FMS Investor turned cold outreach into qualified pipeline
A financing marketplace paying for clicks that never converted. We rebuilt the demand engine around outbound and paid working together.
FMS Investor connects small businesses with lenders across term loans, lines of credit, and equipment financing. When we started, paid search was buying volume and a cold email program was burning through domains, but almost none of it turned into deals that funded. In six months we rebuilt deliverability, tightened targeting to the signals that predict funding, and wired outbound and paid to feed the same qualified pipeline. Qualified pipeline more than tripled while cost per lead fell by 41 percent.
Spend was up. Qualified deals were not.
FMS Investor connects small businesses with lenders across term loans, lines of credit, and equipment financing. Paid search brought volume, but most leads were rate-shoppers who never qualified, and an untargeted cold email program was getting flagged as spam before it reached an inbox. Cost per lead kept climbing while the sales team burned hours on prospects that would never fund.
The two channels ran in isolation and worked against each other. Cold email blasted the same generic offer to any business it could find, so replies were rare and rarely relevant. Paid search bid broad and pulled in comparison shoppers who bounced. Nothing tied a prospect's behavior in one channel to the next, so reps had no way to tell a serious borrower from someone killing time, and the marketing spend that did convert was impossible to trace back to a funded deal.
Make outbound and paid feed the same qualified pipeline
Instead of treating cold email and paid search as separate line items, we ran them as one demand engine pointed at the same definition of a qualified borrower. First we fixed deliverability so the outreach reached inboxes at all. Then we tightened who we targeted to the revenue and time-in-business signals that actually predict funding, and pointed every dollar at the businesses most likely to close.
The work, month by month
The same plan, laid out on the calendar it actually ran on.
Deliverability and tracking
Warmed dedicated domains, set SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, and stood up end-to-end tracking from send to funded deal.
Targeting and offers
Rebuilt segments around revenue and time-in-business signals and rewrote sequences to one clear offer per prospect.
Channels in sync
Wired cold email, LinkedIn, and retargeting against shared segments so a prospect saw a consistent message across touches.
Tune to funded
Shifted spend and sequence effort toward the segments producing funded deals and cut the ones that stalled at qualification.
From cold sends to booked meetings
How the rebuilt outbound sequence converts a monthly cohort of sends into qualified conversations.
Percentages are share of the delivered cohort. Booked meetings are the top of the sales-qualified pipeline.
One view of the whole demand engine
The weekly KPIs we reported against funded deals across every channel.
Every metric tied back to funded loans, so channel budgets moved toward what actually closed.
A pipeline built on qualified conversations
By month six FMS Investor was spending less to reach better borrowers. Qualified pipeline more than tripled, cost per qualified lead fell 41 percent, and cold email went from a liability to the highest-intent channel in the mix, all measured against loans that actually funded.
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