Why Koi needed a different approach to outbound
Koi is a fintech company selling into a crowded, skeptical buyer base: finance and operations leaders who get pitched by five new payments and compliance tools a week. Before working with Nurturance, Koi’s outbound had followed the standard playbook: a sales rep or SDR sending sequenced emails, some LinkedIn touches, and a generic call script. It produced meetings, but not consistently, and the ones it did produce often turned out to be poor fits once a rep got on the call.
The problem wasn’t effort. It was precision. Koi’s internal team was spread thin across product, support, and sales, and outbound was the first thing that got deprioritized when anything else caught fire. What Koi needed wasn’t more volume. It was a tighter target list, sharper messaging, and callers who could actually hold a real conversation instead of reading a script and hanging up at the first objection.
Defining the real target account list
The engagement started with a narrower definition of “ideal customer” than Koi had been using internally. Instead of targeting anyone with “finance” in their title at companies of a certain size, the list was built around specific triggers: recent funding rounds, headcount growth in finance operations, and companies that had publicly signaled they were outgrowing spreadsheet-based processes or a competitor’s tool.
This mattered more than any single message or script. A well-targeted list forgives an average pitch. A poorly targeted list makes even a great pitch fail, because the person on the other end of the phone has no reason to care. Nurturance built the list in collaboration with Koi’s sales team, using firmographic and intent signals rather than a purchased list scraped for job titles alone.
Messaging built around a specific problem, not a product pitch
The outbound messaging avoided the common trap of leading with features. Instead, callers opened conversations around a specific operational pain that Koi’s product addressed: the manual reconciliation work that finance teams do when their existing systems don’t talk to each other. That framing gave prospects a reason to stay on the phone past the first ten seconds, because it named something they were already dealing with rather than asking them to imagine a hypothetical benefit.
This is a deliberate departure from how a lot of in-house SDR teams write cold outreach. When a founder or a junior rep writes the script, it tends to describe the product. When an outside agency writes it, the incentive is different: the only way to get paid is to get someone to agree to a meeting, so the messaging has to earn attention on the prospect’s terms, not the seller’s.
Why phone-based outreach mattered here
Koi’s buyer, a finance or ops leader, is not someone who responds reliably to cold email alone. These buyers are hard to reach by email because they get too much of it, and they are wary of anything that reads as automated. A human caller who can adapt to pushback in real time, ask a follow-up question, and handle an objection on the spot converts better than a sequence of emails that a busy VP skims and archives.
Nurturance runs outbound through the Glencoco marketplace, which connects clients with vetted, experienced human callers rather than a single dedicated SDR. For Koi, this meant the calling capacity could flex with the campaign rather than being limited to whatever one or two internal hires had bandwidth for. It also meant the callers doing outreach had done this kind of calling before, across other B2B software campaigns, and weren’t learning objection handling on Koi’s dime.
The result
Over the course of the engagement, the campaign generated 21 sales meetings with qualified prospects matching Koi’s target profile. These weren’t calendar holds with unqualified contacts; each meeting was with someone who fit the account and persona criteria Koi’s team had defined at the outset, and each one showed up ready to talk about a real problem rather than being surprised by a cold pitch.
The number itself matters less than what it represents: a repeatable process that didn’t depend on any one person’s bandwidth or creativity on a given week. Koi’s internal team could see, meeting by meeting, which targeting criteria and messaging angles were producing conversations worth having, and adjust from there.
What this means for teams thinking about their own outbound
The lesson from Koi’s experience isn’t that phone outreach beats email, or that any one tactic is a silver bullet. It’s that targeting discipline and message specificity do more work than most teams expect, and that the execution layer, whether that’s an internal SDR or an outside calling team, only pays off once the targeting and message are right. Spend the effort there first.
If you’re building this in-house, the honest tradeoff is time and hiring risk. Good SDRs take months to ramp, and outbound only compounds once someone has iterated on the list and script enough times to know what’s actually working. If you have that runway and want to build the muscle internally, it’s worth doing.
A managed, pay-per-meeting service like Nurturance is a better fit when you need qualified meetings on the calendar now, without the six-month ramp of hiring and training an SDR team, and when you’d rather pay for outcomes than for headcount and tooling that may or may not perform. It’s not a replacement for having a sales process that can close what gets booked, just a faster way to fill the top of it.