52.9% open rate from cold emails to ESA, CERN, and european defence primes.
Client: Beamide srl
Sector: Radiation simulation SaaS for nuclear, space, and defence
What we built: Outbound infrastructure (sending domains, sequences, reply detection, CRM handoff)
Headline result: 52.9% open rate · 2 qualified meetings from 40 sends · 50% qualified-to-close
Cold email to enterprise procurement is supposed to be a numbers game. Send 10,000, get 30 replies, hope two convert. Beamide didn't have that volume to play with. Their total addressable market is in the hundreds, not the millions. So we threw out the volume playbook and built something different.
The situation
Beamide builds simulation software used by physicists at ESA, CERN, and european defence primes. It's the kind of product that takes 6 to 18 months to sell into a single account. The buyers are senior research engineers and procurement officers at organisations where security clearance gates the inbox.
The total addressable market is small. There is no SDR-and-volume play here. Every email goes to someone whose time is measured in hundreds of euros per hour and who ignores anything that smells of marketing.
Beamide was already working with a major Italian marketing agency, the same firm that handles McDonald's marketing in Italy. That relationship covered brand and web. It did not cover selling simulation software to research engineers who ignore anything that smells of marketing.
Prior outbound and agency work had been invoiced heavily with almost nothing to show in the pipeline. Outbound was still manual and scattered on top of that. Brevo was in the stack but mostly as a CRM. Emails went out by hand. Google Ads spend was running without tight keyword-to-landing-page alignment. The pain was simple. Not enough conversations with the right people, and the conversations that did happen weren't moving forward.
What we built
Sending infrastructure that doesn't get filtered.
Multiple sending domains, multiple inboxes per domain, full SPF / DKIM / DMARC alignment on beamide.com, and a warm-up window before any real send. The technical floor matters more in technical industries. CERN's spam filter is not casual.
A sequence written for engineers, not for procurement.
The first email reads as one specialist contacting another about a specific simulation problem. Not "I'd love to schedule a quick chat about your needs." The email actually demonstrates we understand what they do. That's the only reason a CERN engineer opens a second email from us.
Reply detection and handoff to a real human.
Every interested reply pings Beamide's team within minutes. The system does not auto-reply, does not auto-book, does not pretend to be the founder. The handoff is fast and explicit. A senior buyer can tell the difference between a tool and a person within two messages.
Tight ICP segmentation.
Contacts were split by product interest (Converter, Space, Dose, and full MRADSIM), country and language (EN/IT), and lead source (forms, Google Ads, trade shows). Warm contacts who had downloaded but not upgraded got their own nurture path. Geant4-intent leads were treated separately. We did not blast a single sequence at every engineer in europe.
CRM reflection of every conversation.
Every reply, every meeting, every dropped thread is logged into Brevo so the Beamide team can see the pipeline as it builds. Form submissions auto-create deals and tasks. Stage changes trigger follow-up reminders so nothing sits at Inbound Lead for weeks.
Google Ads alignment and keyword tightening.
We audited the live Google Ads account, mapped high-intent keywords (Geant4, radiation simulation, TID analysis) against actual landing pages, and flagged where spend was leaking to generic traffic. Recommendations went to Beamide's web agency for implementation: intent-based form routing, a Geant4-user landing page, and GCLID-tagged instant-response automations so paid clicks didn't sit in a queue.
The result
52.9%
Open rate
On the December 2025 campaign to research institutions, space agencies, and defence-adjacent contacts across europe. Industry benchmark for B2B email is 20 to 25%.
2 / 40
Qualified meetings from first sends
Two qualified meetings booked from the first 40 outbound sends in the pilot cohort. That is a 5% meeting rate on a list where every contact was pre-qualified to a named role at a named organisation.
50%
Qualified-conversation-to-deal
One closed deal from two qualified conversations. This measures close rate on meetings that actually happened, not blanket reply or open rates.
The 50% number is small-sample but real. Two qualified meetings came from the first 40 sends. One became a closed contract. We are not dressing up a volume play. Every conversation that started was with someone we had pre-qualified down to the named role at the named organisation. We were not optimising for replies. We were optimising for replies that mattered.
What it took
Four months from first campaign builds (October 2025) through the Christmas push and January 2026 automation go-live. Signed scope ran October through December 2025; delivery continued into January while automations went live and the CRM was cleaned up. List consolidation, duplicate-deal cleanup, and eight lifecycle automations mapped in that window. First measurable reply lift showed up within weeks of the nurture sequences going live.
Fixed-scope GTM engineering engagement, not an open-ended retainer. We owned Brevo automations, email sequences, ICP segmentation, CRM rules, Google Ads keyword and landing-page recommendations, and reply routing. Beamide's web agency kept site changes on their side. Behçet and the commercial team kept every technical conversation and close once a reply landed.
We did not pretend to be the founder. The handoff was the most important part of the system, not the sequence copy. Interested replies pinged Behçet within minutes. He handled the physics. We handled the infrastructure that got the right people to reply.
What changed
By January 2026, Beamide had a working outbound stack where one didn't exist before. The December campaign hit a 52.9% open rate. Two qualified meetings came from the first 40 cold sends in the pilot cohort, and one of those became a closed contract. CRM automations were live, duplicate deals were cleaned out, and replies routed to Behçet within minutes instead of sitting in a manual inbox. Prior agency spend had produced invoices, not pipeline. This produced conversations with the right people.
Related work
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