The constraint
Hemlane sells property management software: tenant placement, leases, maintenance, rent collection. The buyers are landlords and property managers, an audience that behaves like consumers, not companies. No corporate email domains, thin LinkedIn presence, and notoriously hard to reach in any valid, efficient way.
Before the engagement, Hemlane had tried internal outreach and outside providers. Both ate time and returned little: contact lists that did not turn into conversations, no visibility into which message worked, and reply and bounce rates below the benchmarks that matter.
"The contacts we were generating internally weren't really becoming very fruitful. We weren't really seeing the results we wanted as far as really getting into people's inboxes."
Jesse Litwin, Sales Outreach Consultant, Hemlane
What we built
It started with a sharper definition of the buyer. Not "landlords" in general, but property owners with an active rental listing right now, on platforms like Zillow. An active listing is the buying moment: that one change did more for results than any tool.
On top of that definition: Clay sourced and enriched the contacts, Smartlead ran the campaigns across channels, and every email was written with controlled variation so messages read personal at scale, sequenced so follow-ups felt natural instead of robotic.
Underneath it all, deliverability work that rarely gets glamour: careful list building, validation, and technical setup. That is what took the bounce rate to 0.5% against industry averages of 2 to 5%, which means almost every email actually arrived.
The collaboration ran from November 2023 to April 2024, and Hemlane came back for a second round in August 2024 that is still running.
Results
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Qualified contacts from one Zillow campaign | 830 |
| Reply rate | 5.5% |
| Bounce rate | 0.5% (industry averages run 2 to 5%) |
| Time saved versus manual outbound | 70% |
"Working with ColdIQ was great, and it has been great. Super easy! They're really true partners, and they provided a lot of insights into how we could grow. Always felt like we had a clear understanding of what was going on."
Jesse Litwin, Sales Outreach Consultant, Hemlane
What this means for you
If your buyers look more like consumers than companies, most outbound advice quietly stops applying. What still works is precision on the moment of need (an active listing, not a job title) and discipline on deliverability. Hard-to-reach does not mean unreachable; it means the targeting has to do the work.
