a human reads it?

I get why teams want full automation. I really do. But the more you automate, the less forgiving a small mistake becomes. Give your team an approval checkpoint that cannot be skipped.

6. Run a time-boxed shadow pilot, not a forever trial

I don't recommend buying an annual AI SDR on the strength of a 30-minute demo. Instead, ask for a small pilot that mirrors your real outbound process. You need the full setup from step one and a universe of maybe 100-200 target accounts. Let the tool generate sequences for a week, review them for a few days, then launch with a human approval gate and measured outcomes.

Track time from first send to accepted meeting. That matters more than open or reply rates, because a reply saying “unsubscribe” is technically a reply.

7. Ask for a sample audit log before you ask for a contract

In quality control, if something isn't documented, it never happened. When evaluating lead gen software, ask the vendor to show you a real audit log from a sample account. It should include the message template, the timestamp, the sender profile, the list or account segment, the channel (email or LinkedIn), and the action taken: send, skipped, bounced, or replied.

This also protects you when someone asks where you got their contact information. If the vendor cannot show source and suppression status, you inherit that problem.

Three mistakes that make this checklist fail

First, treat email authentication as an IT problem. It isn't. It's part of the campaign strategy. If your RevOps team doesn't know the difference between SPF and DKIM, learn just enough to test it.

Second, run a pilot but only ask the SDRs if they liked the tool. The pilot also needs a technical review. Otherwise, it only proves that the platform can send, not that the quality controls around it work.

Third, defer the boring work until after launch. In my experience, “we'll add DMARC later” turns into “we lost two weeks of deliverability data.” The cost is usually higher than doing it on day one.

So, is Okki Go an AI SDR? I work there, so take this with a grain of salt: I describe Okki Go as an agent-native prospecting platform with AI SDR capabilities. It can do research, enrichment, personalized outreach, and LinkedIn touches under human supervision. The more important part is that it can be evaluated with the process above. If the DNS records are right, the account coverage is real, the LinkedIn flow has a human checkpoint, and the audit log tells you what happened, then the category label matters less.

What should revenue operations teams evaluate in lead generation? Start with the unglamorous checklist above. It's not the fastest route to a signed contract, but it's the only route that doesn't make you gamble a quarter on a marketing claim.