How The Weather went from zero outbound to 32 booked sales meetings in three months

Introduction

The Weather is an award-winning digital agency founded by Dominik Backhaus and Chris Lettner, with its roots in Berlin and Prague and a fully remote team of around twenty. It designs and builds websites, products and brands, and has shipped more than 200 of them for clients including Kiwi.com, Mews and RE/MAX, with sixteen sites recognised on Awwwards and a number-one ranking among German web design agencies on Clutch. Every one of those projects had come through inbound and referrals. In July 2024 the founders asked us to build their first outbound channel.

The Challenge

The Weather had never sent a cold email, and it was selling one of the most crowded offers in any inbox.

A saturated offer → every company already hears from web agencies. “We could redesign your website” is among the most-sent cold emails there is, so the service alone would never earn a reply.
No proof points → the agency had never collected results. Asked for case studies with tangible numbers, Chris said: “We have not really been collecting things like that.”
A service that is hard to quantify → design and development rarely come with a revenue figure attached. The results existed in clients’ analytics, not in a format a cold email could use.
A team built for inbound → project managers were used to replying to inquiries from people who had already chosen them. Sales calls with cold prospects, in Chris’s words, needed them “to adapt to these kinds of sales calls, where the lead hasn’t already picked us out of a round up of companies.”
No vertical → an agency can build a website for anyone, which means a cold email can be about nothing. Someone had to choose.

What We Built

We built the channel in two rounds, and kept testing with Chris’s team until an angle earned attention in a market that ignores agency emails by default.

1. Proof points pulled from their own data. Before a single email went out, we had Chris dig into client analytics. Out came the numbers the agency had never written down: a plant shop whose sales rose 200% after a redesign, a fintech whose leads grew 175% in six months, a product configurator that lifted leads 220% in a year, and an incentive-travel startup that heard from Novartis, KPMG and Amazon within six weeks of launch. Those became the spine of every email.

2. Round one: travel and hospitality. Chris had fifteen years in tourism and a client list to match, so we started there. Plain-text emails, no tracking pixels, and every interested prospect scheduled straight into the sales team’s calendars with the full thread forwarded so they knew what had been said. The first two positive replies arrived on launch morning.

3. Value before the meeting. When a prospect showed interest but hesitated, we went back with something concrete: Chris’s own assessment of what their site was getting wrong and what a redesign would change. For the consultancy vertical, The Weather produced a presentation covering who they are, how they help, how a project runs and who they have done it for, so every call started from the same place.

4. Round two: testing the angles. Across 27 campaigns we tested different value propositions, calls to action and offers against different segments: travel operators, event services, hospitality and, from November, consultancies. Emails with a case study against emails without one, a meeting ask against a soft “can I send more information”, a free audit against a time-limited offer. The consultancy angle came with three fresh proof points: a communication coach whose inquiries rose 300% in three months, a pharma consultancy with five times the website leads, and a life-science consultancy whose inquiries nearly doubled. An AI-generated first line read each prospect’s own positioning, and Chris’s team checked every variant line by line.

5. Website visitors turned into outreach. Companies visiting theweather.agency were identified with Snitcher, qualified in Clay, checked against a blocklist built from the agency’s own pipeline, and dropped into sequences automatically. Chris and Mia worked the shared inbox directly, and every interested lead was pinged into Slack the moment it landed.

The Outcome

An agency that had never sent a cold email ended up with more conversations than it could keep up with.

• 32 sales meetings booked → with travel, hospitality and consultancy companies across Europe, North America and Australia, scheduled straight into the team’s calendars from the first week.

• 27 angles tested → value propositions, offers and calls to action run across travel, event services, hospitality and consultancies until one combination generated real interest. Chris, two weeks into the final campaign: “I’m a little overwhelmed because there are just so many.”

• A sales process that did not exist before → a lead-tracking spreadsheet, a pitch deck, call preparation and founders taking calls themselves, all built because outbound forced the question.

• Proposals up to €18K → including an €18K offer to a travel company, quotes for two new websites to a restaurant group, and offers to an escape-room operator, a travel platform and a consultancy.

Why It Worked

1. Proof came from their own numbers. Nothing was invented. Every claim in the emails was a result The Weather had already delivered, which is why prospects replied asking for more detail rather than questioning it.

2. Creative angles in a saturated market. Web design is a commodity pitch, so value propositions, offers and calls to action were run against each other across segments, together with The Weather’s team, until one combination generated real interest.

3. Visitors were already warm. Identifying the companies that had just looked at the agency’s site and reaching them while the visit was fresh turned anonymous traffic into named conversations.

Ready To Own Your Pipeline?

If your agency has grown on referrals and inbound, and nobody on the team has ever sent a cold email, this is where we start. We turn your past work into proof points, test the angles against real segments and run the inbox until your calendar fills.

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