How to Configure Exclusions

Intro to Exclusions

Exclusions in Unify are a powerful way to keep your outbound strategy clean, relevant, and aligned with your go-to-market objectives. By setting up exclusions, you can prevent emails from being sent to contacts or accounts that shouldn’t be part of your outreach—such as active customers, late-stage opportunities, competitors, or educational institutions. These safeguards help avoid unnecessary or confusing messages, keeping your campaigns focused on high-opportunity segments.

To begin setting up exclusions, log into your Unify instance and navigate to the Settings section in the left-hand menu. From there, click into the Exclusions tab, where you’ll see a list of common exclusion templates provided by Unify. These include recommended categories such as Schools, Competitors, Customers, and Open Opportunities—each with guided walkthroughs to help you apply accurate filtering logic.

For example, if you’re excluding schools, you can use domain-based logic and keyword filters like .edu or names that contain “university,” “school,” or “college.” Unify allows you to preview matching results so you can confirm accuracy before activating the exclusion. For competitors, you simply input their domains—Unify automatically simplifies the URLs and shows you the matches so you can finalize the setup quickly.

When it comes to customers and open opportunities, the most effective way to filter them is through a CRM integration. If your Salesforce or HubSpot instance is connected, Unify can pull in fields like Opportunity Stage, Account Type, or Lifecycle Stage to define who counts as a customer or an in-progress deal. For example, you might exclude anyone with an opportunity stage of “Closed Won” to ensure that existing clients don’t receive outbound prospecting emails. You can also use the “Other” option to define custom logic based on your specific CRM data model.

Beyond the guided templates, Unify offers a manual exclusion builder. This lets you create new exclusions from scratch by selecting either companies or individuals, and then applying filters across any available field—whether that’s job title, domain, persona match, or CRM-synced data. This is especially helpful for more advanced use cases, such as excluding your own internal team, existing partners, or segments under active contract negotiations.

Once configured, these exclusions automatically apply across your plays and workflows—ensuring that Unify respects your defined boundaries during outbound execution. Whether you’re scaling new campaigns or refreshing your territory, exclusions give you confidence that you’re targeting the right audience while avoiding overlap or redundancy.

With these tools in place, your outbound messaging becomes more strategic, your reputation stays protected, and your team can operate more efficiently—all while maintaining a clear and accurate boundary around who should (and shouldn’t) receive outreach.