The 6-phase outreach workflow that fills a solo agency pipeline

I ran ModernWebSEO as a solo agency for the better part of two years. The pipeline ran on a six-phase outreach workflow that I refined to the point where it works without me thinking about it. This is that workflow, with real numbers.

The system is built for one person on one channel. It does not scale to a team without significant rework. For a solo founder doing services or productized services it is the cleanest pipeline I have run.

The six phases at a glance

Phase	Time per lead	Goal	Conversion to next
1. Prospect	10 min	Find the right person/company	80%
2. Research	15 min	Write the personalized hook	70%
3. First-touch email	5 min	Get a reply	10-15%
4. Soft follow-up	5 min	Reactivate the dead thread	30% of phase 3 non-responders
5. Proposal call + doc	30-60 min	Get to yes/no	40-60%
6. Onboarding	60 min	Convert yes to active client	95%

The funnel math from this: 100 prospects in phase 1, ~80 qualified, ~12 first replies, ~6 second replies from follow-up, ~18 active conversations, ~9 proposal opportunities, ~5 closed engagements.

In practice I ran 30 prospects per week, which produced 4-6 meetings and 1-2 closed deals per week. At my agency price point ($1500-4000 per engagement) that was a sustainable rate without burnout.

Phase 1: Prospect (10 min per lead)

The first phase is identifying who to contact. Three sources, in order of conversion quality:

• Inbound interest signal — someone followed me, replied to a tweet, or downloaded a free resource. They self-identified as the right audience. 30-40% of my weekly leads come from here.
• Referral introductions — existing client introduces me. ~10-15% of leads. Highest close rate.
• Outbound discovery — I search for companies matching the ICP (industry, size, tech stack, recent funding signal). ~50% of leads. Lowest per-lead conversion but the only one that scales beyond my existing network.

For outbound, the ICP for SEO services was: companies between $1M-$10M revenue, in software/B2B SaaS, with a published blog that had not been updated in 4+ weeks, on a marketing team of 1-3 people. This filter alone eliminated 95% of false positives.

Tools used for phase 1: a saved Twitter list, Crunchbase for funding signal, a free LinkedIn search, a simple Python script that pulls company blog last-modified dates. Total tooling cost: zero. Total time per qualified lead: about 10 minutes.

Phase 2: Research (15 min per lead)

The research phase produces the hook for the first email. Specifically:

• Recent specific event — funding round, product launch, hiring spree, conference talk, recent blog post the founder wrote. Something that happened in the last 60 days that I can reference.
• One concrete problem — a specific weakness in their current marketing presence I could improve. "Your blog ranks for X but not Y" or "Your meta descriptions are missing on these three pages".
• One personal connection — something we share. Mutual contact, common tool, similar past project. Real, not invented.

The output of phase 2 is two or three sentences I can drop into the first email that proves I am not blasting templates. If I cannot produce these three things in 15 minutes, I drop the lead. The hook is non-negotiable.

Phase 3: First-touch email (5 min per lead)

The first email is short. Three to five sentences. No attachments. No links to a portfolio. Subject line under 60 characters.

The template I used most often:

Subject: Quick question about [their blog / their last launch / their hiring page]

Hi [first name],

I noticed [specific thing from phase 2 research]. [One sentence explaining why it caught my eye, ideally with a specific observation, not a compliment].

I help small SaaS teams with [one-line description of service]. If [specific outcome that addresses their situation] is interesting, I would love to chat for 15 minutes — no pitch, just to understand what you are working on.

[Name]

Reply rate from this template across about 800 sends in 2024-2025: 11.2%. The variance was mostly driven by phase 2 research quality. When the "specific thing" was genuinely specific, reply rate climbed to ~16%. When it was a generic compliment, it dropped to ~4%.

The 15-minute call ask is deliberate. "30 minutes for a discovery call" gets fewer accepts. "Just to chat" gets quick yeses that flake. "15 minutes, no pitch" lands the right buyers.

Phase 4: Soft follow-up (5 min per lead)

Seven days after the first email, I send one follow-up. It is the single most undervalued phase in cold outreach.

The template:

Subject: Re: [original subject]

Hi [first name],

Just bumping this in case it got buried. If now is not the right time, no worries — happy to circle back next quarter.

[Name]

Two sentences. Reactivates the thread without guilt-tripping. Closes the loop politely if the answer is no.

Across the same 800 first-touch sample, the follow-up converted ~30% of phase 3 non-responders into replies. Not all positive (some were polite declines), but the conversion-to-call rate of phase 4 replies was about the same as phase 3 — 35-40%.

Two-touch outreach beats single-touch by roughly 40% in total response rate. Three-touch outreach beats two-touch by another 5-10% but burns goodwill. I stop at two.

Phase 5: Proposal call + document (30-60 min per lead)

The 15-minute call expands to 30 if it goes well. The agenda:

1. What are you trying to accomplish? (10 min, mostly listening)
2. What have you tried? (5 min, identifies the dead ends I should not propose)
3. What does success look like in 90 days? (5 min, gives me the success metric for the proposal)
4. Is there a budget range you have in mind? (5 min — explicit ask, saves both parties from a bad-fit proposal)
5. Next step (5 min — I propose to send a written proposal within 48 hours)

The written proposal is one page. Three sections: situation summary, proposed scope (3-5 line items), price + timeline. Sent as a Notion link with view permission, not a PDF.

Proposals close at 40-60%. The variance is driven by the budget-range question in the call. When the answer was concrete ("we have $3-5k for this"), close rate was ~70%. When it was hedgy ("we are flexible"), close rate dropped to ~30%. The hedgy answers signal the budget is below my floor and the proposal will get sticker shock.

Phase 6: Onboarding (60 min per lead)

Closed engagements get a structured onboarding: a one-hour kickoff call, a shared workspace (Notion + Slack channel), a fixed cadence for updates (weekly written report every Friday), and a 30-day check-in calendar invite.

About 95% of closed engagements complete the onboarding and become active clients. The 5% who do not are usually buyer's remorse before any work happens — I refund without argument and we both move on.

The tools used for the whole pipeline

For a solo agency at this volume, the tooling stack is minimal:

• Google Sheets — CRM. One row per prospect, six timestamp columns, status enum, notes field.
• Gmail + a saved-replies folder — outreach. No automation tool.
• A simple Python script — phase 1 ICP filtering. Pulls company blog last-modified dates from a list of domains.
• Cal.com (or Calendly) — call scheduling.
• Notion — proposals + ongoing client workspace.
• Stripe — invoicing once the engagement starts.

Total tooling spend: about $50/month including Stripe transaction fees on incoming payments. The cost is negligible because the system is built around one person doing focused work, not around tools doing it for them.

What this workflow is not

This is not a growth-hack playbook. The reply rates above are unremarkable. The conversion math is the same math every B2B services business runs. What makes this workflow work for a solo operator is the discipline of the time budget per phase — you cannot spend 45 minutes researching every lead. You cannot afford 7-email sequences. You cannot run a CRM that needs maintenance.

The leverage is in cutting the workflow down to what one person can actually do for 30 leads a week, indefinitely, without dreading Monday.

For a system that automates the parts that can be automated (ICP filtering, email drafting from templates, CRM pipeline tracking), the B2B Growth Machine is what I built to handle the parts I no longer wanted to do by hand. For the broader agency context (services pricing, retainer transition, onboarding playbooks), AI Agency Launch Kit is the wider system this workflow fits inside.

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Part of the solo founder series. The conversion math behind the funnel ties into the CRO experiment post once that ships. The pricing decisions for service engagements use the same Van Westendorp framework the digital products do.