How We Helped Besolo Generate 139 Sales Opportunities in 5 Months
Your team's professionalism is just an incredible resource and I think the learnings that we got and the customers that we got are going to be priceless moving forwards
Mark Jackson
CEO
Results (TL;DR)
2.32% reply rate
1 sales opp per 172 contacts
149 total sales opportunities
What is Besolo?
Besolo.io is an all-in-one platform for solopreneurs, freelancers and fractionals that bundles business formation, taxes, accounting, retirement, and benefits into a single subscription.
The Problem
When we started working with Besolo, outbound was actually the channel that got them their first few customers and they were getting good results from it. The only problem? The founders were doing it completely manually and it was a huge time stuck on their already full days.
As Mark Jackson, Founder of Besolo, put it:
“We were following the traditional path, which is to be as manual as possible and waste as much time as possible.”
They saw the potential in the new tools like Clay and even started to utilize them. But they felt like they were only scratching the surface.
The Turning Point
At the start of our engagement, Besolo’s total addressable market was limited to just three states (due to licensing restrictions for their tax services). Even with that limitation, the very first campaign targeting fractional C-level execs showed promise: 25 leads in the first 30 days.
Mark again:
“We went from manually finding our ICP (solopreneurs) on SalesNav and reaching out one by one on LinkedIn, to a fully automated Clay system. This gave us a massive volume upgrade across both email and LinkedIn. Allowing us as a small startup to reach thousands of people with the right message at scale.”
That was the proof of concept we needed.
Our Solution
Once we saw traction, the challenge became expanding the TAM. Limiting ourselves to just fractionals with the three states cap was not feasible.
So we thought wider:
All knowledge workers with independent, freelance, or fractional in their title
Coaches across various categories
One-person companies (founders, CEOs, and owners with only a single employee — themselves)
That expansion gave us a targetable TAM of 36,000 prospects — a real foundation to scale. Without a big enough TAM, cold email would never work. That was problem #1 solved.
Next, we segmented solopreneurs by their experience level:
New (≤12 months in role, no prior solo experience): Highest pain, strongest receptiveness.
2–5 years in role: Still a fit, but with tailored messaging.
>5 years: Disqualified. If they’d been solo that long, they had systems figured out.
On the value prop side, since Besolo’s product does so much, we needed to avoid overwhelming prospects. We tested three clear angles:
Tax reduction
All-in-one simplicity
Benefits access (healthcare, PPO)
The hypothesis proved right: new solopreneurs were the most responsive, averaging 1 lead per 127 contacts (36% better than average). And the two winning value props were tax reduction and all-in-one simplicity.
Scaling to 139 Sales Opportunities
With the right TAM, segmentation, and winning value props in place, it was all about consistency and scale.
We steadily increased daily sending volume, carefully monitoring deliverability and performance. Over a five month period this generated:
149 total sales opportunities
A consistent flow of new leads each week
Outbound as a predictable, repeatable growth channel
Conclusion
Besolo started with outbound already working — but at the cost of their founders’ time and focus. By building a scalable, automated outbound engine, they went from manual prospecting to a system that allowed them to talk to their target audience at scale, gather valuable insights and sign a crucial wave of initial customers.
