Two real outbound campaigns for PR agencies — the numbers, the conversion rates, and what the results do and don't prove.
By Moe Alhosni, founder of ROI Maximizer. Published 28 August 2026.
Short answer: PR Noir, a New York PR agency, received 27 curated leads in their first 30 days with ROI Maximizer. Ten of those became qualified meetings — a 37% lead-to-meeting rate — and one converted into a $90,000 deal ($15,000/month for six months) inside that same first month. P1 Communications, a UK PR agency working in travel and property, produced 20+ qualified meetings with roughly half progressing to commercial discussions and a projected £12,000/month pipeline. Below is what those numbers mean, what they don't, and which parts are repeatable.
These are the only two campaigns I'm going to write about in detail, because they're the two where the figures are documented and the clients are named. Everything below comes from those two engagements.
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Curated leads delivered | 27 |
| Qualified meetings booked | 10 |
| Lead-to-meeting rate | 37% |
| Closed deal in first 30 days | $90,000 ($15k/month × 6 months) |
Full write-up: PR Noir success story.
The number people react to is the $90,000. The number that actually explains the campaign is the 27.
Twenty-seven is a small list. Deliberately.
Most outbound programmes are built on the opposite assumption: that meeting volume is a function of send volume, so the answer to "we need more meetings" is always "load more contacts." That logic works right up until it destroys your deliverability and burns your addressable market.
At 27 contacts, every single one has to be right. There is no room for a 5% hit rate to be rescued by scale. That constraint forces the work upstream, into the part of the process that most campaigns skip:
When the list is 27 and the meeting rate is 37%, the campaign is being won before the first email sends. The copy matters. The list matters more.
I want to be careful here, because this is exactly where case studies get abused.
37% is not a benchmark. It is one campaign, one month, one market. PR services being sold into a network-driven industry is close to an ideal case: high deal value, a clearly identifiable buyer, and a service where a well-argued cold approach is genuinely welcome. Not every market behaves like that.
The $90,000 is one deal, not a rate. It closed unusually fast — inside the same 30 days — which reflects PR Noir's own sales ability as much as the meetings we booked. We put ten qualified conversations in front of them. They closed one of them for $90k. Both halves of that sentence matter, and only one of them is our work.
If you take one thing from this case study, take the process — small verified list, real personalisation, tight qualification — not the percentage.
P1 Communications is a UK PR agency working in travel and property. Different market, different currency, different sales cycle from PR Noir.
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Qualified meetings | 20+ |
| Progressed to commercial discussions | ~50% |
| Projected pipeline | £12,000/month |
Full write-up: P1 Communications success story.
The figure worth pausing on is the ~50% progression to commercial discussion. That is a different measurement from the one most agencies report, and it's the one I'd want if I were buying.
Most lead generation reporting stops at booked. Booked is the easiest number to inflate and the least connected to revenue.
The honest chain looks like this:
Every stage between 4 and 6 is where buyers get quietly burned. An agency reporting only stage 4 can look excellent while producing nothing at stage 6.
P1's ~50% progression rate is a stage-6 number. It says that the people we booked were the right people, in the right role, with a real reason to talk. That is the metric I would ask any vendor for — including this one.
£12,000/month is a projected pipeline figure. Projected means the commercial discussions are live and the value is modelled from them. It is not revenue in a bank account, and I am not going to present it as such.
The reason I flag this is that "pipeline" is the most abused word in B2B marketing. When you read anyone's case study — ours included — check whether the headline number is closed revenue, contracted revenue, or projected pipeline. Those three things are not comparable, and the gap between them is where credibility lives.
Two agencies, two countries, two verticals. The overlap is instructive:
A precisely defined buyer. Both campaigns targeted a specific person with a specific situation, not a broad title sweep across an industry.
Small, verified, enriched lists. No volume-first spraying. Every record checked before use.
Qualification agreed up front. "Qualified meeting" meant something specific in both engagements — which is why the progression rates hold up when you look past the booking count.
A client who could actually sell. PR Noir closed $90k in 30 days. P1 turned half their meetings into commercial conversations. We book the meeting; the client wins the deal. Any agency claiming otherwise is claiming credit for someone else's work.
Being straight about the limits, because two case studies are two case studies:
If you are running or buying outbound right now, the transferable lesson from these two campaigns is not "cold email works." It's narrower and more useful:
Precision beats volume when your deal size is meaningful. Twenty-seven correct contacts outperformed what a few thousand wrong ones would have done — and left the market intact for the next campaign. If your average contract value is in the tens of thousands, your list should probably be an order of magnitude smaller and an order of magnitude more accurate than it currently is.
And measure yourself at stage six, not stage four. Booked meetings feel like progress. Commercial discussions are progress.
If you want to talk through whether this approach fits your market — including the honest answer if it doesn't — book 20 minutes here or email moe@roimaxi.com. No obligation, and I'll tell you if I think outbound is the wrong move for you right now.
Moe Alhosni is the founder of ROI Maximizer (M Ventures LTD, Bath). ROI Maximizer works on a pay-per-result basis — clients pay for booked, qualified meetings, not retainers.
Or run the free GTM teardown on your own site for the ICP, cold email and numbers specific to your company.