How The Obsidian Co Booked 39 Ecommerce Meetings in Its First 90 Days

Results at a glance — first 3 months

Michalis Nikolaou, CEO of The Obsidian Co, on working with 1SecondLeads.

“The difference with you guys and other agencies is your approach to the hyper niche. Even though that sounds simple when you say it out loud, the whole pipeline and the process behind that simple statement is what sets you apart.”

— Michalis Nikolaou, CEO, The Obsidian Co

The short version

The Obsidian Co is a Cyprus-based performance marketing agency. They already won consistently in Greece and Cyprus. Now they wanted the US and UK. Those markets have far bigger ad budgets — and a far higher ceiling on what an agency can earn.

Before us, they had spent over six figures chasing that goal — with almost nothing to show for it.

In our first three months together, they booked 39 meetings, qualified 24, and closed 3 deals. That’s an estimated €90K–€120K in contract value, with three more deals in progress.

Here’s exactly what was broken, and the pipeline we built to fix it.

The situation: strong at home, stuck abroad

The Obsidian Co runs Meta and Google campaigns for ecommerce brands. Their results at home were real. The problem was reach. To break into bigger, more competitive markets, they needed a steady flow of qualified ecommerce brands to talk to. They didn’t have one.

Their first two attempts bet on the same idea: hire the right person, and the problem is solved. First they brought in an outsourced agency. Then they moved someone in-house. Neither produced the steady pipeline they were after. The problem was never the person doing the outreach. It was the system feeding them.

What was broken

Five gaps worked against each other. The result: most of Obsidian’s outreach hit the wrong brands, with the wrong message, on too few channels.

The lead database was built for everything except ecommerce. Leads came from Cognism, a general B2B database. It indexes companies broadly, across every industry. It was never built to find ecommerce brands. So it couldn’t confirm the basics. Was this a live online store? What did it sell? Was it even still trading? Every record looked the same on paper, fit or not.

No one checked whether a prospect was actually running ads. Nothing verified ad activity before outreach. Yet the entire pitch was about improving ad performance. Reach out to a brand with no active ad account, and you kill the conversation before it starts. There was no system to catch those brands in advance.

Every brand got the same message. A haircare label, a skincare reseller, and a supplements brand all got identical outreach. But each has a different buyer, different concerns, and a different reason to care about paid media. Without segmentation, the copy couldn’t speak to any of them.

The outreach led with ROAS. Messages opened with return-on-ad-spend numbers as the hook. That’s generic on its own. Worse, with no ad verification behind it, the pitch often landed with brands running no ads at all. They had no reason to care about the number up front.

Email alone couldn’t reach half the market. Outreach ran entirely on cold email and cold calling. There was no LinkedIn. A large share of ecommerce contacts come back as catch-all emails, which can’t be reliably delivered to. With no second channel, those decision-makers were simply unreachable.

The pipeline we built

We didn’t hire another person to run a broken process. We rebuilt the process itself. The result is one integrated pipeline. It only ever puts a verified, ad-active, correctly-segmented brand in front of the right message.

We rebuilt the data around ecommerce-specific sources. We dropped Cognism entirely. Instead we sourced from StoreLeads and other databases built to index live ecommerce operators. Our in-house scraper caught the stores those databases miss.

We verified every store was real and transacting. We ran each company through website scraping and HTML analysis to confirm it was a genuine, active store. We even checked that the cart and checkout worked. That told us the store was processing transactions, not sitting dormant.

We scraped the ad library to confirm spend and pull live creative. Our in-house ad-library scraper confirmed which prospects were running ads. It estimated their spend and pulled their live creative. This did two jobs at once. We only contacted brands with confirmed ad activity. And the copy could point to specific gaps in their real ads, instead of pitching generically.

We segmented by niche and brand structure. We split prospects by category: haircare, skincare, makeup, fragrance. Then we split again by structure: single-product brand, multi-product brand, or reseller carrying other companies’ products. Each segment got its own angle, built around what that type of brand actually cares about.

We rewrote the copy around verified specifics. Now we knew a brand’s ads, its spend, and its creative. So the message changed. It stopped being a generic performance pitch. It started referencing the brand’s own campaign, its own niche, and a real gap we could point to.

We added LinkedIn as a parallel channel. We ran LinkedIn alongside email. Cold email can never reach catch-all-email decision-makers reliably. Running both channels put those people back in play, instead of losing them.

How each gap was closed

The results

Three months in, the pipeline had turned a stalled outbound effort into a working client-acquisition engine.

Obsidian’s own economics show the value. Each client is worth a €2,500 average order value and stays 12–16 months. At those numbers, the three closed deals put an estimated €90K–€120K in contract value on the board in a single quarter. The three deals in progress would add a similar range again if they close.

The six-month goal was 50 qualified meetings. Three months in, Michalis told us he expected to beat it well ahead of schedule.

The bigger outcome: a foothold in bigger markets

The pipeline and revenue are only half the story. The engagement changed where Obsidian’s business actually sits. They started as a domestic agency, working almost entirely inside Cyprus and Greece. They now work with two US-based global brands and one EU-based global brand.

That was the real goal all along — not just more meetings, but a genuine foothold in bigger markets. For an agency that had only ever worked its home region, that’s a fundamentally different business than the one they started the quarter with.

Key takeaways

• The bottleneck is usually the system, not the person. Two hires and six figures couldn’t fix a broken pipeline. Rebuilding the pipeline did.

• Verify before you reach out. Confirm a brand is a live store and actively running ads. That removes the biggest source of wasted outreach.

• Segment before you write. Niche and structure segmentation is what lets copy say something specific instead of generic.

• One channel is a ceiling. Adding LinkedIn alongside email recovered the decision-makers cold email can’t reach.

FAQ

How long does B2B appointment setting take to show results?

For The Obsidian Co, it produced 39 booked meetings, 24 qualified, and 3 closed deals in the first three months. That was ahead of a six-month target of 50 qualified meetings.

How do you find ecommerce brands that are actually running ads?

We use an in-house ad-library scraper. It confirms which prospects have live ads, estimates their spend, and pulls their actual creative. So outreach only goes to brands with verified ad activity — and the copy can reference real gaps.

Why run LinkedIn and email together for ecommerce outreach?

A large share of ecommerce contacts come back as catch-all emails that can’t be reliably delivered. LinkedIn gives a second path to those same decision-makers, so they aren’t lost from the pipeline.

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