Booked 14 qualified meetings a month for a founder-led B2B software company without hiring an SDR
Client snapshot
A founder-led B2B software company with eight people and a product sold to operations teams at mid-sized logistics firms. The founder ran all sales. No SDR, and no budget for one yet.
The problem
Outbound happened in bursts. The founder would block a Friday, pull a list, write emails, send them, and then get pulled back into product for two weeks while the replies went stale. Lists were bought and never cleaned. Generic first lines got generic results: around a 1% positive reply rate and three or four meetings in a good month.
What we built
The whole outbound loop, running on a schedule.
Each week n8n pulls a fresh batch of accounts matching the ICP from Apollo, then scrapes each company's site and hiring page. Claude scores every account against the founder's criteria and writes a first line based on something specific it found: a new warehouse, a job post for an operations role, a recent integration. Low-fit accounts get dropped before anyone emails them.
Qualified leads go into a short sequence in Instantly, sent from warmed secondary domains so the main domain stays clean. When replies come back, Claude classifies each one: interested, objection, not now, not interested, out of office. Interested replies get a booking link from the founder's calendar and a HubSpot deal. "Not now" replies go to a re-engagement list with a date. Unsubscribes are honoured immediately.
A daily report goes to the founder: replies, meetings booked, sequences finished, and deliverability health per domain.
Results, 90 days in
- Qualified meetings: three or four a month → about 14.
- Positive reply rate: 1.1% → 3.8%.
- Founder time on outbound: around 10 hours a week → about 2, mostly taking the calls.
- CRM: every contact, reply and stage logged automatically, duplicates flagged weekly.
Quote
"I used to do outbound when I felt guilty about it. Now it runs every day and I just show up to the calls." Founder
Build snapshot
- Timeline: 14 business days
- Stack: n8n, Claude, Apollo, Instantly, HubSpot, Google Calendar
- Investment: $5,500
- Who owned it: the founder approved the ICP and the sequence copy; an operations hire took over the daily report after launch.
The pattern
This is the pattern we ship in the Sales Ops Pack engagement. If you're the one doing outbound between everything else, the build is the same, with your ICP and tools swapped in.
This is an illustrative composite drawn from operator engagements. Names, identifying details, and exact metrics are anonymised. The workflow, stack, and approach are real.
Looks like your situation?
A 30-minute call tells us whether the same pattern fits your operation, and what it would cost to ship it.