From "hard to get the meeting" to a durable outbound engine
We built and ran the cold email engine for Eddy, an HR and payroll platform: roughly 6,000 leads from 1,156,928 emails in the first year. Eddy already closed 51% of the sales opportunities it opened. Starting enough of those conversations was the bottleneck.
01Key Numbers
At a Glance
"Leads" here include positive replies and engaged-prospect lists (like interested clickers) delivered to Eddy's team, not just replies.
"So over the last three years, we've closed 50%, 51% actually, of every sales opportunity that's been opened. ... So the close rate is insanely high."
Jared Price
President & CTO, Eddy
02The Client
Who Is Eddy?
Eddy is an all-in-one HR and payroll platform for small and midsize businesses with local, frontline teams: hiring, onboarding, PTO, time tracking, and full-service payroll in one system.
They're small for what they run. President and CTO Jared Price puts it plainly: Eddy runs "nearly a billion dollars of U.S. payroll today" and competes with BambooHR, Rippling, and Workday, all "with like five or six engineers."
When Eddy gets the meeting, Eddy wins. The missing piece was never the product or the sales team. It was the top of the funnel.
03The Challenge
Closing was never the problem. Starting was.
Eddy had tried the usual routes. An internal SDR team booked plenty of meetings, but with the wrong buyers, who churned. Eddy shut it down. Referrals and partnerships brought great customers, but not enough of them.
"It's pretty hard to get the meeting. Once we get the meeting, we are very good at selling it. ... the product's very compelling, but it's really hard to get that first initial meeting."Jared Price, President & CTO, Eddy
They didn't need help closing. They needed a machine that starts the right conversations, and a partner whose upside was tied to it working.
The math explains why: in this category it takes roughly 1,800 cold emails to start one positive conversation. A small SDR team can't send that much. Infrastructure can.
04The Build
Launched in a Week
Payroll has a buying season: companies switch providers when they can start clean. To catch it, we compressed our usual three-week launch into a little over one.
- First copy draft delivered two days after kickoff
- Campaigns live just over a week after that draft
- Targeting focused where Eddy competes best
- 9,000-contact do-not-send list honored
That last item matters. On onboarding day, Jared paused access until we confirmed in writing that Eddy's data would never be resold or repurposed. Eddy checked the work, and the guardrails held.
05The Engine
Outbound at Scale
The early signals came fast: first positive reply eight days after launch, and a week in month two that produced 48 leads. Then the machine settled into a rhythm: ten consecutive months above 90,000 sends, at a 1.10% lifetime bounce rate. Over the first year, that added up to roughly 500 leads a month.
Swipe the chart to see all 12 months →
Monthly sends and the running reply total, first 12 months; headline totals include a few additional days. SAS internal campaign data.
This is what Eddy hired us for: outbound in a regulated, high-stakes category, run like infrastructure instead of a campaign.
06The Check-In
In It for the Long Run
HR and payroll deals take a while to close. A few months in, we asked Jared how the channel was going.
"I should probably also say I'm optimistic that this channel will work out in the long run, I think it's on us to make sure we are following up relentlessly. For example, I met today with a fractional HR person who absolutely loved Eddy and said he'd likely purchase and also refer clients to us."Jared Price, President & CTO, Eddy
Eddy kept investing. They tightened the ICP and expanded the scope of work.
07The Long Game
A Working Partnership
What keeps a channel alive through a long sales cycle is the boring work:
- ICP tightened based on which replies moved forward
- Pricing copy that prospects misread, rewritten and A/B tested
- Reply-classification bug flagged by Eddy, fixed same day
- Attribution-feed regression caught and fixed within the day
- Three persona tracks: C-suite, HR leaders, office managers
When Eddy built a new Shift Scheduling product, they brought the launch to us. Eddy's CPO reviewed the outbound creative himself:
"I think this looks good. Let's give it a try."Kenny Freestone, Chief Product Officer, Eddy
Outbound became part of how Eddy launches new products, not a standalone experiment.
08Book an Intro Call
Work With SAS
Eddy had a proven product, a sales team that closes half of what it opens, and a bottleneck at the top of the funnel. If that sounds like your company, let's talk. You'll see the actual send, reply, and lead numbers, and you can pick them apart the way you would your own.
We'll show you the numbers first. If cold email isn't the answer for you, we'll say so.
Campaign numbers on this page are SAS internal data covering cold-email sends, deliverability, and replies for Eddy; company facts and sales metrics are Eddy's own statements. We don't state totals for meetings, pipeline, or revenue from this channel. Those outcomes live in Eddy's systems.