Built to Scale: From Chaos to 20,000+ Qualified Leads
Client: A growing education consulting company
Services: CRM automation, lead nurturing, email strategy
Educational Consulting Company
20x
email list growth
+7%
MQL increase
This education company was stuck in spreadsheets and missing opportunities. After a CRM and email overhaul, they grew their list from 1,000 to over 20,000 leads, re-engaged dormant contacts, and started converting faster, with less manual work.
Key benefits:
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More leads, without more effort
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Smarter follow-ups that actually converted
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A system that runs in the background while the team focuses on sales
Challenges
The team was tracking leads manually in Excel. which made things messy and hard to manage. Important follow-ups were missed, and the sales team didn’t have a clear way to focus on leads that were most likely to close. This slowed down their sales process and made it harder to grow their pipeline.
The process wasn’t built to scale, and it was holding them back.
Approach
I streamlined lead tracking and follow-up so the sales team could quickly spot and reach out to ready leads. This sped up responses and boosted sales. I also added Calendly to simplify call scheduling, letting the team focus more on selling.
Here’s how:
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Set up a system to automatically capture and organize new leads
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Sent targeted emails based on each lead’s interests
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Created free resources like webinars and guides to attract more leads
Results
After I set up the new CRM and automated workflows, the team grew their email list from 1,000 to over 20,000 leads.
Even more importantly, they saw more leads turn into real sales opportunities. The number of marketing-qualified leads more than doubled - from 6% to 13% - which helped them build a stronger, more reliable sales pipeline.
Why It Worked
This wasn’t about adding more tools - it was about making them work together. By building a simple, scalable system, the team stopped wasting time on admin and started spending more time with qualified leads.
Tools used: HubSpot Marketing & Sales, Calendly, Zapier
From 1K to 20K: Fueling the Lead Engine
I grew the list from 1,000 to over 20,000 warm leads through gated content, university-specific tools, and interactive quizzes (including a Harvard guide that got 700+ downloads).
Webinars and newsletters kept prospects engaged and moving toward sales readiness, turning the list into a real growth engine.
Each touchpoint was designed to support the full lifecycle, nurturing leads all the way down the funnel.
