Revolution Payroll: a first outbound channel, and about 90% of the meetings were real

The situation, the work, the outcome

What the engagement actually looked like

Revolution Payroll is an entertainment payroll company specializing in payroll and software development for film and TV production and commercials. It is a very niche industry. There is probably a handful of businesses of its type serving Canada and the United States, and it is very union heavy, so the software and services exist to offer production companies things a traditional payroll company does not.

Growth had come from relationships. As a startup, the company leaned heavily on the book of business its salespeople carried and on existing relationships from times past. No effort at all had gone into buying outbound from anybody, and the little cold calling and emailing that happened was internal.

Sukhi Pabla was the harder kind of prospect, someone who had been pitched this service for years. By his own count, 99.9% of those approaches either did not catch his attention or pointed somewhere he had no interest in going. His specific fears were that an outside team would not understand the industry, how the company works, the kind of people it deals with, or how this industry buys.

Two things moved him. The first call ran 45 or 50 minutes and was mostly him educating us on the market, which was enough to show that the gap and the pain points were understood. The second was the growth plan: research and data produced before there was a contract or a payment.

Onboarding then ran to a plan he was held to, with regularly scheduled meetings. Parts of it felt redundant, and that was the point: “I felt like you guys were learning our business, and that was important for me for you to know our business.” He took enough from the process to say he learned a lot himself about how he would onboard his own clients.

Skepticism survived every stage, including signature, so the agreement itself was worked through until his concerns were answered. His test was never how much outreach went out or how many meetings got set. It was who attended and whether they were quality meetings.

The first couple of calls he marked as unqualified, which he puts down to an early warming-up campaign. Since then roughly 90% have been legitimate meetings and actual opportunities. The funnel came up, and meetings have converted into customers. Almost everything arriving now is a perfect ICP.

He also counts something he was not paying for. Outreach to 1,000 people who never knew the company existed is awareness the business lacked, whether or not any given person books a meeting.

The engagement was extended. Competing firms still email him and he does not open them. And the internal sales team, the ones who believed only relationships and contacts work in this industry and who he expected to be the real obstacle, now attend every call themselves. He sat in on the first two to see how it worked and has not needed to since.

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From first call to qualified pipeline