The pain
Explode do premium work for entertainment and leisure brands, at a typical deal size of £25k a month. Work of that quality usually sells itself through referrals — which is exactly the problem. Referrals cannot be scheduled, and an agency carrying senior talent cannot plan a year on lead flow that arrives when it feels like it.
The problem underneath
There was no outbound muscle and nowhere to put one. No researched route to the brands they wanted, no sequences, and no CRM discipline underneath — conversations lived in inboxes and memory. For a £25k-a-month engagement, one or two extra closed deals a year changes the entire business, but nothing existed to produce them deliberately.
What we built
A pipeline engine their own team runs — this was a done-with-you build, systems and process handed over, not a black box we operate.
- A researched cold outreach engine aimed at their ideal entertainment and leisure clients
- A HubSpot CRM built out from scratch — pipeline, stages, tasks, reporting
- Sequences, messaging and qualification criteria, documented
- The processes and training for Explode’s team to run all of it themselves
How we did it
We defined the ideal client with them — the brands worth a researched approach at their deal size — and built the list, the messaging and the infrastructure around that definition. The CRM went in first so every reply had somewhere to land and a next step attached.
Then we ran it together until the team could run it alone: their people sending, our system underneath, every process written down.
The results
The system produced closed-won ROI inside the first 60 days — at their deal size, one signed client covered the entire build. The pipeline now fills deliberately instead of by referral luck.
The outcome
Explode own the engine, the CRM, the process documents and the skill to run them. Outbound is now a capability of the agency, not a dependency on a supplier.