Three engagements. Three honest readouts.

Context

Eight-person team, $1.2M ARR, founder running outbound between customer calls. Two attempted SDR hires hadn't worked out. Apollo + Salesloft were in place; nothing was producing reliable pipeline.

The problem

The team was trying to sell to a too-broad ICP — anyone running cloud infrastructure at 50+ employees. Sequences were product-led, lists were stale, replies were going untriaged. Founder was spending 11 hours a week prospecting and resented every minute of it.

What we changed

• Cut the ICP from 'cloud-using SaaS 50–500' down to two segments: post-Series-A platform teams hiring infra roles, and mid-market data orgs running specific stack signals.
• Rebuilt the list with Clay enrichment around tech stack + hiring triggers. Verified contacts; killed about 40% of the original list as wrong-persona or stale.
• Wrote three messaging angles per segment — problem-led, trigger-led, and contrast — and ran them as an A/B/C across the eight weeks.
• Added a clean weekly readout: positive reply by segment, meeting bookings, meeting outcomes, and what got cut.

Execution

Three reps on the engagement (one strategist, two operators). Two-week experiment cycles. Daily reply tagging. Mid-pilot we cut the mid-market segment based on poor conversion and doubled down on platform teams.

Context

26-person team, $4.5M ARR, just closed Series A. Owned Clay, Apollo, Sales Nav, Salesloft, and a HubSpot CRM that nobody trusted. Had one SDR who'd been running sequences for six months with disappointing results.

The problem

The stack was right; the operating system was wrong. The team was sending high volume to undifferentiated lists. The Clay license was barely used. Reply quality was decent but meetings rarely became opportunities — buyers were 'kind of interested' but not really in market.

What we changed

• Rebuilt segmentation around three triggers, not job titles: companies hiring people ops at scale, those running benefits RFPs, and those that had recently consolidated HRIS systems.
• Designed Clay workflows the in-house SDR could maintain — enrichment, trigger detection, and personalization inputs.
• Cut sequence volume by 40%. Raised personalization quality. Net send was lower; positive reply was meaningfully higher.
• Wired the qualification bar tighter — moved from BANT to a fit-and-timing question pair that filtered out 'curious but not buying' meetings.

Execution

Eight-week pilot followed by a six-month managed engagement. We ran outbound alongside their in-house SDR, who picked up the playbook by month three and is now running it solo with quarterly check-ins.

Context

12-person team, late-Seed, technical founder doing most of the selling. Outbound was producing meetings — 40+ booked in the previous quarter — but only two opportunities had emerged. Founder was burning out on calls that went nowhere.

The problem

The system was over-indexed on activity and under-indexed on qualification. Sequences were being sent to 'security adjacent' titles that didn't have buying authority. Meetings booked = vanity. The founder was the qualification function and didn't have time to be.

What we changed

• Outbound audit first. We mapped the past quarter's meetings against opportunity creation to identify which segments + personas were producing nothing.
• Cut targeting down to two personas: heads of security at Series A+ B2B SaaS, and CTO/CISO at fintechs. Killed three sub-segments that had been generating meetings-with-no-pipeline.
• Rewrote messaging to lead with the specific operational pain — not the product. Added a pre-meeting qualification step that filtered out 'just curious' buyers.
• Introduced a 'meeting quality' tag in CRM so the team could measure pipeline-creating meetings vs. courtesy meetings.

Execution

Two-week audit followed by an eight-week pilot. The audit alone produced enough clarity that the team cut their outbound volume by 50% before the pilot officially started — and saw qualified pipeline go up.