Case study · Event management
54 partnership meetings in three months
Six became paying partnerships worth $90,000, with $810,000 still open. A US event management business, no referrals, no ads, no waiting to bump into the right person at a conference.
Did they get a good result?
Yes, and here it is without decoration. They had never run outbound before. Twelve weeks later it was their most predictable source of new partnerships.
What happened
Straight from the campaign dashboard and the client's CRM.
Did we get them in front of the right people?
That is the question that actually matters, and a meeting count does not answer it. Anyone can fill a calendar with people who cannot sign anything.
Six of those 54 conversations turned into signed, paid partnerships. Another 49 are still live.
You cannot close $90,000 out of meetings with the wrong people. The targeting is proven by what happened after the meetings, not by how many we booked.
What worked, and why
We built the list from many sources instead of one.
Almost every agency exports one database and calls it targeting. That is why the same partnership manager gets four nearly identical emails in a week and stops opening any of them. We pulled the same audience from a lot of niche databases and custom broker feeds, kept only the records that agreed with each other, and threw the rest out before sending anything.
Why that worksWe reached people who were not already sick of being approached. Same market, fresh audience.
We asked for a partnership, not a sale.
A sales email asks someone to think about spending money. A partnership email offers them something. The second is a much easier yes, as long as what is in it for them is in the first email rather than saved for the call.
Why that worksYou are not asking for budget, you are asking for a conversation about mutual benefit. Almost a third of everyone who replied positively ended up booking.
We sent enough to find the people who were ready right now.
In any partner market, most people are not thinking about this today and a small number are. Volume is how you find the small number. We reached 303,164 decision makers, and our own sending setup let us do it without deliverability falling apart - which is where most programmes at this size quietly die.
Why that worksReach at that scale is only worth having if it lands. 1.8% bounce across 450,094 sends is what made the volume usable rather than reckless.
The seven angles we test, in every market
There is no way to know in advance which message a market will respond to. Anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing, and charging you for the guess.
So we do not guess. We run seven proven angles against your audience at the same time, read what comes back, and put the volume behind whichever one is winning. These seven work across every industry we have run them in, because they are built on how people decide rather than on what you sell.
The soft ask
Ask for something small. Not a meeting, not a demo, just permission to send something over. It is the easiest yes in the inbox.
Value first
Lead by giving something away. A list, a piece of research, a breakdown. You are useful before you are interested in anything from them.
Pain led
Name the problem they actually have, in their language, and ask if it is real for them. Works when the pain is well known in the sector.
Social proof
Someone like them already did this. Specific name, specific result, specific timeframe. The reader does the comparison themselves.
Risk reversal
Remove the downside. If the outcome does not land, the cost does not either. Strongest angle in markets that have been burned before.
The direct pitch
No setup, no story. Here is what we do, here is who for, do you want it. Some buyers actively prefer this and reply to nothing else.
Partnership or collaboration
Approach as a peer with something to offer, not as a supplier looking for budget. This is the one that carried the campaign in this case study.
How we use them
All seven go live at once, split across the list. Within a few weeks the replies tell us which one or two this market responds to, and those get the volume. The rest get switched off.
The same seven frameworks run on LinkedIn as well as email. The wording shortens, the angle does not change.
It is always a toss-up which angle lands with which audience. What is not a toss-up is that one or two of them will land. That is the whole reason we test seven instead of betting on one.
What did not work, and what we did about it
Three things, and we would rather tell you than have you find out.
We put too many people into a three-month window.
Most of the people we loaded never received the full set of emails before the window closed. We paid to find and verify them and then never properly reached them. Looking only at the people who did get the full sequence, the response rate was normal for this kind of work. The campaign was not underperforming. It was spread too thin.
What we changedWe now build a smaller list and work all of it, instead of a bigger list and work some of it. Same budget, more conversations.
Eight in ten replies were out of office.
A timing problem, not a message problem. We launched on a Friday afternoon, and because the opening emails all go out on day one, most of that first wave landed straight into the weekend. It skewed the reply data badly. We should have held the launch until the Monday.
What we changedSend timing gets reviewed inside the first fortnight now, and nothing launches into a Friday.
We never wrote down where they started.
Nobody recorded how many partnership conversations the business was getting before we arrived, so we cannot show you a proper before and after. That is on us.
What we changedNothing sends until the starting numbers are written down.
If a case study tells you everything went perfectly, someone is editing. Every engagement has a version of this section. Most agencies just delete it.
Why this works in the events industry specifically
Every event business we speak to has the same shape of problem. Partnerships are how the good work arrives. Venues, suppliers, agencies who need delivery, corporate accounts. Those relationships pay for years.
And almost nobody has a way to start one on purpose. It happens when you meet someone. Which means growth is capped by how many rooms you can be in, and it cannot be turned up when you need it.
Three things make outbound work unusually well here:
The people you need are findable.
A partnership decision maker sits in a named role at a company you can identify in advance. You do not have to hope to run into them.
The ask is easy to say yes to.
You are proposing mutual benefit, not asking for spend, so the reply rate is better than it would be for a straight sales approach.
The partner market is big.
There are far more venues, agencies and suppliers than most operators realise, which means there is enough volume for this to work.
Why would this work for your business?
Honestly, it might not. Here is how to tell quickly.
This works if
- Partnerships and referrals are where your good work comes from
- There are thousands of potential partners you could name
- A $15,000 partnership is worth having
- You can take four or five new conversations a week and actually run them
This does not work if
- You sell one big contract a year to a handful of named accounts
- Your entire market is a few hundred companies
- Your deal sizes are too small to justify going and getting them
- Nobody has time to attend the meetings once they are booked
If you are on the right side of that table, the reason this transfers is that nothing about it depended on the client being special. They were a normal event business with normal relationships and no outbound function. The result came from the process, and the process is the same one we would run for you.
One more thing worth understanding
We normally run three channels at once: email, LinkedIn and cold calling. Not because more is better, but because in any given market one of them will beat the other two, and there is no reliable way to know which one in advance.
So we run all three, watch where the meetings actually come from in the first few weeks, and move the resource there. If LinkedIn is winning in your market, LinkedIn gets the volume. You are buying booked meetings, not a channel.
For this client, email was the channel that carried it. That is the point rather than an exception: one avenue always outperforms the rest, and the job is finding which one fast and then pouring everything into it. What stays constant is that one of them will work, reliably, and it will produce the meetings you came for.
Want to know whether your market has this in it?
The first conversation is short. You tell us who your ideal partners are and roughly what a partnership is worth to you. We tell you how many of those people we can actually reach, what the realistic 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. That is a cheaper conversation for both of us than finding out in month three.