The Challenge
Inception had a precise acquisition mandate, but the businesses they wanted to buy were scattered across a fragmented market with almost no reliable contact data.
Inception knew exactly who they were after: privately-owned technical and compliance services firms, £1.5m to £30m turnover, with recurring revenue and strong engineering teams. The problem was reaching them. These are owner-run businesses in smaller towns and the countryside, the kind that barely show up on LinkedIn and are missing from most standard prospecting tools. The specialist M&A databases that do cover them are expensive and still incomplete.
To source deals at the pace Inception wanted, we needed to do three hard things at once: identify every business in the market that fit the mandate, pull the financial and filing detail needed to qualify each one, and then get in front of the owner directly, at scale, without burning the domain in spam filters.
Our Solution
ToplineX built a complete map of the market, enriched it with Companies House data, then reached owners directly through a combined cold email and warm calling engine.
We combined multiple databases with AI-powered web scraping to build a full picture of every company matching Inception's criteria, well beyond what any single subscription tool could surface. On top of that map, we ran enrichments that pulled filing data straight from Companies House for each business, so Inception could filter on turnover, margins, and recurring revenue and focus only on genuine fits.
We then stood up an outreach infrastructure that paired cold email with warm calling, engineered to reach 2,000 to 3,000 new owners every day while staying out of spam. Every conversation that came back fed real market intelligence into the system, which we used to keep sharpening both the targeting and the pitch.
The Results
Within the first couple of weeks, Inception was having 4 to 5 new seller conversations every single week, plus a live feedback loop to refine targeting and pitching.
From launch, the system started producing direct seller conversations almost immediately, 4 to 5 qualified discussions a week within the first fortnight. Just as importantly, the data coming off those calls gave Inception a clearer read on which owners were open to a deal and what messaging landed, letting us continuously tighten who we targeted and how we spoke to them.
4-5
new seller conversations per week
3.2%
avg reply rate
Ready to scale?
Schedule a call with ToplineX leadership to learn how our outbound strategy and go-to-market systems can generate qualified leads and close deals.