A UX design agency in the UK booked 796 sales calls in 12 months with Smirnov Consulting Group. The first month alone brought 35 sales calls and 7 new contracts. We ran LinkedIn outreach with warm emails, separate cold email campaigns, and LinkedIn content next to the outreach.
The agency needed qualified leads every month
The agency sold UX design work to other businesses. What it needed was a steady supply of qualified leads: people with a real project and the budget to hire a design agency, arriving every month instead of now and then.
We ran outbound and content on LinkedIn at the same time
This was the setup, in order:
- Picked 4 niches to target.
- Built the lists with Sales Navigator and Uplead.
- Ran LinkedIn outreach with warm emails. A warm email follows a LinkedIn first touch, so the prospect already knows the name when it lands.
- Ran separate cold email campaigns.
- Published content on LinkedIn, so the profile a prospect checked after a message looked active.
- Ran multiple campaigns, each with 3 or 4 scenarios of 6 to 7 steps.
One of the sequences is a 6-step LinkedIn flow. It starts with a profile view. If the prospect's profile takes a free InMail, the next step is an InMail. If not, it is a connection request. The follow-up steps branch from there.
December was the best month: 360 replies
The campaign volume table for December shows what a strong month looked like.
| December (best month) | Number |
|---|---|
| Messages sent | 1,243 |
| Replies received | 360 |
A reply is not a call. Some replies are a polite no, some are questions, some are "not now". The replies that show real interest are the ones that turn into booked calls.
35 calls and 7 contracts in month one, 796 calls in the year
The results, as recorded on the case:
- 35 sales calls in the first month
- 7 new contracts signed in the first month
- 360 replies in December, the best month
- 796 sales calls booked in 12 months
The 7 contracts in month one matter more than the call count. A booked call is a cost until someone signs. Early contracts are the first proof that the list and the offer reach people who buy.
Design agencies need proof a stranger can check
A design agency is judged on how it looks and how it thinks before anyone reads the offer. When a prospect gets a message, the next thing they do is open the profile. The LinkedIn content was there for that moment.
This setup works for a design studio under a few conditions. The studio already has a service that sells at a price it is happy with. It can describe its buyer in one sentence for each niche. And it has people free to take the calls. 796 calls in a year is more than 60 a month on average.
If your portfolio has no results in it, fix that before you send anything. The outreach will send people to it.
See how we run LinkedIn campaigns on our LinkedIn outreach agency page, and results for other agencies on our marketing agencies page. Browse every case on /case-studies, and see how programs are priced on /pricing.