How We Helped Kea Get 508 Sales Opportunities in 6 Months Driving 95% of Their Revenue
“95% of the business we closed in the last six months is thanks to your efforts in cold outreach.”
Joel Foster
Senior Product Manager
Results (TL;DR)
508 qualified sales opportunities
1 opp per ~100 contacts
95% of closed their revenue came from outbound
Cold email became their #1 acquisition channel
What is Kea?
Kea.ai is a voice-powered AI assistant for restaurants, known as “The Cashier in the Cloud.” It uses natural language processing to take phone orders, streamline operations, improve customer service, and increase revenue.
The Problem
Kea was at a critical point. They wanted to pivot from targeting large chains and franchises (50+ locations) to independent SMB restaurants and mom-and-pop shops.
The old enterprise playbook — networking, relationship building, manual LinkedIn messaging — wasn’t going to work for mom-and-pops. These owners rarely existed on LinkedIn. And most of the time they’re busy running the kitchen.
So Kea tried cold emailing. But they ran into three big issues:
Deliverability problems — most emails weren’t hitting the inbox.
Sub-optimal data sources (for the niche) like Apollo and Seamless(.)ai — producing incomplete, overused lists.
Generic messaging — not specific enough to get replies or book meetings.
All of this led to Kea's team to seek a better solution like a Clay powered outbound system.
The Turning Point
Joel Foster Senior Product Manager at Kea:
“Working with you has been instrumental in helping us pivot from targeting mid-market to targeting mom-and-pop shops (single-location, family businesses). With that pivot and the results we saw from your efforts; we completely revamped our GTM strategy— and turned to cold email as our main acquisition channel.”
And yes, as Kea had a strong product with a compelling benefit. We knew that if we set them up with our standard foundation: fixed their deliverability, data targeting and combined with stronger messaging - results would be imminent.
Our Solution
We approached Kea’s outbound from the ground up, solving each of their original problems in sequence.
1. Fixing Deliverability
The first step was making sure Kea’s emails actually landed in inboxes. We:
Set up enterprise-grade cold email infrastructure.
Configured domains, warm-up, and advanced deliverability monitoring.
Built sending systems that could scale from a few hundred emails/day to thousands, while keeping sender reputation healthy.
2. Building High-Quality Data
Next, we focused on data quality — a lever for this niche.
Built custom scrapers to collect mom-and-pop restaurant data directly from platforms like SliceLife, Toast, Square, and Clover.
Enriched every record with Google Maps data: reviews, star ratings, phone-order mentions, competitors in proximity, and location context.
Scraped restaurant websites to identify specific indicators of phone ordering, menu structure, and tech stack.
Used AI agents to find hard-to-source owner emails — combing through their Website, Yelp, TripAdvisor, even Google review threads.
The result: a unique, deeply enriched dataset no one else in the market was using.
3. Segmentation strategy
With the TAM mapped, we built segments tied directly to Kea’s value props:
Bad reviews mentioning phone orders → pain-led messaging (e.g. “long wait times, no one answering”).
Restaurants explicitly offering phone orders on their website → relevance-led messaging.
Platform-based targeting (SliceLife, Toast, Clover, Square) → contextual pitches that showed how Kea complemented their existing systems.
Joel on our targeting:
“For example, we were able to contact the owners of a pizza place in the middle of nowhere in Nebraska, and you successfully obtained those leads and generated high-quality outreach. This has been completely transformative in our ability to grow with the pivot.”
4. Crafting Resonant Messaging
For each segment, we built multiple copy angles and tested systematically. The bad review angle drove strong responses (though limited by list size).
The platform-based targeting proved to be the best for scale with Slicelife specifically producing exceptional results:
SliceLife (first campaign) → 116 opps from 5,355 contacts
SliceLife (relaunch) → 96 opps from 4,681 contacts
We replicated similar success across Toast, Clover, and Square.
Toast results 117 Leads in total:
Joel again:
“It’s remarkable what you’ve achieved for us — everything from the copywriting for all our outreach to setting up systems with Clay and Instantly, to targeting the right ICP and finding emails that are extremely difficult to find.”
Scaling to 508 Sales Opportunities
Once the strongest angles were validated, we scaled steadily — ensuring a consistent pipeline without overwhelming Kea’s sales team.
Over six months, our campaigns reached 52,710 contacts, generating 1,482 replies and 508 qualified sales opportunities. That’s roughly one opportunity for every 100 contacts.
Most importantly, outbound became Kea’s primary revenue driver — directly responsible for 95% of their closed business.
Joel:
“95% of the business we closed in the last six months is thanks to your efforts in cold outreach.”
Conclusion
Kea had a strong product and a bold pivot — but their outbound playbook wasn’t built for SMB restaurants. By rebuilding their outbound system from the ground up, we solved their deliverability issues, data quality gaps, and messaging challenges.
The result? 508 sales opportunities in just six months, transforming cold email into Kea’s #1 acquisition channel and driving 95% of their closed revenue.
What started as an experiment to reach mom-and-pop shops is now the engine powering Kea’s growth.
Joel summed it up best:
“95% of the business we closed in the last six months is thanks to your efforts in cold outreach.”
