The Company

A digital platform for institutional investors to trade fund positions in the secondaries market. Over 2,000 accredited investors on the platform. More than $1 billion in annual transaction volume. A small but effective team of under 20 people.

The product worked. The way they found new customers did not scale.

What Was Happening

The Head of Sales was personally handling most of the prospecting work. Every morning started the same way: research prospects on LinkedIn, check Crunchbase for fund details, write individual emails, track replies in a spreadsheet.

This manual process generated enough conversations to keep the business growing, but it consumed half of every day and could not produce more output without more people. Hiring was not an option: the team was deliberately lean.

There was also a risk dimension. All outreach was going out from the company’s primary email domain. In financial services, one poorly received cold email to the wrong allocator can damage years of relationship building.

“We had a clear picture of our buyer. Fund managers, LPs, institutional allocators: maybe 5,000 people globally who fit. The challenge was covering that market systematically instead of one email at a time.”

Head of Sales, Financial Marketplace Platform

What Needed to Change

Scale without headcount. The manual process maxed out at maybe 15-20 personalized emails per day. The addressable market was 5,000+ contacts. At that pace, full coverage would take over a year, and by then half the data would be stale.

Protection for the brand. Financial professionals are sensitive to unsolicited outreach. Sending from the main domain with no fallback infrastructure was a liability.

Research quality at automation speed. These buyers ignore generic templates. Every message had to reference fund specifics, strategy focus, or recent portfolio activity. That level of personalization was what made manual outreach work. The question was whether automation could preserve it.

The System Corela Built

Sending infrastructure. Dedicated domains with full authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC). Three-week warm-up cycle. Complete separation from the primary business domain.

Automated research pipeline. Clay workflows replaced the manual LinkedIn/Crunchbase process. Firmographic data, fund details, verified contact information: all pulled and enriched automatically. What took 30 minutes per prospect now ran in the background for hundreds simultaneously.

Dynamic personalization. Using enriched data fields, we built email templates where the personalization was driven by real fund attributes: strategy type, geographic focus, recent activity. Each email referenced details specific to the recipient without anyone writing them manually.

Sequencing and routing. Smartlead campaigns with 4-touch sequences, A/B tested subject lines, and reply-triggered routing. Only positive responses surfaced to the sales team. Everything else was handled by the system.

Continuous refinement. Weekly reviews with the sales team: which segments responded, which angles landed, where to shift. The system improved every week based on actual performance data, not assumptions.

What Happened

Starting from week two:

• 8-20 positive replies per week, consistently maintained

• Qualified leads arriving daily: the sales team started each morning with warm conversations instead of cold research

• 5 clients closed from early campaign responses

• 15+ hours per week reclaimed, previously spent on manual prospecting

The shift was operational, not just numerical. Outreach domains removed brand risk. Automated enrichment let them cover their entire addressable market. Consistent sequencing replaced sporadic follow-up. And performance data, not gut feeling, drove every messaging decision.