Outbound worked for years, then email suddenly stopped creating opportunities.
For the first years, that motion worked. Ekipa's offer was novel, the market was interested, and the team could reliably get into conversations with innovation managers, heads of innovation, and directors of innovation at large corporations.
Over time, the market changed. The same buyers received more automated sales emails, response rates declined, and email deliverability became harder to diagnose. By late 2024, Ekipa saw campaigns fall to zero response from one day to the next.
The team had already moved tools and improved parts of the infrastructure, but the core problem remained unclear. Were prospects no longer interested, were messages not relevant enough, or were emails simply failing to reach the inbox?
"From one day to another, our email outbound campaigns had a zero response rate, and we weren't quite sure what the reason for that was."
We rebuilt the foundation before adding more outbound volume.
The work started strategically. Ekipa used Enablement's templates, documents, and guidance to challenge its understanding of the market, value proposition, ICP, customer challenges, and offer.
Then we focused on the biggest operational constraint: deliverability. Instead of treating Smartlead reporting as the whole truth, the team learned how to set up infrastructure and monitoring that made inbox placement visible.
From there, Ekipa improved the broader GTM motion: relevance-based outreach, better message testing, email and LinkedIn coordination, and founder-led content creation that could create both outbound conversations and inbound demand.
Ekipa filled its calendar with 15-30 sales meetings per week.
Justin reported that Ekipa now has a full schedule of 15-30 sales meetings per week.
He also said the company expects to grow between 10% and 25% this year, and that Enablement contributed to that growth through the expertise and knowledge provided during the collaboration.
The impact extended beyond email outbound. Ekipa started using LinkedIn content more professionally, and Caritas, one of the largest employers in Germany, hired Ekipa for a first pilot project after seeing content Enablement helped create.
Ekipa left with a system the team understood, not a black box.
Ekipa did not want an agency to run campaigns in isolation. They wanted guidance, structure, and expertise that helped the internal team understand what was happening and build its own capability.
That is why the collaboration focused on both execution and enablement: strategic thinking, deliverability foundations, campaign testing, content support, LinkedIn support, and the knowledge transfer needed to keep improving the motion internally.