The situation and the briefExecutive summary
Firebolt Group makes illuminated signage for brands that operate across many locations. Their best-fit buyer is a national restaurant group, a beverage brand, or a hospitality company with storefronts to light up.
The hard part was never the product. It was reach. Firebolt sells into large companies where no single person signs off on a signage program. A marketing lead, a brand director, and a development or construction lead all touch the decision. A normal cold email reaches one of them and waits for an internal forward that rarely happens.
Firebolt had also been paying on a per-meeting model, which tied spend to a step their own team controlled. They wanted predictable enterprise pipeline instead, and a partner who could build the system to produce it.
What Skyline was hired to do
- Build and run an outbound engine that reaches the full buying committee, not one inbox.
- Produce qualified, interested replies from enterprise brands at real volume.
- Track every reply through a clear pipeline so Firebolt's sales team always knows what to work next.
What we built and ranThe action
The core move was to stop emailing one person and start emailing the committee, in one deliberate thread, with an offer no marketer ignores.
Group email to the whole buying committee
For each target account, Skyline identified the real decision-makers and put them on one thread together. When several leaders see the same message and see each other on it, a reply feels expected instead of optional. The internal-forward step, the place where most signage outreach dies, disappears.
A free illuminated sign as the opener
The offer was a free sign. It costs the prospect nothing and lets Firebolt show the quality instead of describing it. That one hook turned cold accounts into hand-raises at enterprise brands.
Marquee social proof in every thread
The messaging led with the national brands that already trust Firebolt, so a new prospect saw proof before they saw a pitch. The ICP was tight: brands with five or more locations across restaurants, beverage, hospitality, and retail.
A team that keeps the engine full
A dedicated campaign manager keeps accounts moving and leads flowing. An operations manager runs the sending team so the daily quota is hit every day. Skyline owns the AI research, list building, copy, and the lead-alert routing that drops each positive reply straight to Firebolt's sales team.
Hi team,
We build the illuminated signage for several national brands you would recognize. We would like to make one for you, free, so you can see the quality in person.
If you are open to it, send over your logo and we will get a mockup back to you.
Best,
The Firebolt Group team
No email tool builds a real committee thread. It takes knowing who the buyers are at each account and writing so each one sees why they belong on the email. That manual work is why it keeps producing replies while standard outbound stays stuck at 1%.
The numbers and the pipelineThe business outcome
The engine has reached 1,430 accounts on group email and turned them into 63 positive replies from enterprise brands. That is a 4.4% reply rate against a 1% standard, and the trend is up.
Group email produced 63 positive replies. Cold email and LinkedIn added the rest, for 78 in total. After 5 were disqualified, 73 stay active.
The caliber of the pipeline
These are not small leads. The brands that replied span national restaurant groups, global beverage companies, casino and resort operators, grocery chains, and hospitality groups. Many are names you would know on sight. Each one asked to see Firebolt's work.
How we measure pipeline, fairly
Closing a signage deal is Firebolt's job, and the sales cycle is long, so it would be wrong for us to claim closed revenue. Instead we measure the pipeline the engine created, and we weight every opportunity by a conservative chance of closing based on how far it has moved. We never assume a win.
Weighted pipeline = the opportunities at each stage, multiplied by that stage's conservative close probability, multiplied by the average deal value. The probabilities stay low on purpose so the number is a floor, not a hope.
| Stage | Open | Close prob. | Weighted deals |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reply received | 17 | 5% | 0.85 |
| Active dialogue | 40 | 8% | 3.20 |
| Logo received | 1 | 20% | 0.20 |
| Prototype in progress | 3 | 25% | 0.75 |
| Renderings delivered | 7 | 30% | 2.10 |
| Meeting held | 4 | 35% | 1.40 |
| Deferred | 1 | 3% | 0.03 |
| Disqualified | 5 | 0% | 0.00 |
| Total active | 73 | n/a | 8.5 |
Default is a placeholder. Replace it with Firebolt's real average signage program value and every number updates.
Weighted pipeline is the honest headline. Total open is all 73 active opportunities at full value, before any probability weighting.
63 enterprise brands raised their hand from cold. The system did its job. The close is Firebolt's to make.