The starting point
Spendlab is a spend management platform built for mid-market finance teams, the kind of company that competes with a crowded field of expense software vendors all making similar claims about visibility and control. Like most B2B software companies at their stage, they had inbound demand from content and paid search, but it was inconsistent and heavily weighted toward smaller accounts that took a long time to close and didn’t expand much after signing. They wanted a repeatable way to get in front of finance leaders at companies large enough to matter, without hiring and managing an internal SDR team from scratch.
This is a common position for FinTech and InsurTech companies to be in. The product is good, the market exists, but nobody is reliably calling the accounts that would actually move the revenue needle.
Defining the target
Before any outreach happened, the work was in narrowing who to call. Spendlab’s best existing customers were not “any company with an expense process.” They were companies between roughly 200 and 2,000 employees, with a finance team big enough to have a controller or VP of Finance who owned spend policy but small enough that procurement wasn’t a twelve-step approval chain. Industries mattered too. Companies with distributed teams, multiple cost centers, or physical operations (logistics, healthcare services, multi-location retail) had more painful expense processes than flat, single-office software companies.
This narrowing matters more than most outbound programs admit. A list of 5,000 loosely-qualified accounts produces worse meetings than a list of 500 tightly-qualified ones, even though the second number looks smaller on a dashboard. For Spendlab, the working list came down to a few hundred accounts, segmented by trigger events: recent headcount growth, a new VP of Finance hire, or a recent funding round, all reasonable proxies for “this company’s expense process is about to get more painful.”
Building the message
The messaging avoided the two most common failure modes in FinTech outbound: leading with a feature list, and leading with a vague productivity claim nobody can evaluate over the phone. Instead, the opening was built around a specific, recognizable moment: the point in a company’s growth where spreadsheet-based expense tracking or a legacy tool stops working, usually visible through late reconciliations, manual card requests, or finance spending hours chasing receipts at month end.
Callers weren’t reading a script that pitched Spendlab. They were opening a conversation about whether that moment had already hit, and letting the prospect describe their own situation before anything about the product came up. This is a deliberate design choice, not a nicety. A cold call that talks at a finance leader gets a polite decline. A cold call that asks a real question about their close process gets a real answer, and sometimes a meeting.
Running the campaign
Spendlab’s outreach ran through Nurturance’s network of live callers on the Glencoco marketplace, covering both US and UK accounts, which mattered because a meaningful share of the target list had finance operations split across both regions. Calling was paired with email and LinkedIn touches, not as a separate channel but as reinforcement, so a prospect who didn’t pick up the phone still saw a short, relevant note before the next call attempt.
Call cadence followed the target list’s segmentation. Accounts with a recent trigger event (a new finance hire, a funding announcement) were called within days of the signal appearing, while the general account list moved through a slower, multi-touch sequence over several weeks. This is where a lot of DIY outbound falls apart: teams build a good list once and then let it go stale, calling the same static set of accounts for months without refreshing it against what’s actually happening at those companies.
Objection handling was kept honest. When a prospect said they were happy with their current tool, callers didn’t argue. They asked what would need to change for that to stop being true, which either surfaced a real gap or ended the call quickly, both useful outcomes. Chasing a “maybe” that’s really a “no” wastes calling capacity that should go to the next account.
The result
Over the course of the campaign, this targeting and calling approach produced 9 qualified sales meetings for Spendlab, booked directly onto their sales team’s calendar with finance decision-makers who matched the ICP defined at the outset. For a mid-market B2B software company, 9 meetings with the right title, at the right company size, in an active buying window, is a materially different outcome than 9 meetings with whoever happened to answer the phone. The quality of the list and the specificity of the opening question did more to produce that outcome than any script optimization would have.
What this means for other teams
The mechanics here aren’t exclusive to Spendlab or to Nurturance. Any B2B team can build a tighter ICP, tie outreach timing to real triggers, and train callers or reps to ask before they pitch. The harder part is doing it consistently: keeping the list fresh, tracking which triggers actually correlate with meetings versus which ones just feel intuitive, and giving callers enough real product knowledge to handle a skeptical finance leader without sounding scripted. Most internal SDR programs struggle with this not because the ideas are complicated, but because it takes sustained management attention that founders and sales leaders often don’t have room for alongside everything else.
When a managed service makes more sense
If your team has the bandwidth to build and manage this system in-house, hiring and coaching SDRs directly can work well. But if you’re a founder or sales leader who needs qualified meetings on the calendar without spending months building calling infrastructure, training callers, and tuning targeting, a pay-per-meeting model like Nurturance removes that setup cost and ties spend directly to results. It’s worth considering when the constraint isn’t strategy, it’s execution capacity.