Almost 10 new clients in 7 months: how Peak Orange Consulting replaced cold calling with LinkedIn

The challenge

Munich-based Peak Orange Consulting helps companies secure public funding for their innovation projects. Its clients come from a broad range of fields: science, product development, mechanical engineering and software development.

Like every growing consultancy, managing director Ian Burke faced the question of how to win new clients predictably. For a long time, acquisition ran on cold calling, most recently through an external agency. At some point that stopped working, and the costs were enormous compared to the results.

Ian wanted to outsource client acquisition completely instead of spending his own time on it. Before deciding, he spoke to three or four agencies. What tipped the balance towards Leadtree were honest conversations about what is realistically possible.

The solution

We segmented Peak Orange's target audience and turned Ian's LinkedIn account into a sales channel: targeted connections with the right decision-makers, personal messages in Ian's name and the entire conversation from first contact to booked meeting.

We tailored the target audience precisely to grant consulting: product-developing companies in Germany and Austria. We address managing directors and the heads of development, production and innovation.

We work signal-based: we specifically reach out to companies that have filed a patent in recent years – a strong indicator of ongoing innovation projects and therefore of eligibility for funding. Further signals such as innovator awards or seals like “Software Made in Germany” serve as hooks for relevant, personal outreach.

To find these companies, we combine multiple data sources in Clay. Our AI agents then check every single company: Does it develop its own products? Is it innovative? Is it likely to be eligible for funding? Research that would normally be tedious manual work runs automatically – and only truly relevant contacts make it into the outreach.

We respond to every reply individually and pick up the contact's specific question, so Ian hardly needs to add any input himself. How natural this feels shows in the calls: not a single prospect doubted that Ian had written the messages himself.

We have been working together for seven months, and in those seven months we have closed almost ten clients. Per client, we earn an average fee of €25,000 to €30,000. […] For what you pay, you get good service and you also get good results.Ian Burke, Managing Director of 'Peak Orange Consulting'

We keep refining the target audience: Ian flags particularly good leads directly in the system, we analyse what the companies that became clients have in common, and we build new, even more precise searches from it. All of this runs in the background, so Ian can focus on advising his clients. When he needs an adjustment, we make it right away.

The results

Since the start, we have booked 62 meetings with potential clients for Peak Orange – four to five per week in good phases.

What matters is what comes out of them: Peak Orange won almost ten new clients in seven months, with an average fee of €25,000 to €30,000 per engagement. Another eight to ten potential clients are close to signing.

Compared to cold calling, Peak Orange wins roughly the same number of clients via LinkedIn, but at significantly lower cost. Thanks to the high fee per engagement, the investment clearly pays off – exactly the goal Ian set at the start of the collaboration.

Ian is so convinced by the results that he has already recommended Leadtree to clients in his own network.