15 leads, 3 closed deals and 3 placements in the first three weeks

Thomas Robinson, President of ScoutLab.io, recorded this after the first three weeks. Every number on this page is from his own account.

The Challenge

ScoutLab is a staffing firm headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, with offices in Palm Beach, Florida and Northern California. It places sales talent into SaaS, logistics, supply chain, medtech and IT companies. Like most early-stage staffing firms, it grew on referrals and relationships: a placement went well, the hiring manager mentioned ScoutLab to a peer, and the next client arrived through word of mouth. That model produces good clients, but it caps growth at the rate relationships compound, and it gives a firm no lever to pull when the referral pipeline runs dry. Generating new client leads was, in the President's own words, "always a struggle." The firm needed a partner who could build the outbound function it did not have, without pulling recruiters away from placements.

What They Had Tried Before

Before Montazzo, ScoutLab's new business development was informal. Recruiters would occasionally reach out to a hiring manager themselves between placements, usually a LinkedIn message or a personal email sent in whatever gap existed in a billable week. It was not a system, and it was not meant to be one: every hour a recruiter spent prospecting was an hour not spent sourcing or closing a job order. The firm had never run a structured cold outbound motion with its own sending infrastructure, its own target list, or a sequence built to be sent at volume. There was no dedicated channel for new client acquisition that did not compete directly with the work that actually billed.

What We Built

We built ScoutLab a dedicated outbound system that ran independently of its recruiting team: separate sending domains and warmed mailboxes so the new motion carried no risk to ScoutLab's existing email reputation, and a target list of companies actively hiring for the sales roles ScoutLab fills across supply chain, logistics, SaaS, medtech and IT. The core decision was the angle of the email itself. Rather than describe the agency, every message led with a specific, pre-vetted candidate ScoutLab already had in its pipeline, matched to a role the target company had open. The pitch was the person, not the firm.

The Sequence We Ran

Each sequence opened with that named candidate: their background, the kind of role they were suited for, and why they were worth ten minutes of a hiring manager's time. Follow-up touches kept the same candidate-first framing rather than pivoting into a general pitch for ScoutLab's services, because the moment a hiring manager has a real person in mind is the moment they are most likely to reply. Replies were triaged the same day and handed to ScoutLab's team as a live conversation with a named hiring manager, not a lead sitting in a shared inbox waiting to be worked.

What Came Back

The replies were not generic interest in "learning more." Hiring managers wrote back asking directly about the candidate: were they still available, what was their notice period, what compensation range were they expecting. Some asked to see a second candidate for the same role, or for a different open req entirely once they realized ScoutLab worked their niche. A few replies were pure objections, the kind every staffing firm hears, that they already had a preferred vendor or ran searches in-house, and those were qualified out quickly rather than chased. The candidate-led emails were doing the hardest part of the sales conversation before ScoutLab's team ever picked up the phone.

What Happened In The First Three Weeks

In the first three weeks the campaign produced 15 qualified leads. Three of those became closed deals, and each of those deals produced a placement. ScoutLab had signed a three-month pilot to test whether a cold channel could work alongside its referral business without disrupting it.

Month Two: Deciding To Extend

On the strength of the first month, ScoutLab did not wait for the pilot to finish before deciding what came next. The President recorded the video above after those first three weeks and said on camera that he expected to keep the engagement running for the following year and beyond, specifically because the new client conversations kept arriving without pulling a single recruiter off a placement. The pilot had answered the question it was designed to answer: a candidate-led outbound motion could run as a second channel next to referrals, not instead of them.