A B2B payments company had grown on events and referrals alone. That worked until it didn't — growth targets outran the referral network, and there was no second channel to turn on.
The company provided payments infrastructure to mid-market businesses, selling primarily to finance directors and heads of treasury. Deal values were healthy and retention was strong. The problem was where deals came from.
Essentially all pipeline arrived through two sources: industry events and referrals from existing customers. Both worked well and neither could scale on demand. When the board set a growth target that exceeded what the referral network could plausibly produce, there was no third channel to switch on.
There was also no CRM. Pipeline was tracked in a shared spreadsheet with a tab per rep. Nobody could answer basic questions about conversion rates, and the sales process existed only in the heads of the people running it.
Regulated-industry messaging added a genuine constraint. Every outbound asset required compliance review before use, which meant the usual approach of rapid copy iteration had to be redesigned around a review cycle rather than fought against.
Figures measured over the engagement period and reconciled against the client CRM.
| Metric | Before | After eight months |
|---|---|---|
| Qualified leads per month | Referral and event dependent | 220+, consistently |
| Cost per lead | Event-driven baseline | 65% lower |
| Acquisition channels | 2 (events, referrals) | 4 (events, referrals, outbound, brand) |
| New ARR | Baseline | $1.4M attributed |
| CRM | Shared spreadsheet | Zoho with documented process |
| Forecastability | None | Monthly volume predictable within a band |
Cost per lead compared against the fully loaded cost of the previous event-driven motion including stand, travel and staff time. ARR is new annual recurring revenue closed during the engagement window.
Cold calling and cold email built from zero, including all infrastructure.
Zoho implementation replacing a spreadsheet-based sales process.
Filtered finance and treasury audience across target geographies.
Executive LinkedIn programme that raised outbound response rates.
Speed-to-lead and follow-up sequencing after first contact.
ICP definition that made outbound targeting possible.
By designing around the compliance review cycle rather than treating it as friction. We batched copy variants for weekly group approval, maintained an approved-phrase library, and built sequences from pre-cleared components. Iteration speed was slower than an unregulated programme but entirely workable once the workflow was agreed.
Because outbound into a spreadsheet produces volume nobody can measure, route or follow up reliably. The month spent implementing Zoho delayed first meetings by four weeks and was the reason the programme could be scaled afterwards. Skipping it would have created a larger problem in month four.
No, and it was never intended to. Referrals remained the highest-converting source throughout. The objective was removing a single-channel dependency, not replacing a channel that worked. Both motions ran in parallel for the full engagement.
Steady state was reached around month five. Month one was CRM and process, month two was deliverability infrastructure and compliance workflow, months three and four were ramp with copy iteration, and volume stabilised from month five onward.
Yes, measurably. Response rates on outbound sequences improved after executives became consistently visible in the category. We would not claim precise attribution between the two, but the direction was clear enough that the brand programme was extended rather than treated as a separate experiment.
Figures on this page are reconciled against the client CRM at the end of the engagement window. Client identity withheld at their request.
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