The ChallengeA pipeline that was 100 percent referrals and a founder who refused to prospect.
The practice was a solo executive coaching firm working with eight active clients at $5K to $15K a month each. Recurring revenue was healthy, retention was strong, and the founder's outbound activity was zero. Every client had come in through a referral or a past speaking engagement.
The plateau hit when the calendar capped out at eight clients and growth required net-new acquisition. The founder explored options:
- Hiring a US-based SDR. Quoted at $75K to $90K base plus commission. Too expensive for an eight-figure-EBITDA business to absorb on speculation.
- Outsourced agency SDR firms. Tried two over 18 months. Both burned through her ICP list, sent generic templated sequences, and produced inbound replies she was embarrassed to read. Reply rate under 3 percent. No qualified meetings.
- Doing it herself. Tried. Spent two months. Made 14 cold calls total. Booked zero. Discovered she hated the work so much it tanked her energy for actual client work.
The pattern was clear: every alternative was either too expensive, too off-brand, or too miserable to sustain. What she needed was someone who could do the work the way she would have done it if she could stand to do it.
The ApproachA trained SDR placed long-term, not a campaign rented short-term.
Staffify placed a dedicated SDR with five years of outbound experience in professional services (consulting, legal, financial advisory). LinkedIn-fluent. Familiar with Apollo for list-building, Lemlist for email cadences, and HubSpot for handoff to the founder's calendar.
The first two weeks were ICP work, not outbound:
- Week 1 — ICP definition. Staffify and the founder rebuilt the ICP from past clients up: industry, company size, decision-maker title, the trigger events that made coaching the right purchase. Pulled the actual LinkedIn URLs of seven past clients to study the signals.
- Week 2 — sequence build. The SDR drafted three first-touch sequences (LinkedIn DM, cold email, LinkedIn voice note) in the founder's voice. The founder approved each one personally. No automation that didn't sound like her.
- Week 3 onward — daily outbound. 40 to 60 first touches per day. Replies routed through the SDR for triage. Anything qualified got booked directly onto the founder's Calendly with a context note (LinkedIn profile, their company size, the trigger that prompted the booking).
The founder never personally touched the prospecting motion. She showed up to the calls the SDR booked, ran the conversation, closed (or didn't), and the SDR took it from there.
Every discovery call on my calendar last quarter — I didn't book a single one of them myself. That sentence is the entire reason I went looking for someone like Staffify in the first place.
The Outcome$180K in pipeline in 90 days. Seven new client engagements signed.
By the end of month one the SDR was producing 8 to 12 booked calls per month. Reply rate held steady at 32 percent (the founder's voice doing the lifting). By month two the founder had signed three new engagements. By the end of month three: seven new clients signed, representing about $180,000 in committed annual revenue.
The Staffify SDR's monthly cost: roughly $3,800. The breakeven on a single $5K/mo coaching client hit at day 38. The breakeven on two clients hit at day 22. By day 45 the placement had paid for itself for the rest of the year and then some.
The qualitative win the founder cared most about: she didn't have to learn a skill she'd been refusing to learn for a decade. She kept being a coach. The SDR was an SDR. Both got better at their respective jobs without one having to become the other.