Smirnov Consulting Group books qualified meetings with CTOs, heads of product, IT directors and non-technical founders at mid-sized B2B companies that buy custom software, for software development companies and dev shops, using cold email and LinkedIn.
- German IT company: 5 contracts worth about EUR 1,250,000 in 35 days, with LinkedIn, warm email and cold email running side by side.
- German software development company: 488 sales calls in 6 months.
Smirnov Consulting Group is a Prague-based B2B outbound lead generation agency that runs cold email and LinkedIn campaigns for founder-led B2B companies and books qualified sales calls. 12 years in outbound, hundreds of B2B companies, 24 countries.
Who this is for
Custom software firms, dev shops and product studios, usually 5 to 50 people, with delivered projects and clients who would vouch for them. Most of their work so far came through referrals.
Contracts in this niche are big enough to justify outbound. The German IT company in the case below had an average project size of EUR 250,000, so five signed contracts came to about EUR 1,250,000.
The people who hire us:
- The founder or owner, who still closes most deals
- The managing partner, at shops with two or three founders
- The CTO, who ended up doing sales because nobody else would
- The head of business development, at shops big enough to have one
The people we book into your calendar:
- CTOs and VPs of engineering who need extra delivery capacity
- Heads of product with a roadmap their in-house team cannot ship on time
- IT directors and CIOs replacing a legacy system
- COOs who want to automate a manual process
- Non-technical founders who need a first build or a rebuild
Why outbound is hard for dev shops
Your buyers are pitched by developers every week. A CTO at a mid-sized company gets messages like "we have senior developers ready to start next week" constantly. Most go unread. If your first message looks like that, it gets the same treatment, however good your team is.
Your buyers read specs for a living. Engineers and product leads spot vague sales language fast. "End-to-end digital transformation" tells them nothing. A result from a company like theirs, with numbers, gets a reply.
Referrals make the pipeline lumpy. A common pattern in dev shops: one big client carries the payroll, the bench is empty the month that client pauses, and nobody has prospected in years. When a quarter looks thin, it is already late, because a software project usually takes weeks to close.
Hiring one BDR can fail quietly. A German IT company came to us after trying SDRs and agencies. One of their SDRs had booked 2 calls in 3 months, and those leads were not even qualified. The full case is below. A single BDR without a target list, a clear offer and sending infrastructure is set up to fail.
How we run outbound for a software company
1. One service, one buyer. We pick one thing you build and one type of company that buys it. A CTO will answer a message about "custom software for logistics companies moving off spreadsheets". "Full-stack web and mobile development" reads like every other pitch in their inbox that week.
2. Foundations before volume. Before anything goes out, we look at you the way a CTO would: the founder's LinkedIn profile, your case studies, your website, your entry offer. For the German IT company below, this meant a new video sales letter, rewritten website copy and two new angles on its existing offers before the first message went out. If a buyer clicks through and finds a years-old portfolio, the best message in the world will not save the call.
3. Lists built on buying signals. We build the list with Sales Navigator, Apollo, ZoomInfo, Clay and other data tools, filtered by industry, headcount and region. Then we narrow it with signals that matter for a dev shop: companies hiring developers they cannot find, and companies running the stack you know best. Each address is checked before it enters a campaign, so bounces stay under half a percent.
4. LinkedIn and cold email, sent from real people. LinkedIn outreach runs from the founder's or CTO's profile, with warm email follow-ups. Separate cold email campaigns run from dedicated domains we set up and monitor, on dedicated sending IP addresses that are separate even across your different domains. We handle SPF, DKIM and DMARC, warmup and monitoring. No paid ads.
5. Qualified calls on your calendar. We answer the replies, check each prospect against your criteria (the kind of project, budget range, when they want to start) and book the call on Zoom, Microsoft Teams or phone.
Compliance. Dev shops sell across borders, so one country's rules do not cover every campaign. Most of our campaigns target the USA, the UK and English-speaking Europe: CAN-SPAM applies to US buyers, UK GDPR and PECR to UK buyers, and CASL to Canadian ones. Business contacts only, a simple way to opt out in every email, and anyone who asks to stop is removed and not re-added. Your current clients, open deals and anyone you name are excluded before launch. In Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic, where business email needs prior consent, we do not send cold email without a compliant basis and use LinkedIn instead. This is how we work, not legal advice.
Case: German IT company, about EUR 1,250,000 in 35 days
An IT company in Germany with an average project worth EUR 250,000. Before us, one of its SDRs had booked 2 calls in 3 months. We rebuilt the foundations first: a video sales letter for the website, rewritten website copy, two new angles on the existing offers, and lists of ideal clients only from Sales Navigator, Apollo and UpLead. Then three channels ran side by side.
| Channel | Accounts | Sequence length |
|---|---|---|
| LinkedIn plus warm email | 3 LinkedIn accounts, 3 email accounts | 6 steps |
| Cold email | 15 email accounts | 5 steps |
| Stage | Number |
|---|---|
| Replies | 712 |
| Interested in a call | 59 |
| Sales calls booked | 34 |
| Showed up | 28 |
| Contracts signed in 35 days | 5, about EUR 1,250,000 |
What the funnel shows: 712 replies became 59 people who wanted a call, 34 booked calls and 5 contracts. Hundreds of replies become dozens of conversations, and dozens of conversations become a handful of contracts. When one project is worth EUR 250,000 on average, a handful is enough. One inbox manager read every reply, and we worked with the client's sales team on closing, because booking a call and closing a sale are two different jobs.
Case: German software development company, 488 sales calls in 6 months
A software development company in Germany that sold into one niche. We optimized several LinkedIn profiles, built the lists in Sales Navigator and ran 5-step campaigns across LinkedIn and email, all aimed at that niche. In one tracked campaign, 84 connection requests led to 52 accepted (61.9%) and 40 replies (76.9% of those connected).
| Period | Booked sales calls |
|---|---|
| First 4 days | 12 |
| Month 1 | 43 |
| Month 2 | 51 |
| Month 3 | 78 |
| 6 months in total | 488 |
Months 4 to 6 brought 316 calls, almost twice the first three. Once a campaign worked, we added accounts running it instead of pushing one account harder. The published record for this program counts booked calls only, so we claim no contracts or revenue for it.
More in our case studies.
Timeline and price
- About 15 days from signed contract to launch: onboarding starts in the first week (usually one 60-minute call plus a few emails), then foundations review, offer, target list, copy, domains and inboxes.
- First 30 days live: the first replies and booked calls. The German software development company booked its first 12 calls in 4 days. For the German IT company, 5 contracts came in 35 days.
- After that: once a message and a list are working, we scale sideways. More LinkedIn profiles and more sending inboxes run the winning sequence, instead of one inbox being pushed harder.
The German IT case closed unusually fast. Custom software deals often take 6, 9 or 12 months, so plan for calls in the first 30 days and contracts from those calls four months later or more. That is why we recommend at least 3 months, and why about 6 months is the industry average for outbound to work fully.
Who runs your campaign. A very senior team: lead generation experts, GTM architects, GTM engineers and AI specialists. No interns, students or juniors write to your CTOs. We keep a small number of clients so each gets full attention, and we take full responsibility for results. A senior team member is your day-to-day contact, and you have a direct line to Artem, the founder. You get a weekly and a monthly report, live notifications every day, and a client portal with live campaign data if you want one. A CTO spots a junior or offshore writer in one line, so ask any agency for the names of the people who will write to them and look them up on LinkedIn. Ours are easy to find.
Price. From USD 3,000 (about EUR 2,500) per month, up to USD 10,000+ for shops that need more channels, markets or volume. The final number depends on scope, markets, volume and team size. The fee covers all our work: strategy, list building, copy, campaign setup, sending management, reply handling and reporting. Tools, sending domains, mailboxes and data are paid by you directly, because the right stack depends on your market and volume. If the foundations are missing, such as case studies, an optimized website or LinkedIn profiles, a one-time setup fee may apply, agreed case by case. No minimum contract, one month's notice to cancel. Full details on the pricing page.
Not a fit if
- You have no delivered projects to show yet. Outbound amplifies proof. It cannot create it.
- Your offer is "developers by the hour, cheaper than the rest". That message already fills every CTO's inbox.
- You could not start a new project in the next two or three months. Meetings you cannot deliver on are wasted.
- You want to pitch seven services to every industry at once. We start with one.
FAQ
Should a small dev shop hire a full-time BDR or outsource cold outreach?
Outsource first if nobody in the shop has built an outbound system before. A new BDR needs a list, an offer, copy, sending infrastructure and a manager who knows outbound. Without those, results look like the German IT company above: 2 calls in 3 months from one of their SDRs, then 34 booked calls and 5 contracts in 35 days once the system was in place. Hire in-house later, when you know what works.
What should a dev shop look for when hiring an outbound sales agency?
Ask for a case from a software or IT company with numbers and a time period, not a logo wall. Ask whose LinkedIn profile and which domains will do the sending, who writes the copy (a senior person or a junior), who qualifies the replies, and what you will see in the first 30 days. If the answers are vague, the campaign will be too. We show the setup and the full funnel, as in the German IT case above.
How fast can a dev shop get new client meetings?
Launch takes about 15 days from signed contract, and calls can come in the first 30 days after that. In the cases on this page, the German software development company booked 12 calls in its first 4 days, and the German IT company signed 5 contracts in 35 days. That is faster than usual. Most software deals take months to close. Speed also depends on your foundations: if your case studies and founder profile are ready, launch is faster.
Should a German dev shop use outbound to win US clients before expanding in Europe?
It can work. The questions to settle first: can you show a case a US buyer will recognize, can you take calls in US hours, and will you price in dollars. Most of our campaigns target the USA, the UK and English-speaking Europe, so a sensible order for a German shop is often the UK first, where the time zone is easy, then the US once the offer is proven. At home, German law requires prior consent even for business email, so outreach to German and Austrian prospects runs on LinkedIn, with our own stricter rules on top.
Our dev shop depends on one big client. Can outbound fix that?
Yes, if you start before the big client leaves. Launch takes about 15 days, and a software deal often takes months from first reply to signature, so the pipeline you start now is the one that covers you in the quarters ahead. We would pick the one service you are best known for, build a list of companies like your big client, and start conversations there.
Do you work with dev shops in Canada, Ireland and Australia?
Yes. Our office is in Prague, and our clients are in Canada, Australia, the UK, the USA and many other countries. For a dev shop in any of the three, the work is the same: one service, one buyer, proof a CTO can check. What changes is the law: GDPR in Ireland and the rest of the EU, CASL in Canada, the Spam Act in Australia, and CAN-SPAM if you target US buyers.