--- title: "How we built a $31M+ active program pipeline for a tier-one aerospace and defense supplier. | Stone Haven Capital Group" description: "42 qualified OEM and program-office opportunities, reached before the RFP existed. Six months. A tier-one aerospace and defense supplier. No new business development hires, no trade show budget, no waiting for a program office to find them." canonical: "https://stonehaven.capital/showcase/aerospace-defense-tier-one-supplier" last-updated: "2026-08-22" --- > 42 qualified OEM and program-office opportunities, reached before the RFP existed. Six months. A tier-one aerospace and defense supplier. No new business development hires, no trade show budget, no waiting for a program office to find them. Stone Haven Capital Group Schedule a Call Case study · Aerospace & Defense Tier-One Supplier # How we built a $31M+ active program pipeline for a tier-one aerospace and defense supplier. 42 qualified OEM and program-office opportunities, reached before the RFP existed. Six months. A tier-one aerospace and defense supplier. No new business development hires, no trade show budget, no waiting for a program office to find them. - $31,240,000 of active program pipeline across four advanced programs, on a $96,430,000 qualified book. - 597,842 emails to 121,384 primes and integrators, producing 1,056 replies at 0.9%. - 282 positive replies became 42 qualified opportunities at an average of $2,296,000 each. - Average program size reached $7,810,000, up 43% from a $5,460,000 baseline. - What went wrong: the first list was far wider than the programme could justify. 01 ## Did they get a good result? Yes, and here it is without decoration. Before we started, new programs only surfaced when an RFP dropped, by which point the shortlist had usually been set months earlier. Six months later the supplier was carrying $31,240,000 of active program pipeline across four advanced aerospace programs, with 42 qualified opportunities in total and 282 earlier-stage conversations sitting behind them. What happenedThe number Active program pipeline$31,240,000 across four advanced programs Total qualified pipeline$96,430,000 across 42 opportunities Average value per qualified opportunity~$2,296,000 Average program size$7,810,000, up 43% from a $5,460,000 baseline Qualified pipeline growth3.1×, from a ~$10M baseline to $31.2M Emails sent597,842 over six months Leads contacted121,384, of which 120,915 were new Replies1,056, a 0.9% reply rate, or 3,590 and 3.0% counting out of office Positive replies282, 26.7% of all replies Bounce rate1.4%, 8,187 bounces The full programme in the sending platform. 02 ## Did you get them in front of the right people? That is the question that actually matters, and volume does not answer it. Anyone can push 600,000 emails at people who will never sit on a program board. 42 opportunities reached qualified stage carrying $96,430,000 of program pipeline, an average of roughly $2,296,000 each. Four of those advanced far enough to become live program pursuits worth $31,240,000. The proof of targeting is in the conversion rather than the volume. 1,056 replies produced 282 positive ones, and 42 of those cleared a program-level qualification bar. Roughly one in seven positive replies turned into a real program conversation, which does not happen when you are reaching people with nothing to source. The pipeline as the client sees it. 03 ## What worked, and why ### We isolated the supplier's corporate domain and built a separate sending estate. A tier-one supplier cannot afford deliverability problems on the domain it uses to talk to existing program offices, primes and quality auditors. So no cold volume ever touched it. We stood up 152 dedicated sending domains carrying 456 inboxes, every one authenticated on SPF, DKIM, DMARC and MX before a single email went out. Warmup ran continuously on all 456 for the life of the programme, and only half of them carried campaign volume at any point. The rest sat in reserve and rotated in as the older domains aged. The estate carried 597,842 sends across the programme and finished at a 1.4% bounce rate, 8,187 bounces in total, comfortably inside the threshold where domains start to burn. Inbox placement held at 94% across the estate. At this volume those two numbers are the whole game. Miss either and the domains die, and the programme dies with them. The sending estate, fully authenticated and none of it on the supplier's own domain. Why that works: the corporate domain that carries every existing customer relationship stayed untouched, while the outbound engine carried all the risk on infrastructure that was built to be replaced. ### We built the list around who shapes a program, and excluded everyone who does not. The people who decide a supplier gets onto a program are program and engineering leadership, procurement and supplier quality, spread across OEMs, primes, tier-one and tier-two suppliers and MRO operations. The list was built on that profile across North America, then narrowed by what an organisation says publicly when a new program is forming. The exclusions mattered as much as the inclusions. Consultancies, staffing firms, anything under 200 employees and every non-ITAR-eligible geography came out of the list entirely, which removed most of the original pool before a single email was written. The targeting profile: titles, industry, company size and location. Why that works: a program is an event rather than a permanent state. Firmographics tell you who could award work. The intent and hiring signals tell you who is about to. ### We put the qualification question into the first email instead of saving it for the call. The opener does the qualifying work itself. It asks one question about whether a program is forming, puts the credentials that actually matter in aerospace alongside it as proof, and makes clear nothing is being asked for beyond an answer. One question, one credential, one exit. Everything went out as plain text, varied line by line, so no two programme offices received the same wording. The live sequence and the opener behind it. Why that works: the first email has to answer what replying costs. When the answer is visibly nothing, the people with something forming reply, and everyone else passes without friction. ### We ran a five-touch cadence and routed only program-level replies to the business development team. Five steps, three day waits, five variations on the opener and two on each follow-up, all A/B tested. A program-qualification workflow sat on top of the replies and pushed only conversations carrying an actual program reference through to the client. Why that works: senior business development time is the scarcest asset in a supplier this size. 3,590 replies came back once out of office responses are counted. Only 282 were genuinely positive and 42 cleared qualification. The filter is what stopped the other 3,548 from reaching anyone. ### We reviewed performance weekly and cut losers fast. Every week the angles were reviewed against reply quality rather than reply count. Losing angles were switched off within days and winning ones absorbed the volume. With a 0.9% reply rate, the difference between an angle that turns a quarter of its replies into program conversations and one that turns none is the entire programme. 04 ## The five angles we test, in every market No one knows in advance which message a market will answer. The market decides, and the only way to learn the answer is to put the options in front of it. So several run at once and the data settles it. 05 ## 1. The soft ask Drop the price of agreeing until it is effectively zero. No meeting, no commitment, only permission to send a document across. Would it be useful to see where our structures work has flown on comparable platforms? Happy to send a one-page capability read across first. 06 ## 2. Value first Open with something they can use whether or not they ever reply. A lead time benchmark, a qualification read, a view on second-source risk. Usefulness first, interest second. We benchmarked lead times on actuation subassemblies across six primes this quarter. Want me to send the summary over? 07 ## 3. Pain led Name the constraint in the language they use internally, then ask whether it applies to them. It works hardest where the problem is well understood and rarely said out loud. Most program offices we speak to are carrying one sole-source item they would rather not be carrying. Is that where you are on the current build? 08 ## 4. Social proof Put a comparable organisation in front of them with a real outcome attached. You never have to draw the parallel. They draw it faster than you could. A prime about your size qualified us as second source on a landing gear subassembly last year and pulled eleven weeks out of their lead time. Want the short version of how it was structured? 09 ## 5. Risk reversal Move the risk onto our side of the table. If nothing lands, nothing is owed. It carries markets where the buyer has been disappointed before and is expecting to be again. No NDA and nothing to sign to start. We will run a no-cost design-for-manufacture review on one part and you keep the output either way. 10 ## How we use them All of them go live at once against a divided list. Within a few weeks the replies have identified the one or two worth keeping, and the remainder are switched off. 11 ## What did not work, and what we did about it Three of them. You will hear them here rather than discover them in month four. ### The opening list was far broader than the programme could justify. We opened against a pool of 341,600 contacts built on job title, region and headcount alone. It was every engineering and procurement leader at an aerospace organisation of the right size, whether or not anything suggested a program was forming. Replies came back and the conversations behind them went nowhere, which is the least useful kind of result because it still looks like activity on a dashboard. The first pull, before any intent signal was applied. What we changed: we added intent keywords, certification filters and hard exclusions, which took the pool to 138,218. After email verification and deduplication, 121,384 contacts were loaded into the sequencer. Everything after that point was aimed at organisations showing a new platform, upgrade program or supplier qualification signal. ### Early replies went straight to the business development team. In the first weeks anything that looked positive was routed through. It burned senior time on conversations that were never attached to a real program, and it was the fastest way to lose the team's confidence in the channel. What we changed: the program-qualification workflow was built and every reply now passes an alignment check before anyone sees it. Of 3,590 total replies, 282 were genuinely positive. Those are the only ones that should ever have been routed. ### We were slow to kill losing angles in the first month. Reviews began on a monthly cycle. In a market you can approach only a few times before exhausting it, a month spent on a losing angle is a month you cannot get back. What we changed: the review moved to a weekly cycle, and most of the improvement across the remaining months came from that alone. A programme at this volume does not run clean, and any document claiming otherwise has had this section removed. We would rather you see how the mistakes got corrected, because that is the part that repeats on your engagement. 12 ## Why this works for aerospace and defense specifically Every tier-one supplier we speak to has the same shape of problem. They win steadily once they are on a program, and almost never get onto a new one. Capture runs through incumbency and personal relationships, which works right up until the existing programs mature, and then the address book becomes a hard ceiling on growth. Three things make outbound work unusually well here: - The buyer announces themselves. New platform language, upgrade programs, facility expansions and engineering hiring show up publicly twelve to eighteen months before a request for proposal is written. That signal is searchable, which means the timing problem solves itself. - The program value carries the cost. At an average qualified opportunity of roughly $2,296,000, the entire programme pays for itself several times over on a single award. Very few channels have that arithmetic. - The offer removes the objection. Asking a program director whether something is forming, rather than asking for a procurement decision, means the first email costs them nothing to answer, and the reply quality reflects that. 13 ## Why would this work for your business? ### Perhaps it does not. Establishing that costs nothing at this stage. Work down the table. This works ifThis does not work if Capture runs through incumbency and the same handful of program relationshipsYou are already on every program your capacity can absorb There are thousands of program offices and primes you could name but cannot reachYour entire market is a dozen organisations you already work with A single program award is worth seven figuresYour economics cannot absorb a programme that pays back over a long cycle Something observable signals that a new program is formingNothing distinguishes an organisation that needs you today from one that never will Someone can qualify replies before they reach business developmentEvery reply has to land on a senior engineer's desk If you land on the left column, what transfers is the method rather than anything unusual about this client. A supplier with real engineering credibility, long-cycle contracts and no mechanism for reaching a program office it has never worked with. Everything above came out of process, and the process does not change for you. 14 ## One more thing worth understanding Nearly every engagement starts on email, LinkedIn and phone at the same time. The reasoning is simple. In any given market one of the three quietly outperforms the others, and nobody can say which in advance. So all three go live, the first month shows which is producing real conversations, and the spend moves toward it. What matters is that the decision comes from data rather than from preference. In this programme email won, at a volume that only survives when the estate beneath it is built correctly. That is the reason so much of this document is about infrastructure. That result is ordinary rather than fortunate. One channel always separates itself. The work is spotting it early and then backing it properly. 15 ## Before and after Before After Source of new programsincumbency and warm introductions only a repeatable outbound engine running alongside the network Point of first contactat the RFP, against a shortlist already set twelve to eighteen months before an RFP exists Qualified pipeline~$10,000,000 $31,240,000, a 3.1× increase Average program size$5,460,000 $7,810,000, up 43% RFP release to awardabout 18 months about 14 months, down 22% 16 ## If you want to know whether your market has this in it Fifteen minutes is usually enough. Describe the programs you want to be on and what a typical award is worth when it lands. We come back with how many of those organisations are actually reachable, the conversation volume that is realistic against that pool, and a straight answer on whether outbound is the right instrument for you. If the answer is no, it gets said on that call. Discovering it later costs both sides more than a short conversation does. ## Want to know whether your market has this in it? The first conversation is short. You tell us who your buyers are and what one is worth to you. We tell you how many we can actually reach, what the meeting volume looks like, and whether outbound is the right lever for you at all. If we think it is not, we will say so. 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