Case study · HR tech, skills intelligence
Talent Guide / talentguide.com
From skeptical founder to 40+ meetings and €70K ARR closed.
Talent Guide, an AI-powered skills intelligence platform, faced the early-stage dilemma: generate pipeline without hiring dedicated sales staff. Through structured outbound, the company proved its commercial model while preserving runway.
ARR closed
40+ meetings and €350K pipeline, no sales hire
Client
Talent Guide
Founder and CEO
Filip Tack
Target market
Mid-market HR leaders
Team size
5 people, no sales function
Channels
Email, LinkedIn, Calling
Engagement
Automated Outbound, 9 months from October 2024
The Person
A founder who had seen hired sales guns fail.
Filip Tack, co-founder and CEO, was also the company's first salesperson. He was skeptical of easy sales solutions, having watched companies hire a rep, hand them a product, and say go sell, with no systems and no playbook. He knew how that usually ends: demotivation, churn, and wasted runway.
I had a suspicion about hired sales guns. If you hire one salesperson and they need to do everything by themselves, cold calling without any technology or system, it just doesn't work. It's actually demotivating.Filip Tack, Talent Guide
The Approach
Speed without sacrificing intelligence.
The engagement launched in October 2024. Within weeks Talent Guide had a segmented list of several thousand targets, each with a reason to be there. Messaging was built as a back and forth, starting from drafts the team shaped into their own voice. Deliverability infrastructure was put in place so volume did not damage the domain, and every campaign generated data that refined the next.
Critically, Filip and his team took the sales calls themselves. This was not a call-center arrangement. Meetings were booked in the first week or two, while onboarding was still happening. For an early-stage company, that momentum mattered.
The Bigger Picture
Scalable sales, before they could afford to hire.
The engagement answered the question that haunts every early-stage founder: can we make sales scalable before we can afford to hire? The answer was yes, with the right infrastructure and partner. The playbook now exists on proven messaging and qualified lists, so scaling further does not start from scratch.
The Results
ARR closed
40+ meetings and €350K pipeline, no sales hire
- 40+qualified meetings booked over 9 months.
- €350Kin pipeline with mid-market companies.
- €70KARR closed in the first 6 months.
- 0sales hires required, runway preserved.
It feels to me that you really have it in the fingers on how to do outbound in the 21st century without it becoming spam. You keep the pace, there's open dialogue and weekly meetings. That kind of stuff works.