A founder-led B2B services agency partnered with Startupr to fill the top of its sales funnel with high-quality discovery conversations. The agency works across marketing, sales operations, and custom software integrations for B2B clients. The founder did not want pitch meetings. He wanted strategic conversations he could use to learn about prospect environments, surface real problems, and position the agency’s offerings naturally.

Before: Inconsistent top-of-funnel. The founder was carrying most of the business development workload personally, and pipeline creation had become a constraint on growth.

After: 32 qualified discovery conversations and 8 closed deals over six months from March 2025 to August 2025. The engagement extended into a second layer where Startupr now supports outbound for one of the agency’s own end-clients.

Impact: Predictable top-of-funnel that freed the founder to focus on closing rather than prospecting, a 25% meeting-to-close conversion rate, and an expansion engagement supporting the agency’s own client base.

Client Overview

Industry: Marketing, Growth, and Custom Integrations Services

Headquarters: Confidential

Company Size: 20 to 50 employees

The client is a founder-led B2B services agency. They work with companies across marketing, sales operations, and custom software integrations, with a focus on aligning go-to-market functions to drive measurable revenue growth.

The founder is a hands-on operator who produces thought-leadership content and runs a podcast in the space. Discovery conversations are a strategic asset for the business. Every prospect call is an opportunity to learn how a company works, what they’re spending on, and what’s broken in their growth motion.

Before partnering with Startupr, the founder personally drove most of the agency’s pipeline. As demand grew, his bandwidth became the bottleneck. He needed a structured way to fill the calendar with the right kind of conversations without spending his own time prospecting.

Why They Chose Startupr

The agency evaluated multiple outbound options and chose Startupr based on:

A pay-per-meeting model that aligned cost with delivered outcomes

Operator-led understanding of founder-driven sales motions

Multi-channel execution combining email, LinkedIn, phone, and persona-based landing pages

Research depth that let cold outreach open as strategic conversations, not pitches

Flexibility to support the agency directly today, with a path to support its end-clients later

They needed a partner who understood that the goal was qualified conversations, not raw activity.

The Challenge

Strong founder reputation, but a top-of-funnel that relied entirely on his time.

Founder Bandwidth Constraint

The founder had built relationships and inbound leads through content and community, but new pipeline outside that channel required outbound work he didn’t have time to run.

Conversation, Not Pitch

The agency’s offerings span multiple disciplines. The founder needed each meeting to start as a discovery conversation about the prospect’s growth motion, not a pitch for any one service. This required research-driven outreach and a softer first-meeting framing than typical SDR scripts produce.

Multi-Persona Targeting

A productive call usually involved both sales and marketing leaders inside a target account. Outreach had to land with at least one persona on each side without burning the other.

Mid-Market Buyer Mix

Targets ranged from in-house growth teams at mid-market B2B companies to other agencies looking for white-label support. Each subgroup needed different positioning.

Startupr’s Approach

1. Founder-Aligned Messaging

Startupr built messaging that mirrored how the founder actually opened conversations. Research-led, observation-driven, light on pitch. The first message named something specific about the prospect’s growth setup and offered a 20-minute exchange of perspectives, not a demo.

2. Multi-Channel Cadence with Persona Landing Pages

Outbound ran across email, LinkedIn, and selective phone outreach. Startupr also built persona-specific landing pages for sales and marketing buyers, used as soft-conversion assets inside cadences and as referenceable artifacts for replies.

3. Multi-Stakeholder Outreach Per Account

Rather than pursue a single contact at each target, Startupr ran parallel outreach to sales and marketing leaders inside the same accounts, coordinated to avoid stepping on each other. The goal was to surface the right person without forcing the founder to chase introductions.

4. Pre-Call Research Briefs

Before every booked meeting, the founder received a short brief on the prospect. Tech stack signals, recent hiring patterns, public commentary on their growth motion. This let him walk into discovery calls with a strategic angle already loaded.

5. Weekly Iteration

Startupr ran weekly check-ins focused on which message variants were producing meetings, which personas were responding, and where the founder’s debrief notes pointed to refinements.

6. Transparent Reporting

The client had ongoing visibility into:

Open and reply rates by persona and segment

Booked meeting volume and meeting quality

Meeting-to-close conversion

Pipeline progression after discovery calls

Disqualification reasons by source

Challenges Discovered During Execution

A few realities surfaced once campaigns were live:

Mid-market sales leaders responded faster than marketing leaders, so cadence sequencing had to lean sales-first on the first touch

The founder’s existing content footprint helped warm the cold outreach, but only when the cadence referenced it explicitly

Some closed-won outcomes took longer to materialize than expected because the agency’s services involved scoping calls beyond initial discovery

Persona landing pages outperformed generic sales pages but required ongoing iteration as messaging refined

Results: March 2025 to August 2025

Across six months, Startupr delivered:

Qualified Meetings Booked: 32, about 5.3 per month

Closed Deals: 8

Meeting-to-Close Conversion Rate: 25%

Average Open Rate, Email: 31%

Average Reply Rate, Email: 11%

KPI Achievement: 100%

Expansion: Engagement extended into ongoing outbound support for one of the agency’s end-clients

Conversations landed across:

Mid-market B2B SaaS companies looking for growth and integrations help

Other agencies seeking white-label execution capacity

Operations-led teams inside services businesses

Founders evaluating fractional growth support

Why It Worked

Founder-Aligned Messaging

The first message read like the founder wrote it. Reply rates climbed because the framing matched the conversational style of his content footprint.

Pre-Call Briefs Made Every Meeting Count

With prospect research in hand, the founder could open discovery calls with strategic observations instead of fishing questions. The quality of the meetings helped convert a meaningful share of discovery calls into closed business.

Parallel Persona Targeting Without Burning Accounts

Coordinated multi-stakeholder outreach surfaced the right buyer without alienating peers, which is a common failure mode in dual-persona outbound.

Strong Meeting Quality Created a 25% Close Rate

Because meetings were researched, relevant, and aligned with the founder’s sales style, 8 of the 32 qualified conversations converted into closed deals.

Path to Expansion Built In

The pilot framework was designed so success would naturally extend into either ongoing agency-side outbound or end-client outbound support. Both happened.

Momentum Curve

Month 1: Persona research, messaging frameworks, persona landing pages built. First test cadences live.

Month 2: First booked meetings. Reply pattern data drove first messaging revisions.

Month 3: Predictable weekly meeting flow established. First closed deals began progressing from early discovery conversations.

Month 4: Persona landing page conversions improved. Additional deals moved through scoping.

Month 5: Strongest meeting-quality month. The founder’s workflow shifted from chasing meetings to debriefing them.

Month 6: Closed-won volume reached 8 total deals from 32 qualified meetings, representing a 25% meeting-to-close conversion rate. Second engagement layer started as Startupr began supporting outbound for one of the agency’s end-clients.

Next Steps

Ongoing work continues across:

Maintaining the agency’s top-of-funnel flow

Outbound support for the agency’s end-clients under the second engagement layer

Messaging and landing-page refinement based on close-rate data

Selective expansion into adjacent target segments

Outcome

In six months, Startupr removed top-of-funnel as a constraint on the agency’s growth. The founder shifted from doing his own prospecting to running discovery calls already loaded with research. Startupr delivered 32 qualified meetings, 8 of which converted into closed deals, creating a 25% meeting-to-close conversion rate. Meeting flow stabilized, KPI targets were achieved, and the engagement expanded into a second layer where Startupr now supports outbound for one of the agency’s own clients.