The situation
A B2B consultancy in Kortrijk, eight years old, twelve people. Revenue had grown year after year — until it suddenly stopped. The managing partner was their best closer, their strategic brain, and their lead consultant. Three jobs. One person. Something was going to break.
Their pipeline was 100% word of mouth. "We have a solid proposal flow, but we have to wait for someone to find us," he said. Referrals had been the engine. The engine was stalling. Four quiet weeks in a row, no new opportunities, and the partner was rewriting his pipeline in Notion at midnight.
They had one internal "commercial" person — really a project manager in sales clothing, the KMO classic. No outbound muscle. No CRM discipline. No appetite for cold calling. The partner knew it: hiring someone would take months, and the previous junior SDR had walked after eight months. Growth was on pause.
Our approach
Week 1–2: onboarding and playbook. We re-mapped their ICP (mid-sized industrial clients in West and East Flanders), combed the last 24 months of won proposals, and wrote a script that sounded like the partner on a good day.
Week 3: one specialist cold caller started with 200 targeted calls a month. Not a generic list — a list we built from KBO data with three trigger layers (growth, new hires, competitor of an existing client).
Week 4 onward: in parallel to the calls, we coached their internal account manager. Bi-weekly call reviews, objection-handling drills, a pipeline cadence they actually used. He went from "I do it on the side" to a rep who filled his own calendar.
Within ten weeks the motor ran without the managing partner making a single cold call.
The results
The numbers over the quarter:
- 42 meetings with qualified decision-makers (previously: 0 outbound meetings)
- €280,000 in pipeline (previously: around €30k from inbound and referrals)
- 68% of those meetings converted to a demo or proposal
- Internal rep closed his first three self-sourced outbound deals in weeks 9, 11 and 13
More important than the raw numbers: the managing partner stepped out of the top-of-funnel sales seat for the first time in four years. He still closes the big deals. The rest runs without him.
What the client says
"We deliberated a long time before outsourcing any sales work. You hear so many horror stories about agencies running generic scripts or offshore SDRs you never meet. What we got was something very different. One specialist who learned our market, who sounded like us, and who reported transparently every week on what worked and what didn't. The coaching layer was the deciding factor for us: our own account manager is now self-sufficient. He picks up the phone. He asks the pain questions. He books his own meetings. I hadn't managed that myself in four years. The investment paid back in a single quarter — and we now have a team we can scale without having to re-recruit every time."
— Managing Partner, B2B consultancy · Kortrijk
What we learned
Coaching is a multiplier on outbound, not a separate product. If you buy calls without pulling the internal rep along, you get meetings but no capacity. If you buy coaching without example-led execution, you get theory without reps. Running both in parallel is why this consultancy built an outbound motor in ten weeks that the founder couldn't build in ten years.