Case study – business brokerage
Cold outreach turned into a scalable growth engine.
Prospecting agents running inside the firm delivered 63 meetings in 10 weeks with a 95% show-rate, saved roughly 800 hours and lifted reply rates 14x.
Results
A 10-week run, measured against a pre-launch baseline.
- 14x
- reply-rate lift
- 0.9% → 14.4%
- 63
- meetings booked
- 95% show-rate
- ~800h
- hours saved
- ≈80h per week
- 7,478
- companies analyzed
- across 27 markets
The challenge
Expensive tools, thin results.
The brokerage had a premium lead database and had cycled through outsourced BD agencies. Response rates stayed under 1% and meetings were rare – and hiring more juniors was not the answer.
- A premium lead database sitting at under 10% utilisation
- In-house scripts that struggled to engage business owners
- Generic agency outreach that never learned the market
- No way to add capacity without adding headcount
What went live
Four agents, working one prospecting loop.
Company research
Parsed 7,478 companies across 27 markets, surfacing only the names that matched the firm's mandates and buyer criteria.
Personalized outreach at scale
2,018 emails written in the brokerage's own voice, each tailored to the recipient's business profile and tuned for deliverability.
Engagement and scheduling
Handled 290 replies, carried the conversations forward and booked 63 meetings straight into the calendar.
Weekly optimization
Scripts and segments were refined every week against live response data, compounding reply and show rates.
Before and after
Every prospecting metric moved.
| Metric | Before | After | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| Email reply rate | 0.9% | 14.4% | 14x lift |
| Meetings from outreach | 1 (manual) | 63 | 63x lift |
| Analyst hours on prospecting | ≈65h/week | ≈0h/week | 1.6 FTE freed |
| Lead-list utilisation | <10% of monthly limits | 100% of capacity | Database finally monetised |
“Our AI agents have helped deliver better results than any outsourced agency we've used. Over a two month period, we booked 50+ meetings and saved 500 hours of manual work.”
President, leading business brokerage
How it scaled
Week 3 at 8%. Week 7 at 21%.
Reply rates crossed 8% by week three – eight times the industry average – and peaked at 21% in week seven. Across the ten weeks the agents booked 63 meetings, with only three no-shows.
- Average reply rate of 14.4% across the full run
- 3% booking rate from contacted owners
- 95% show-rate on booked meetings
- ≈80 hours returned to the firm every week
Why it matters
Business development moved from cost centre to growth engine.
Lead gen in-house
The data, the process and the pipeline sit inside the firm – not with an agency.
Capacity without hiring
Senior time went back to relationships, valuations and execution.
Predictable growth
Every interaction feeds the next round of targeting and messaging.
More listings
With sourcing running on its own, brokers pursue more mandates with less friction.
Ready to unlock 80+ hours every week?
We start by mapping where the hours actually go, then get the highest-value workflow live in weeks.