How Puzzle Went From No Outbound at All to 77 Leads With ColdIQ

Foundation

Puzzle sells two things at once, and that is the whole story.

On one side, a consulting practice that helps organizations streamline their processes by implementing tools like Zapier, Make and monday.com. On the other, a software product that lets users see their systems the way Miro or Lucidchart let them see a diagram, only faster and easier to understand.

Two lines of business, two audiences, two ways of buying. Brian Ragone, Founder and CEO, had been running the company for four years when he decided outbound had to become a channel rather than an afterthought.

The problem was that nobody at Puzzle had ever done it.

“We were new to the cold email game. So much of our messaging, much of our approach on defining ICP, wasn’t built out at all.”

That is where ColdIQ came in.

The challenge

Before ColdIQ, outbound at Puzzle was a manual habit rather than a system:

• Every message sent by hand. One by one, mostly over LinkedIn, on lists researched inside their own network.
• No ICP to aim at. The company had a guess at who it sold to, not a definition it could build campaigns on.
• Email campaigns performing very poorly, with nothing to explain why.
• A market full of tools and no way to judge them. Dozens of sales platforms, no experience with any of them.

Brian was blunt about what that felt like from the inside:

The brief was not “send more emails”. It was “give us a foundation we don’t have”.

The process

1. Building the foundation first

ColdIQ started where Puzzle had nothing: the messaging and the go to market ICP. Not one ICP, as it turned out. Working through the two business lines surfaced several niches where the offer landed, and the campaigns were built to reach all of them rather than betting the quarter on one guess.

2. Outbound on both business lines

Consulting and product were run as separate motions, because they are separate purchases. The product side is where it clicked hardest.

3. Targeting partners, not just prospects

The winning segment was agencies partnered with the platforms Puzzle plugs into: HubSpot, Salesforce, Make, Zapier. Lists of thousands of contacts were pulled for each platform and worked as their own campaign.

The strongest of them was HubSpot, for a concrete reason: Puzzle was building a specific integration for it, so the email had something real to say.

4. Killing campaigns on purpose

Several campaigns failed. That was treated as information rather than as a setback: the losers were dropped, the winners got the volume.

5. Working as one team

Brian described the collaboration in the terms most clients use about ColdIQ, and it is worth quoting in full.

The outcome

• 77 leads driven in a few months of campaigns.
• From zero foundation to a working motion. Messaging, ICP and campaigns existed at the end of the engagement, and none of them existed at the start.
• Multiple ICPs identified across two business lines, instead of one assumed buyer.
• Thousands of contacts per platform segment, worked as separate campaigns rather than one blended list.
• Six months and more of collaboration, long enough to fail, pivot and scale.

In Brian’s own summary: “In those few months, we drove 77 leads, and we went from literally zero foundation of outbound to driving 77 leads.”

Lessons learned

1. A foundation is a deliverable. Messaging and ICP are not preliminaries to the campaign, they are the first thing the campaign buys you.
2. Two business lines are two motions. Running them as one campaign would have averaged both into nothing.
3. Failed campaigns are cheap when you kill them fast. The 77 leads came from the ones that survived.
4. Sell where you already connect. The best segment was the ecosystem Puzzle already integrates with, and the best campaign was the one with a real integration behind it.

What’s next

Puzzle now has something it did not have four years in: a repeatable way to reach a market it has defined. The work from here is depth, more segments in the partner ecosystem, more of what the winning campaigns proved.

Final thoughts

Most outbound stories start from a channel that is underperforming. This one starts from a channel that did not exist.

What makes it worth reading is how ordinary the sequence turns out to be: define who you sell to, build the messaging, run several bets, drop the ones that lose, and put the volume behind the ones that win.

If you are starting from zero on outbound and want a foundation rather than a burst of emails, the plays behind this story are in ColdIQ’s GTM Playbook.