How Starbridge Booked 140 Demos/Month with 2 BDRs

Henry flipped the script on cold email playbooks

Author

Joe Petruzzi
October 14, 2025

Most teams with 10 BDRs can’t hit 25 meetings a month.

Starbridge did 140 - with just 2 BDRs.

Here’s the playbook Henry Bell (Head of GTM at Starbridge) shared on our recent call 👇

Step 1: Nail Deliverability

“Everything else is useless if your emails don’t get seen.” – Henry

Starbridge moved their outbound to Organic Outreach and immediately stabilized domain health. They were hitting more inboxes, and their volume scaled to 100k emails/month. When you get that much TAM coverage, it’s hard not to blast off like a rocket ship.

Step 2: Lead With Intent, Not “Book a Call”

They ditched the “Can I get 15 mins?” CTA.
Instead, they offered value first - a free intent report:

“Hey Joe, we found 24 higher-ed orgs with 80%+ likelihood to buy your product. Want the list?”

People love free intel → positive replies → warm conversations.

Step 3: Turn Replies Into Demos

  • A VA team flags every positive reply.

  • BDRs step in to follow up manually (no mass follow-ups).

  • They deliver the “lead magnet,” then pivot to:

That flow alone = 0.6–0.8% conversion rate from cold → booked demo.

Step 4: Personalize With AI

They used Clay + Claude to:

  • Pull public intent signals (news, contracts, competitor data)

  • Write personalized first emails

  • Feed those insights back into call scripts via Nooks

It’s basically cold email → inbound lead → SDR follow-up → demo booked.

Tech Stack Snapshot

Starbridge’s setup:
Clay, Starbridge, OrganicOutreach, Smartlead, Nooks, Salesforce, Claude

Cold outbound isn’t dead — cold email as a marketing channel is just being reborn.
When you stop chasing meetings and start delivering insights, meetings chase you.

Want your team booking meetings like this?