The constraint
Recruitment Coach is a business coaching company for recruiting firm owners and solo recruiters who want to increase their billings, scale their business and build a business they love. Its founder, Mark Whitby, has trained more than 10,000 recruiters in 34 countries since 2001 and hosts The Resilient Recruiter podcast.
The leads were good. They just were not predictable.
So the problem we wanted to solve with ColdIQ (now Frontal) was creating that predictable pipeline and most of our leads were organic and inbound, which is great because they're high quality, but they're not predictable.
The warm list got newsletters and podcasts. Cold outreach barely existed: one domain and a very low volume of emails. What was missing, in Mark's words, was "really the infrastructure and building the machine that would allow us to generate appointments predictably."
What we built
The machine, in five parts. The first campaigns were set up in February 2024.
The infrastructure: the sending setup Recruitment Coach did not have, built and run by our team, with campaigns in Smartlead.
The list: owners, founders, CEOs, managing directors, COOs and principals of recruiting firms with 1 to 10 employees, in the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland, pulled from Apollo. These lists took time to build, on purpose, and that care was a big reason the campaigns worked.
The personalization: a waterfall built in Clay. If a prospect had posted on LinkedIn in the last two weeks, the opening line responded to the post. If not, it congratulated them on a recent hire in their team. If not, it marked a milestone in their time at the firm. And if none of those existed, it spoke to the true fact that they lead a niche business. The whole table took 65 steps to build.
The offer: something useful before any ask. Instead of asking a cold prospect straight for a meeting, campaigns led with content: a podcast call to action, and an invitation to a live webinar.
The copy and the cadence: our team did the heavy lifting on the copy, and a weekly session with Recruitment Coach was where the next campaign ideas came from.
- Clay
- Smartlead
- Apollo
Results
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Warm leads | 657 |
| Time window | About 7 months (February to September 2024) |
| Cold outreach before | Very little, from one domain at low volume |
| Who wrote the copy | Our team |
ColdIQ (now Frontal) team is excellent. They're real experts in what they do and so we've learned a ton working with them. And they actually did all the heavy lifting and wrote the copy for us.
What this means for you
Inbound that is high quality but unpredictable is a good problem with a real cost: you cannot plan around it. When your buyers own small firms, volume is not the lever. The list is, and so is the reason to reply. Offer something useful before you ask for time, personalize on what is actually true about each person, and let a system run it every week.
