Case Study: BRANDED (now Essor)
The Short Version
- An institutional acquirer of Amazon businesses at its inception: no CRM, no pipeline, no data and a target market of sellers who weren't looking to sell.
- I helped pick HubSpot, then built the acquisition pipeline from zero: sourcing with Jungle Scout and Helium10, email discovery and verification, a two-branch Lemlist sequence across email and LinkedIn that stopped the moment anyone replied.
- 5.4% of outreach leads became acquisitions, and the pipeline ran for years without a redesign.
What They Do
BRANDED (now Essor) buys e-commerce businesses that sell mainly on Amazon, then develops and scales them. A portfolio play, which needs a high-volume, structured pipeline to find and close sellers who weren't necessarily looking to exit.
How I Got Involved
A referral from Split Dragon, a previous client. Almost all of my work comes that way.
I came in as a contractor at the company's inception: no systems, no pipeline, nothing. I helped them choose HubSpot and built the first acquisition pipeline. It lasted years. Later I joined full time as Head of Product, DTC & CRM, a different scope. This is the contractor engagement.
The Challenge
A buyer, not a seller, which changes the psychology of outreach and almost nothing about the system. Reach Amazon sellers, build a relationship, get them on a call about an acquisition. Persistent without being obnoxious, and tight enough that no warm lead went cold because a follow-up was missed.
Starting point: no CRM, no outreach system, no pipeline, no data.
What We Built
Lead Sourcing
Researchers used Jungle Scout and Helium10 to find targets, found contacts on LinkedIn, located company domains and fed it all into the system. We automated parts of this later; the outreach system never changed.
Email Discovery and Verification
Most Amazon sellers don't publish contact details. Two routes: LinkedIn Sales Navigator through PhantomBuster where a profile existed, and generated email combinations (first name, last name, domain, every plausible pattern) verified for deliverability before anything was sent. Hunter.io and PhantomBuster did that work. Aggressive by consumer standards. Standard in B2B.
Multichannel Outreach Automation
Built in Lemlist, wired to HubSpot through Zapier and the native integration. Two branches, depending on whether the contact had a LinkedIn profile.
LinkedIn branch: view their profile from an exec account (they get the notification), cold email, connection request, follow-up email, then a LinkedIn message sent regardless, since there's no reliable way to know whether the request was accepted.
Email-only branch: a shorter sequence.
In both, a reply on any channel stopped the sequence and the team took over. Nobody kept getting automated mail after they'd answered.
The sequence never pitched the acquisition in writing. Its one job was the call. BRANDED's domain experts wrote the copy with me: they knew what Amazon sellers respond to, I built the machine.
HubSpot Pipeline
Every lead moved through a staged pipeline with automations at each step: follow-ups at the right moment, the right information at the right stage, progress tracked without anyone touching it. Built in the first contractor months, it served the company for years.
Results
- 5.4% conversion from outreach lead to completed acquisition
- A pipeline running from day one of the company
- Years in service without a fundamental redesign
- A team working engaged leads instead of chasing follow-ups
Note on Scope
This is the contractor-phase acquisition pipeline. As an employee I later ran the DTC, CRM and CDP product verticals across 12 brands, a broader and different job.
Stack
HubSpot · Lemlist · PhantomBuster · LinkedIn Sales Navigator · Hunter.io · Zapier · Jungle Scout · Helium10 · Email combination generation + deliverability verification