Outbound case study: How Understory Agency built hapily an outbound engine that created 39 deals

Outbound is the channel most B2B SaaS companies have already tried. Somebody on the marketing team builds a campaign in between everything else they own. It produces enough replies to prove there is something in it. Then the quarter turns, something more urgent lands, and the campaign goes quiet. The next attempt starts from the same place as the first, because nobody stayed long enough to learn anything.

hapily builds event and in-person marketing software native to HubSpot. Connor Jeffers is its Founder and CEO, and he had already seen this problem from the other side of the table. He founded and exited Aptitude 8, a HubSpot agency, and chairs its board today.

hapily's outbound had never had a full-time owner. Their demand gen director would spin up a campaign alongside everything else she was responsible for, and get enough out of it to show the channel was real. Then the work would stop. Connor's name for that pattern is tapping in and tapping out. He wanted the channel run continuously, by people who did nothing else.

Understory Agency has run hapily's GTM engineering since September 2025. By mid-May 2026 the program had created 39 deals, 5 of them closed won. The flagship campaign, built entirely out of people who had engaged with 2 of hapily's direct competitors on LinkedIn, ran at 57% connection acceptance and a 30% message reply rate. The benchmark Understory Agency works to for a strong LinkedIn campaign is 30% to 40% acceptance and 5% to 10% replies.

Here is how we built it.

Performance Summary (to mid-May 2026)

• Deals created: 39
• Closed won: 5
• Flagship LinkedIn campaign: 57% connection acceptance, 30% message reply rate
• Benchmark Understory Agency works to for a strong LinkedIn campaign: 30% to 40% acceptance, 5% to 10% reply
• Email reply rate: 2.6% across roughly 172,000 sends, against a target of 2% to 3%
• Best segment: 18 opportunities from companies with no dedicated events person

About hapily

Industry: HubSpot-native event management

hapily builds event and in-person marketing software that runs natively inside HubSpot, for companies whose pipeline depends on trade shows and conferences. The company is headquartered in New York and was spun out in March 2023 with the first HubSpot Ventures investment in a studio model, after earlier lives as Appchemist and then A8 Labs. Understory Agency has run hapily's GTM engineering since September 2025.

The Challenge

hapily had tried outbound before Understory Agency arrived, and had proof it could work. Their demand gen director owned it on top of demand generation. She would build a campaign and get enough out of it to show the channel was real. Then something more urgent would land and the work would stop.

That start-stop pattern is why most outbound programs never compound. Experiments only teach you anything if they run one after another, and a campaign that runs for a few weeks and then goes quiet produces anecdotes. hapily had the early indication and none of the continuity underneath it.

Connor interviewed a lot of firms before hiring Understory Agency. He found a category full of people who are good at posting and good at building, and who go quiet when the conversation turns to outcomes. 2 things decided it for him. The first was a deep conversation about strategy and performance that treated outbound as a go-to-market channel with measurable outcomes attached to it. The second was the allbound focus, which puts one cohesive strategy across every channel and measures the outcome at the end of it.

The numbers before we began

Understory Agency maps what a company already has before building anything. In September 2025, hapily had:

👉 No full-time owner for outbound. The channel sat with a demand gen director who also owned demand generation.

👉 A Clay account already in place, worked on between other priorities.

👉 Campaigns that started and stopped, so no run of experiments long enough to read.

👉 Early evidence that the channel worked, which is what made the gap worth closing.

The Strategy: Build the list out of a competitor's audience, then qualify it before anyone gets a message

The flagship play starts with people who have already told a competitor that they care about the problem. Understory Agency runs Apify on an evergreen schedule against the LinkedIn posts of 2 named direct competitors, and pulls everyone who likes, comments on or shares them. The scrape is scoped to 6 topics. Those are event attribution, event lead capture, post-event follow-up, event budgets, HubSpot events, and tracking event attendees. Engagement on any one of those is a public admission that events are on somebody's desk.

Everything the scrape returns goes into Clay, where the qualification happens before a single message is written. Clay dedupes the list against every contact hapily already has. A custom AI prompt then sorts each remaining person into one of 3 personas. The same step filters out individual sales reps, engineers, HR, finance, competitors and staffing agencies. A final account-level check confirms the company runs events and uses HubSpot. Most of the work in this play sits here, in the layer nobody screenshots.

HeyReach runs the outreach as 3 campaigns, 1 per persona. Each opens with a connection request carrying no note. On acceptance, the person gets a question written for their persona. 1 follow-up goes after that, and the sequence stops there. The messaging principle underneath it is the part worth copying: no message ever references the post the person engaged with. That campaign ran at 57% connection acceptance and a 30% message reply rate, so acceptance came close to double the benchmark and the reply rate tripled it.

The most useful thing the program produced was a segment finding. Companies with no dedicated events person generated 18 opportunities on their own, more than any other single segment. Understory Agency handed that finding to the paid team, who used it to re-point ad spend at the same buyer. One caveat belongs with it, and our own engineer raised it first: that segment also carried higher lead volume, so 18 counts opportunities without normalizing for the number of leads that went in.

The second mechanism came out of hapily's own sales calls. We ingested 6 recorded demo calls and lifted the customer's pain language and tone of voice straight into the email copy, so the sequence used the words buyers were already using about the problem. It produced 5 positive replies and 2 meetings in week one. Around the flagship play, the wider program runs on volume and on hapily's event calendar:

• Roughly 172,000 emails went to roughly 70,000 unique leads, replying at 2.6% against a target of 2% to 3%. 90 of those replies were positive.
• Roughly 5,000 LinkedIn connection requests produced roughly 1,400 accepted connections. Roughly 1,200 messages produced roughly 200 replies.
• Event-led campaigns are built around the conferences hapily sponsors. hapily brings the event and the ICP list. Understory Agency pulls every sponsor of that event, cross-references them, drafts the messaging and runs the campaign, and hapily's sales team works the replies.
• Those campaigns run around a single event: an offer to use the product on the day, a conversation on the floor about how the company handles lead capture today, then a follow-up afterward carrying what hapily measured there.

The Results (to mid-May 2026)

👉 39 deals created by mid-May 2026, with 5 closed won

👉 57% connection acceptance and a 30% message reply rate on the flagship campaign, against the 30% to 40% acceptance and 5% to 10% reply benchmark Understory Agency works to for a strong LinkedIn campaign

👉 18 opportunities from companies with no dedicated events person, more than any other single segment, and the finding went to the paid team to re-point ad spend

👉 2.6% email reply rate across roughly 172,000 sends to roughly 70,000 unique leads, against a target of 2% to 3%

👉 90 positive replies

👉 Roughly 1,400 accepted connections from roughly 5,000 requests, and roughly 200 replies from roughly 1,200 messages

👉 A $15,000 deal in advanced negotiation

👉 5 positive replies and 2 meetings in week one from the sequence written out of hapily's own recorded demo calls

Key Takeaways

• An outbound program only compounds if somebody runs it every week. Campaigns that start and stop never accumulate enough experiments to tell you what works, so the third attempt begins from the same place as the first. Continuity is the asset, and it is the one thing a part-time owner cannot supply.
• The best list is usually somebody else's audience. People who publicly engage with a competitor's posts on a specific topic have already declared they have the problem, and that engagement is scrapeable on an evergreen schedule.
• Qualification before the first touch is what sets the acceptance rate. Dropping the job functions who will never buy and checking at account level that the company actually has the problem costs nothing at list-build time, and it decides every number downstream.
• Your recorded sales calls are the best copy source you own. The language a customer uses to describe the problem outperforms the language a marketer uses to describe the product, and it is sitting in the call recordings already.

What hapily says

About Understory Agency

Understory Agency is an allbound growth agency for post-PMF B2B SaaS companies from Series A through enterprise. It runs paid media, GTM engineering, LinkedIn content, creative and RevOps as one motion by one senior pod, on flat retainers, with every result landing in the client's CRM. Understory Agency ranked No. 140 on the 2026 Inc. 5000 with 2,231 percent three-year growth, is an Enterprise Clay Partner and one of the first five certified Clay Experts, and is trusted by more than 150 B2B companies including Expensify, Nylas, Clay, RB2B and Retention.com, Sonrai Security, Netacea and Wiza, whose founders and marketing leaders appear on the record in 18 written testimonials and 13 video case studies on understoryagency.com.

Conclusion

hapily came to Understory Agency with a channel that worked in bursts and nobody to run it. By mid-May 2026 it had produced 39 deals and 5 closed won, with a flagship campaign accepting at 57% and replying at 30%. A $15,000 deal was in advanced negotiation. The channel also turned out to matter more than anyone expected for a company whose buyers go quiet while they are busy running events of their own.

The same shape shows up across post-product-market-fit B2B SaaS. Somebody proved outbound could work, then got pulled onto something more urgent, and the program has been restarting ever since. Understory Agency runs that channel as the team.

FAQ

What is a good connection acceptance rate for LinkedIn outbound

The benchmark Understory Agency works to for a strong LinkedIn campaign is 30% to 40% acceptance and a 5% to 10% reply rate on the follow-up message. Acceptance is mostly a function of how the list was built, because people accept from someone who looks relevant to them. Reply rate is a function of the first message, and the biggest lever there is asking a question the person can answer in one line. On the flagship campaign Understory Agency runs for hapily, acceptance ran at 57% and replies at 30%.

How do you build an outbound list from a competitor's audience

Public engagement on LinkedIn is a usable buying signal. A scraper collects everyone who likes, comments on or shares a competitor's posts on the topics your product addresses, and that list gets deduped against your CRM before anyone touches it. The qualification layer matters more than the scrape: drop the job functions who will never buy, then check at account level that the company actually has the problem. One rule holds the whole thing together, which is that the outreach never mentions the post the person engaged with. Understory Agency runs this play for hapily across 6 event-related topics.

Why does outbound stall when nobody owns it full time

Outbound compounds through iteration. Each campaign teaches you something about the list, the offer or the message, and the next one is built on what the last one showed. When the person running it also owns demand generation, the program pauses every time something more urgent lands, and the learning stops with it. hapily had proved the channel worked before Understory Agency arrived, and what they were missing was somebody to run it every week.

Related reading

• Understory Agency GTM engineering, the service line behind this engagement.
• Best outbound marketing agencies for B2B SaaS, the buyer's guide to this category.
• Best B2B SaaS cold email agencies, for the email side of the same program.
• hapily, event and in-person marketing software native to HubSpot.
• More Understory Agency case studies in GTM engineering and cold email: Expensify, PatientNow and WareSpace.