About 100 enterprise leads in 90 days for a U.S. signage manufacturer.

Situation

Our client makes print and illuminated signage for national brands. Its customers are restaurant groups, beverage companies, grocery chains, casinos and cinema operators with hundreds of locations each. A single order can cover every store in a chain.

The buyer is never one person. Signage decisions run through a committee of marketing and development leaders, and outreach dies when an email reaches only one of them. The client had tried the usual routes. Salespeople chased individual contacts, and the internal forward that should have moved a deal along usually ended it instead.

The goal was enterprise leads at national brands, in volume, with a sales team ready to work them.

What we built

Four moves, repeated every week. None of them works alone. Together they turn cold accounts into a full pipeline.

One thread, whole committee. We put 3 to 5 decision-makers from each account on one email, written by hand for that account. When leaders see each other on the thread, a reply feels expected. The internal forward that kills most outreach disappears.

A no-brainer opener. The first email leads with an offer that costs nothing to accept. The account gets value before any pitch, and replying becomes the easy choice.

Proof before the pitch. Every thread names the national brands that already trust our client. A prospect sees proof first and a pitch second.

An engine that stays full. A dedicated campaign manager enriches new accounts every week and checks every send three times. An operations manager keeps the daily quota on track. After the first touch, every account enters a follow-up sequence that brings in LinkedIn as a second channel.

Every lead routes itself. We built a workflow that scores and routes each positive reply. The bot researches the company, detects the vertical, picks the salesperson best suited to the account and lists two ranked backups. The full brief lands in the sales team’s chat before anyone opens the thread. The real alert includes the lead’s name, title, company, the detected vertical and the reasoning for each pick.

Results

From March to June 2026 the engine reached 1,483 cold accounts. It logged about 100 enterprise leads across the client’s response tracker, a lead rate of 6.7% per account, and replies on 39.8% of all accounts contacted since launch. Most cold email programs treat a 3% reply rate as a good result. At the time of the study, 98 opportunities sat open for the client’s sales team.

The lead rate climbed month over month as the copy and the list improved.

Month	Accounts contacted	Leads	Lead rate
March	729	26	3.6%
April	139	7	5.0%
May	340	13	3.8%
June	275	28	10.2%

June was the best month at 10.2%, and the trend was up.

The headline win. Ace Beverage Group came in as a reply to the committee note from a senior brand manager, moved through renderings and signed. That is a new enterprise customer in the first 90 days, before most of the pipeline had reached a meeting.

The caliber of the pipeline. These are not small leads. The brands that replied span national restaurant groups, beverage companies, grocery chains, casinos and cinema operators. A sample of the brands that replied, named with the client’s approval: Monster Beverage, KFC, Kroger, King’s Hawaiian, Golden Corral, E. & J. Gallo, Regal Cinemas, Dine Brands and Smashburger. Four meetings had been held by the end of the window, with Golden Corral, King’s Hawaiian, TFE Wines and The Save Mart Companies among them. Those companies are prospects of our client, not customers, and they are listed to show the size of the accounts the program reaches.

What we would do next

• Score the pipeline by stage. With 98 opportunities open, the sales team needs a weighted view: which replies are in dialogue, which have renderings out, which are waiting on a meeting. We build that view in the CRM so the team works the right accounts first.
• Tighten the list to the best months’ segments. June’s 10.2% came from a specific mix of verticals and titles. The next lists lean into that mix.
• Automate the follow-up bump. Most replies in programs like this arrive after the follow-up, so the bump goes out on a schedule without a human remembering to send it.
• Extend the routing bot into the CRM. Every routed lead becomes a record with the vertical, the assigned salesperson and the research attached.

Sources and method. Source data: the client’s KPI tracker and response tracker, March to June 2026. The lead total counts replies logged in the response tracker across the committee notes, a print campaign and LinkedIn. Lead rate is leads divided by the accounts that received a committee note in the window. Reply rate is all replies, automated responses included, divided by accounts contacted since launch. Shared with permission. The client is described, not named, under our client privacy policy. A sample of responding brands is named with the client’s approval; the rest are withheld by design.