Case Study: How Kalista Digital Cut Their Prospecting Time by 5x with CraftLeads

Kalista Digital is a digital marketing agency based in Lyon, France, helping SMBs and mid-market companies with their online acquisition strategy. With a team of 8, the agency generated most of its new business through word-of-mouth and referrals — an effective but unpredictable channel.

In September 2025, founder Sophie Marchand decided to build a structured outbound prospecting process. Three months later, CraftLeads had become their primary client acquisition tool.

"We were literally spending half-days searching for prospects on LinkedIn and writing emails one by one. Today, CraftLeads does in 20 minutes what used to take us a week." — Sophie Marchand, founder of Kalista Digital

The Problem: Growth Capped by Lack of Time

Like many marketing agencies, Kalista Digital faced a classic paradox: they knew how to sell marketing, but didn't have the time to do their own.

The Situation Before CraftLeads

The sales team — really just Sophie and a junior business developer — spent 12 hours per week on prospecting. The process was entirely manual:

1. LinkedIn research: identifying target agencies and SMBs (3h)
2. Profile enrichment: finding emails, verification, contextual notes (4h)
3. Email writing: one-by-one personalization with unique hooks (4h)
4. Follow-up and reminders: tracking responses, follow-ups (1h)

The result? An anemic pipeline, months without a new client, and growing frustration.

The Solution: CraftLeads on Autopilot

Sophie discovered CraftLeads in October 2025 during a webinar on sales automation for agencies. What convinced her: the AI's ability to understand her agency's positioning and write emails that sound human.

Setup in 3 Steps

Step 1 — Define Your Targets (30 minutes)

Sophie configured her first campaign targeting French e-commerce SMBs with 10 to 50 employees that don't have an in-house marketing manager. CraftLeads uses enriched data to identify relevant decision-makers: executives, sales directors, and growth leads.

Step 2 — Prospect Generation and Qualification (automatic)

CraftLeads' AI scans B2B databases, cross-references public information (website, LinkedIn, news) and automatically qualifies each prospect against Kalista's criteria:

• E-commerce sector ✓
• No identified marketing agency ✓
• Recent growth or funding round ✓
• Digital presence with room for improvement ✓

"What blew me away was that the AI identified signals we would have spent hours finding manually — for example, a company that had just launched a new product but had virtually no SEO. That's exactly our ideal client."

Step 3 — AI-Personalized Emails (automatic)

For each qualified prospect, CraftLeads generates a hyper-personalized email that includes:

• The company's specific context (recent news, identified challenges)
• A unique hook based on a concrete insight ("I noticed you just launched your summer collection, but your category page only shows up on page 3 of Google…")
• A natural call-to-action tailored to the decision-maker's profile

Sophie reviews the emails in batches — a 5-minute scan for 50 emails — and hits send.

The Results: 3 Months That Changed Everything

Month 1 — October 2025: The Testing Phase

• 127 prospects identified and automatically qualified
• 89 emails sent after review
• Open rate: 67% (vs. 22% with their old emails)
• Response rate: 18% — including 11 positive responses
• 3 meetings booked, 1 client signed (€2,400/month contract)
• Time invested: 2h30 for the month (vs. 48h previously)

Month 2 — November 2025: The Acceleration

Building on early results, Sophie launched two parallel campaigns: one targeting French B2B SaaS companies and another targeting digital transformation consulting firms.

• 312 prospects qualified across both campaigns
• Average response rate: 21%
• 5 new clients signed (total value: €8,700/month in recurring revenue)
• The AI refined its emails based on response data from the first campaigns

Month 3 — December 2025: The System Runs Itself

• 6 new clients signed
• Pipeline of 23 opportunities in active discussions
• Sophie hired an account manager to handle the influx of new clients
• The business developer now focuses on closing, not prospecting

3-Month Summary

Sophie's Keys to Success

1. The Quality of AI Personalization

"Our prospects think we spent 30 minutes studying their company before writing the email. In reality, the AI did that analysis in seconds. But the result is strikingly relevant."

2. Time Savings Unlock Creativity

Freed from repetitive prospecting tasks, Sophie's team could focus on what they do best: creating value for clients. The time saved was reinvested into improving services, which increased satisfaction and referrals.

3. The Snowball Effect

The more emails CraftLeads sends, the better the AI understands what works for the agency. Response rates improved by 40% between the first and third campaigns thanks to continuous learning.

What Kalista Digital Has Planned for 2026

Sophie is targeting 25 active clients by June 2026 (up from 14 currently) and plans to hire two additional team members. She's currently testing CraftLeads' multichannel campaigns (email + LinkedIn) to diversify her touchpoints.

"CraftLeads didn't just improve our prospecting. It changed our business model. We went from an agency that waits for clients to an agency that chooses its clients. It's a game changer."

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