How a London IT Consultancy Built a Pipeline Worth £500K in 90 Days

When a 25-person IT consultancy in London approached us, they had a familiar problem: all their business came from referrals. The founders were brilliant technologists but had no outbound sales system. They wanted to grow beyond £2M in revenue but could not control when the next deal would land.

The Starting Point

The firm: IT consultancy specialising in cloud migration and managed services

Team: 25 employees, two founders who handled all sales

Revenue: £1.8M, 100% referral-driven

Pipeline: No CRM, no outbound, no defined sales process

Challenge: Revenue was flat for two years, growth completely dependent on referrals

What We Did

Phase 1: Diagnose (Weeks 1-2)

We audited their entire revenue operation:

• Interviewed both founders about their sales approach
• Analysed their last 20 deals to find patterns
• Defined their Ideal Customer Profile based on best-fit clients
• Identified three industry verticals with the highest potential

Key finding: Their best clients were mid-market financial services firms (50-200 employees) undergoing digital transformation. These clients had the highest contract values and longest retention.

Phase 2: Build (Weeks 3-8)

Outbound Infrastructure:

• Set up three sending domains with full DNS authentication
• Configured Apollo.io for prospecting and sequencing
• Built prospect lists totalling 1,200 contacts across three verticals
• Wrote six email sequences (two per vertical) with five touchpoints each
• Warmed domains over two weeks

CRM Setup:

• Implemented Pipedrive with custom pipeline stages
• Created mandatory fields for qualification data
• Built reporting dashboards for pipeline visibility
• Integrated Apollo with Pipedrive for automatic data sync

Sales Process:

• Designed a five-stage sales process with clear exit criteria
• Created a discovery call framework
• Built a proposal template tailored to each vertical

Phase 3: Execute (Weeks 9-12)

• Launched outbound campaigns across all three verticals
• Sent approximately 150 personalised emails per week
• Coached both founders on discovery calls
• Reviewed every proposal before it went out
• Held weekly pipeline reviews

The Results

After 90 days:

• 42 qualified meetings booked from outbound
• £520K in pipeline across 14 active opportunities
• 3 deals closed worth £87K total
• Email reply rate: 6.2% (industry average: 2-3%)
• Meeting-to-opportunity conversion: 33%

After 6 months (running independently):

• £1.1M in new pipeline generated
• £340K in new revenue closed
• Outbound became their largest lead source, surpassing referrals for the first time

Key Lessons

1. Referrals are great but not scalable. You cannot control referral volume. Outbound gives you a lever to pull.
2. The ICP definition was critical. Focusing on financial services firms in digital transformation made every email more relevant.
3. Founders can sell — they just need a system. Both founders were excellent in meetings. They just needed a way to get more meetings.
4. Apollo.io simplified everything. Having prospecting, sequencing, and data in one platform reduced the learning curve dramatically.

The firm continues to run their outbound system independently, generating £100-150K in new pipeline every month.