We hired three outbound agencies before SmarterOutbound. Only this one worked.
Multi-channel was the difference. The other three were email-only shops that gave up when our buyer didn't respond to email.
- Tried three other outbound agencies first; each lasted under 4 months.
- Common failure pattern: email-only agencies couldn't reach our buyer demographic.
- SmarterOutbound's multi-channel approach (email + LinkedIn + calling + SMS) was the difference.
- Booked meetings went from 6/month to 28/month over two quarters.
This is going to read like an endorsement, and I’d be skeptical of it too. I’ll just give the timeline and you can decide.
The three agencies before SmarterOutbound
Agency 1 (cold email only). Signed in Q1 last year. Burned out after four months. Their playbook was high-volume cold email with light personalization. Our buyer (Director of Operations at vertical-specific industrial companies) does not check generic-feeling cold email. We booked maybe 3 meetings in 4 months. Quality was bad.
Agency 2 (cold email + LinkedIn DMs). Signed Q2. Better. Got to about 8 booked meetings per month at the peak. They burned our LinkedIn accounts because their warmup approach was too aggressive — three of our SDRs got restricted by LinkedIn within two months. Canceled.
Agency 3 (cold email + calling, no LinkedIn). Signed Q3. Calling team was good but the email infrastructure they set up failed deliverability after six weeks. We hit Microsoft RBL twice. They blamed us. We canceled.
Why SmarterOutbound was different
By the time we got to them in Q4, I had a checklist of things I wanted in an agency that none of the previous three could provide:
- Genuine multi-channel — not email with LinkedIn duct-taped on.
- Owned infrastructure they would not burn out.
- Human reply triage, not automated chat workflows.
- Pricing that wasn’t tied to “leads” but to actual booked-and-qualified meetings.
SmarterOutbound checked all four. The Full Outbound Engine tier is what we run.
The numbers
When we started Q4 last year, we were booking 6 meetings per month, mostly through partnerships and inbound. End of Q2 this year: 28 meetings per month, with the channel breakdown roughly:
- Cold calling: 38%.
- LinkedIn: 27%.
- Cold email: 22%.
- SMS: 13%.
The SMS channel surprised me. It’s not the biggest but the close rate from SMS-booked meetings is the highest of any channel.
Why five stars
Not because they’re flawless. Five stars because the previous three agencies couldn’t have delivered this outcome, and most of the reason is that they were single-channel teams pretending to be multi-channel.
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