A 30-year-old company with a functioning sales channel. And a missing second one.
Etiscan has been one of the leading German providers of warehouse and logistics digitalization since 1996. Mobile barcode and RFID processes, AIDC software, ERP integrated processes for SAP and Microsoft Dynamics, more than 1,000 customers across various industries. The company had a base that many B2B companies would envy. PE-backed by VIA Equity. The sales channel, which had grown over three decades, worked: deep account management, strong references and inbound from marketing and trade fair presence.
What was missing was Cold Outbound. Not because the team couldn't do it. The existing AEs and BDRs were experienced, product-oriented and credible in the industrial environment. The pattern was just different: growth historically came from existing relationships and inbound from market presence. Cold approaching new accounts was not part of the habit.
PE goals that the existing path alone could not achieve.
After the VIA Equity transaction, the growth targets increased. Account management remained the strongest channel, but the bill required additional New Logo acquisition outside of the inbound base. The decision was clear: activate cold outbound, consciously and systematically instead of with an attached service provider. The Head of Sales and a Senior AE drove the project on the company side.
MSA came from a direct recommendation from the network. The referrer had seen the outreach agent system working at another client's practice. The briefing was specific: build externally, hand over assets, empower the team, no need for new hires. Quiet activation, no visible disturbance.
External build. No internal email. No new SDRs.
The collaboration was deliberately structured as an external advisory. No internal email account, no CRM access, no embedded role. Everything that had to be built ran in MSA-side workflows until handover. The reason was operational: As long as the structure remained outside of the existing tools, ongoing sales were not disrupted. In the end, we didn't end up with a semi-internal, semi-external intermediate product, but rather a clean system that the team could adopt at their own pace.
Framework conditions for construction
- Only external. No new tools were integrated into Etiscan's stack until the handover. If the direction had changed, nothing would have had to be dismantled.
- No SDR hires. The process had to run with the existing AE and BDR team. The agent did research and personalization.
- Language of the industry. Decision makers in logistics tech don’t respond to SaaS language. Tonality and reference points had to be built for real buyers.
- Multiple ICPs. Several decision-maker profiles had to run in parallel: warehouse management, operations directors, ERP managers - each with their own message logic.
Same basic shape as in the Outreach Agent Playbook, adapted for industrial buyers.
The architecture followed the same four-step logic documented today in the Outreach Agent playbook: connect workflow, pull signals from market and profiles, prepare messages, control dispatch and follow-up. The specific tools were selected based on what suited the segment, speed and subsequent operation.
01 · Connect workflow (Make)
Make connected the workflow across the tools: trigger logic, conditions, error handling, status updates back into the sheet. Comparable in role to n8n in the SaaS mid-market case, but chosen here because the first setup had to be live in two weeks.
02 · Drawing signals from the market and profiles (Make + Sheets)
Each prospect has been enriched with publicly visible information: LinkedIn profile, role, company, recent posts, website signals, news, ERP notes, recommendations and shared contacts. Everything ended up in a Google Sheet, one line per prospect, prepared for message logic.
03 · Prepare messages (Claude API + manual fine-tuning)
Claude generated initial news from a prompt that combined three concrete reference points per prospect: current activity, an industry problem and a common signal. A manual fine-tuning at the end caught anything that didn't sound clean to the industrial tech target group. The language was built on the segment, not on SaaS phrases.
04 · Shipping and video follow-up (Expandi + Sendspark)
Expandi took over LinkedIn-Outbound: contact requests with personalized initial message, sequences within the platform limits, response recognition. The special leverage lay in the second level: Sendspark video follow-ups. Each accepted connection received a short, personalized video related to their profile or company. In a segment where decision-makers rarely see personalized video outbound, this very element noticeably changed the quality of the responses.
From zero cold outbound to a live process in two weeks.
V1 went live two weeks after the briefing. The first wave of personalized contact requests and video follow-ups created three things at the same time: pipeline volume that the AEs could actually handle, a quality of response that was clearly different from typical cold calls, and more trust among the team — predictable inflow instead of waiting for marketing or referrals.
An external advisor, observed from sales.
The perspective from sales leadership, summarized from the discussions surrounding the project:
Honest about what we know. And what not.
Following the collaboration, Etiscan saw a CEO change and broader organizational changes. We do not have a complete view of how the system operated through this phase. What we know: A working outbound process was built, delivered, and running on tools the team could own and maintain. What we cannot clearly say is the long-term course.
This reality is normal in the B2B mid-market. Leadership changes, priorities shift, systems are adopted in the new direction or paused. The case rests on what was built and how it ended up on the team at the time — not on a long-term claim that we can't substantiate.
This case is the Outreach Agent playbook in a different segment.
The architecture documented today in the Outreach Agent playbook ran in the same basic form here — with industrial tech language, multiple ICPs, and a Sendspark video layer. The specific tools differ (Make instead of n8n, Expandi instead of PhantomBuster) because the right tool depends on the team that will later work with it. The shape remains the same.
That's exactly the point of architecture: the form is transferable, the tools are situational. What MSA builds is the form. Tool selection comes last, not first.
