How we helped Sentinel get 35 interested leads in its first 7 days of outbound

Introduction

Sentinel is a decision engine for short-term rental revenue teams: it audits the nightly rates a pricing tool sets, ranks what to fix by revenue impact, and changes nothing without a human’s approval. It was built in 2026 by Angel Host, a Montréal-based revenue management company whose revenue managers run dynamic pricing and listing optimisation for more than 1,000 hosts across 50+ cities, with pricing portfolios around 30% above market. Sentinel had a sales team, a free audit and a seven-day trial. What it did not have was a pipeline. In July 2026 the team asked us to build one.

The Challenge

Sentinel was new, the buyers were hard to size, and the sales team had never worked a cold pipeline.

A product nobody had heard of → Angel Host was known for managed revenue services. Sentinel was software, aimed at property managers who already had a pricing tool and had no reason to add another one.
Portfolio size was the real filter → the product only pays off for operators running ten or more properties, and no database lists that. Employee count misses in both directions: a dozen staff running 150 properties, a 200-person resort running none.
A crowded inbox → property managers hear from pricing tools, channel managers and PMS vendors every week. Another “can I show you a demo” email would sink.
No way to handle a rush → replies were going to land on reps who spent their days on existing clients, with no routing, no owner per lead and no follow-up discipline.

What We Built

We built the list the hard way, led with something the prospect could use, and wired every reply into Sentinel’s own CRM.

1. Lists built on proven portfolio counts. Instead of filtering by headcount, we scraped and read each operator’s own pages and listings to prove how many properties they run, and sent Sentinel’s team the evidence sentence behind every count. Companies we could not size went in a separate tab; 92 we had doubts about were pulled before the client ever saw them. Qualification then moved to the property management system each operator runs, since the larger platforms are a signal of scale on their own.

2. A Listing IQ report as the opener. For the Airbnb campaign, each email named a specific listing the prospect runs, said we had already scored it with Listing IQ, and asked one question: shall I send the report? Sentinel’s reps then generated the real report for every interested reply and followed up with a call.

3. Every industry event turned into a campaign. GuestyVal, VRMA, VRWS, SCALE in Barcelona and the Dubai short-term rental events each got their own track: one for the attendee lists Sentinel had, one for operators we sourced around the event, with English and Spanish variants where the audience needed them. The ask was a coffee or a twenty-minute audit of the prospect’s 365-day calendar.

4. Replies routed to a named rep in minutes. Each interested reply pinged a shared Slack channel with the lead’s company, portfolio and the full thread, created the contact in HubSpot with a note carrying the conversation and the listing link, and assigned it to one of four reps with a five-minute call-back target. A daily check flagged any lead left unanswered for two working days, or gone quiet after a reply, so nothing sat.

The Outcome

The first campaign went live on a Friday, and by the following week the sales team’s problem was keeping up.

• 35 interested leads in 7 days → property managers and owners asking for the report, the audit or a call, for a product that had never been sold cold before.

• 4 interested replies on launch day → Sentinel’s team had told us they would be happy with a single reply. Four positive ones arrived the first day the Airbnb campaign sent.

• Five industry events worked twice → attendees and local operators around GuestyVal, VRMA, VRWS, SCALE Barcelona and the Dubai events, with a second surge of interested replies each time a new event track went live.

• A pipeline the team can run → every lead owned by a rep in HubSpot, with the thread attached and a follow-up nudge when it goes quiet.

Why It Worked

1. The list was proven, not guessed. Sentinel only makes sense for operators with real portfolios, so every company in the campaign came with evidence of how many properties it runs.

2. The first email gave something away. A scored report on a listing the prospect actually owns is worth replying to; a demo request is not.

3. Replies had somewhere to go. Routing each lead to a named rep inside Sentinel’s own CRM, with a call-back target and a quiet-lead check, turned a surge into conversations instead of a backlog.

Ready To Own Your Pipeline?

If you are launching something new and the first question is “who do we even email”, this is where we start. We build the list from evidence, lead with something the prospect can use, and route every reply to a person on your team before it goes cold.

Book an outbound strategy call and we’ll map what an owned outbound channel would look like for you.