1 300 emails, 0 positive replies — how we fixed the funnel in 4 weeks

Our client Grably is a Telegram mini-app that lets AI companies buy never-before-used user data for model training. In 6 weeks we rebuilt their outreach from the ground up and booked 15 sales-ready conversations with U.S. prospects.

The starting mess

Spray-and-pray lists.

Apollo / Sales Nav dumps were 30-40 % trash; sender domains were already scorched, reply rate—next to zero.
Conversation bottleneck.

Prospects replied, but every reply came with a dozen “Can you also…?” questions that had to be routed through Grably’s team — slow and painful.
Conferences that missed.

Ten in-person meetings produced just two decent leads. Clearly, we needed sharper aim.

What we changed, step by step

ICP review

The market is flooded with “AI startups,” but 90 % are just ChatGPT wrapped in a shiny UI. We only wanted teams building their own models, so our ICP sprint produced red-line filters:

Must have an in-house ML team. No engineers → no real R&D → no deal
Watch-out phrases. “AI-powered X,” “smart agent,” or anything equally vague? Red flag.
Positive signals. Mentions of computer vision, facial recognition, proprietary datasets or models.

We added those simple checks to our search filters in SalesNavigator and then made a manual check of every record.

Numbers shift

Before → ~450 leads • 1 300 + emails • 7 replies • 0 positive

After → ~230 leads • 600-700 emails • 9-15 replies • 7+ positive • 1 closed deal is already on the way

FAQ-first sequences

We turned the most common questions into a mini FAQ — and baked it into the first message.

🚀 Result: time from first reply to booked call dropped from 5–7 days to just 1–2 days.

Multi-channel outreach + clean domains

We launched outreach campaign on both LinkedIn and email, using freshly warmed, verified domains.

No more blacklisted domains or inbox invisibility. No more “hope this works” outreach. Just clean infrastructure and targeted delivery.

Hand-picked conference targets

Grably was heading to another industry conference.

This time, we took the attendee list, screened every name, dropped irrelevant ones, and started outreach before the event even began.

📍 Results: 12 meetings booked, 8 were a strong fit as potential clients.

📈67% qualified rate — 3x higher than before.

Need a deep dive into our conference prep? Check our step-by-step guide

3 Key Takeaways

Target quality > quantity
Deliverability is law—protect your domains
Automate the grunt work, keep judgment human