The constraint
Keragon had momentum most startups would sign for: a fresh $7.5M seed round in early 2025, recognition as the #1 healthcare automation platform, 250+ healthcare companies running HIPAA-compliant workflows on it, and 4+ million automations executed across 300+ integrations.
The partnerships team was told to sign up as many partners as possible. The problem: the whole company was about 30 people, and outreach was copy-paste emails, one-off follow-ups, and messy tracking. Hours in, a gamble out. And in healthcare there was no room to fix that by sounding robotic, because partnerships there run on trust, and trust starts with a genuine first conversation.
What we built
The engagement started in late January 2025, in three steps.
The stack came first: Clay, Smartlead, and Lemlist, wired together so the team could upload and segment target lists, send personalized campaigns at scale, and see every open, click, and reply without manual bookkeeping.
Then the copy. The shift was from selling to starting conversations: light, clear, human, written to earn a reply rather than close a deal inside an inbox.
Then the iteration. Performance reviewed daily, subject lines tweaked, send times adjusted, the best sequences doubled down on. Within weeks, shooting in the dark had turned into a process with known numbers.
Results
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| New partner conversations | 2 a day, sustained for six straight months |
| Conversations with potential partners | Hundreds, on a team of about 30 people |
| Time recovered | 100+ hours each month |
| Manual outreach tasks remaining | Zero |
The team's own takeaway from the engagement: cold email works best when you don't sell. It works when you start a conversation.
What this means for you
A partnerships pipeline behaves like any other pipeline: it rewards systems, not stamina. If your team is hand-sending outreach between meetings, the ceiling is their calendar. Keragon's ceiling moved the day outreach started running in the background, with the team stepping in only where it matters: the conversation itself.
