Results at a glance

• 30 meetings booked against a commissioned target of 20, across two engagements

• 88 leads from 2,438 dials, with 66 of them landing in the second engagement alone

• A re-cut ICP that tripled lead flow on effectively identical dial volume

Design work has no buying signal.

This client is a UI/UX design agency selling product design end to end, from UX research and usability testing through wireframing, prototyping and interaction design, and on into audits, strategy and motion. Hiring intent tells a recruitment platform when to call. Funding tells a finance tool when to call. Design has no equivalent. Nobody publishes that they are about to commission a redesign, so the list cannot be built from a trigger. It has to be built from a judgement about which industries and which roles are most likely to be in that window, and that judgement stays a guess until the phone proves it one way or the other.

The agency had run outbound into its market before without the appointment flow it wanted. Blueberg came in to run a single channel properly. No email and no LinkedIn alongside, which meant every appointment had to come off a live conversation and the connect rate carried the entire funnel.

Where they were

• Prior outbound in the region under-delivering on qualified conversations

• Targeting set broadly at kickoff and run unchanged to the end

• No benchmark for what the market returns per 1,000 dials

• A 500-contact scope treated as the ceiling on reach

• Booking and attendance tracked as one number, so the weak point was invisible

Three things we did differently.

• Industry-specific lists. The list was built industry by industry against the agency's ICP rather than pulled broad across the market. Narrow beats wide on a motion with no buying signal: a named vertical gives the rep a reason to be calling that a headcount filter never does. Both engagements ran roughly 500 contacts.

• Follow-up inside the dial plan. A contact got up to two additional attempts, built into the plan rather than left to the rep's discretion. That is how roughly 500 contacts became 1,221 dials in the first engagement and 1,217 in the second, with a meaningful share of connects landing on attempt two or three rather than attempt one.

• A campaign we were willing to stop. The second engagement was paused after one week to re-cut the ICP and tighten the target criteria, then restarted three weeks later. Losing a week of a one-month campaign is a real cost. Running the other three weeks at the wrong target would have cost more.

What changed

• 30 appointments booked across two engagements, both over the committed target

• ICP re-cut on live call feedback, then validated by 66 leads in six weeks

• A measured 40.4% connect rate to plan the next campaign against

• 1,221 dials worked out of a 500-contact list through disciplined follow-up

• Meetings booked and meetings held reported separately, so the gap is visible rather than averaged away

One variable moved, and it was not effort.

Read side by side the comparison is unusually clean, because the market, the channel, the campaign manager and the dial volume all held constant. The first engagement placed 1,221 dials and produced 22 leads and 11 appointments. The second placed 1,217 dials, four fewer, and produced 66 leads and 19 appointments. Four fewer dials, forty-four more leads. Everything that moved, moved because the list changed.

The week spent pausing to re-cut that list returned 44 additional leads and eight additional appointments over the first engagement. The next lever is attendance rather than volume: 30 meetings were booked and 18 were held, and closing that gap does not require a single extra dial.

The numbers

• 3× Lead flow after the ICP re-cut

• 2,438 Dials across two engagements

• 88 Leads generated

• 30 Appointments booked

• 18 Meetings held

• 40.4% Connect rate on the phone

Engagement

• Client: UI/UX design agency

• Industry: Design services

• Market: India

• Engagement: Two campaigns, January to February and April to June 2026

• Channel: Cold calling, single channel

• Personas: Founders · Product owners · Marketing leadership

• Services: Plug-in SDR Team · List Building · ICP Refinement · Appointment Setting

• Focus: Business Services · Design · Single Channel