Meridian Capital provides alternative investment and asset management software to family offices, RIAs, and fund managers. A 40-person company with a strong product but a broken outbound motion — they were spending heavily on cold email with almost nothing to show for it.
They came to us after firing their previous agency. Two months, zero qualified meetings, and a domain reputation that was deteriorating. We had to fix everything while still generating results within the same quarter.
Meridian had been burning budget on a generic agency that sent mass emails without any real infrastructure setup. The result was a 2% reply rate — mostly out-of-office auto-replies — and a primary domain slowly getting flagged as spam.
Their primary domain had been used for cold outreach. Open rates had dropped to 18%, a strong indicator of spam placement. Any further sending from the main domain risked permanent damage to their brand emails.
The previous agency had targeted "finance companies" with generic software benefit messaging. No ICP specificity, no pain-focused angles, no differentiation from every other fintech vendor sending the same emails.
Finance decision-makers — especially family office principals and RIAs — are notoriously cold email-resistant. There was no multi-touch strategy layering LinkedIn to warm prospects before email hit their inbox.
On the rare occasion a reply came in, there was no defined handoff process. Leads were going cold in inboxes with no follow-up system or CRM integration to ensure timely response.
Step one was triage: we completely stopped all outreach from the damaged domain and set up four new parallel sending domains with fresh warmup cycles. We didn't send a single cold email for 12 days while infrastructure was being rebuilt.
ICP was redefined around two high-signal segments: family office investment directors managing $50M–$500M AUM who had hired a new operations person in the last 90 days (a strong indicator of system overhaul), and RIAs with 3–10 advisors who had recently moved to a new CRM (indicating willingness to switch platforms).
We introduced a LinkedIn-first approach for the family office segment — connect, engage with their content, send a warm DM — then follow up with email. This dramatically improved reply rates by creating recognition before the cold email arrived.
"The difference was night and day. MSH actually fixed our deliverability first before touching messaging — that alone changed everything. Then the targeting got so precise that prospects were responding within hours of getting our emails."
— VP of Sales, Meridian CapitalBook a free 30-minute discovery call. We'll audit your current setup and outline exactly how we'd build your engine.