194 qualified leads from a dormant pipeline
A five-week outbound campaign called back into an international logistics platform's stalled lead pool, without pulling the sales team off active deals to do it.
A pipeline that had gone quiet
An international logistics platform had a large pool of leads that had gone cold: companies once in conversation, never converted, never fully closed out either.
Working that pool by hand would have meant pulling the sales team off active deals to make calls that might lead nowhere. The platform needed a way to find the leads worth a rep's time without spending that time finding them.
Qualify first, route second
An outbound qualification agent called into the dormant pool over five weeks, checked whether freight forwarding was still relevant, and asked a small set of qualifying questions.
Companies that qualified were handed to sales with that context already attached, rather than as a bare phone number to call cold a second time.
A five-week campaign
- Discover
Segment the pool
6,804 companies were identified as in scope from the dormant lead pool before dialing began.
- Build
Design the qualification script
A short set of qualifying questions was built to separate genuinely warm companies from dead ends.
- Test
Simulate cold reactions
Disinterested and skeptical responses were run in simulation so the agent could close out cleanly, not push.
- Launch
Run across five weeks
The campaign worked through the contact list in stages over five weeks rather than all at once.
- Evolve
Hand off with context
Qualified leads were routed to sales with the qualifying answers attached, so reps started from context, not a cold list.
What the five weeks produced
| Metric | Result | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Calls placed | 9,666 | |
| Companies in scope | 6,804 | |
| Companies contacted | 2,513 | |
| Full conversations | 1,602 | |
| Qualified leads handed to sales | 194 | 12.1% of conversations |
| Constructive reception | 95.1% | Happy or neutral |
| Sales team time freed | 36 hours of conversation | Handled without occupying the sales team |
Dormant isn't dead
95.1% constructive reception, happy or neutral, on a pool the team had written off as cold was the biggest surprise. Dormant leads were not hostile leads, they were mostly just leads nobody had called back.
Reach was the actual bottleneck, not conversion: of 6,804 companies in scope, 2,513 were contacted across five weeks. Planning the next campaign means budgeting for how many companies can realistically be reached in a given window, not just how many exist in the pool.
The number that mattered to sales was the qualification rate, 12.1% of conversations, not the raw call count. 9,666 calls is a big number, but it is the 194 qualified leads that actually changed what the sales team had to work with.
Put a dormant list back to work
See what a qualification campaign would look like against your own pipeline.