Building a B2B growth engine from zero
E-commerce / Beauty & wellness · Building a repeatable partnership and outreach engine
There was no repeatable commercial engine — partnership growth depended on ad-hoc outreach with no pipeline or measurement.
Response rates were driven by segmentation and timing rather than message volume, which testing made visible.
Built market mapping, segmentation, an outbound sequence with timing experiments and CRM discipline to make the pipeline repeatable.
264 prospects mapped, 52 companies engaged, 63% response rate on tracked conversations and 29% LinkedIn acceptance.
Overview. The client is an e-commerce marketplace for natural, non-toxic beauty and wellness products, handcrafted by Black-owned, women-led brands. I owned the brand's Klaviyo email marketing program and, separately, built its B2B sales motion essentially from scratch — a corporate-partnership and gifting pipeline designed to turn the brand's mission-driven story into real enterprise relationships and revenue.
- Owned Klaviyo end to end for the retail email channel — flows, campaigns and list management.
- Authored the sales strategy mapping seven categories of prospective corporate partners.
- Built and ran the outbound pipeline — prospect lists, LinkedIn outreach and intro emails — tracking every contact from first touch to response.
- Sequenced outreach around real triggers: the holiday gifting season and year-end DEI budget cycles.
The brand's story — Black-owned, women-led, non-toxic — is a genuinely strong DEI and ESG narrative. But a small consumer beauty brand doesn't come with a built-in enterprise sales motion.
There was no target list, no outreach infrastructure, and no established answer to the basic questions any B2B effort needs: which companies would actually care, who inside them to talk to, and when to reach out so timing matched how those buyers operate. I built all of that from a blank page.
| Category | Examples targeted |
|---|---|
| Corporate gifting platforms | GiftSenda, Sendoso, Alyce, SwagUp, Snappy, Caroo (20 mapped) |
| HR / payroll platforms | Justworks, Rippling, ADP, Gusto, TriNet, Paylocity |
| Workplace productivity platforms | Notion, Slack, Zoom, Salesforce, HubSpot, MS Teams |
| DEI connector organisations | The 15% Pledge, WeAreHue, Blavity |
| Large corporations with public DEI commitments | Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Google, Walmart, Apple |
| Consulting firms | McKinsey, Deloitte, Accenture |
| Healthcare / pharma | Kaiser Permanente, Novartis, J&J, AbbVie |
The timing insight
HR and People leaders at large companies need a DEI win to point to, especially around year-end. I built the outreach cadence around that — positioning a holiday corporate-gifting partnership as a ready-made PR moment rather than a generic vendor pitch.
A parallel, direct-to-business sales list
Alongside the brand-partnership angle, I built a separate list of 150 direct B2B prospects across six industries — Beauty, Design, Real Estate, Legal, Construction and Fashion — on the insight that individual professionals who already buy client gifts (realtors closing on homes, lawyers wrapping up cases, designers finishing projects) were an underused, faster-moving market than waiting on large-company budget cycles.
Running the outreach and tracking the funnel
I identified 83 individual contacts across 52 DEI-aligned companies and ran a LinkedIn-first motion: 80 personalised connection invites, 23 accepted (29%), followed by intro emails to accepted connections. Of the conversations I tracked closely, 5 of 8 generated a real response, including one with GiftSenda's Gift Campaign Manager that moved from a cold LinkedIn message to a named partnerships contact to follow up with directly.
I also built a smaller, distinct outreach tier targeting Black-owned banks — Broadway Federal, Carver Federal Savings, Carver State Bank, Citizens Trust and others — institutions with a natural values alignment that hadn't been part of the original target categories.
| Stage | Result |
|---|---|
| Total prospective partners / contacts mapped | 264 across all lists |
| DEI-aligned companies engaged directly | 52 companies (83 individual contacts) |
| LinkedIn connection acceptance rate | 29% (23 of 80 invites) |
| Direct-conversation response rate | 63% (5 of 8 tracked conversations) |
| Furthest-advanced lead | GiftSenda — cold outreach to a named partnerships contact |
| Adjacent B2B vertical prospects | 150 contacts across 6 industries |
- Pipeline built from zero264 contacts
- LinkedIn connection acceptance29%
- Response rate on tracked conversations63%
- Adjacent sales motion identified150 prospects
- Went from no B2B sales infrastructure to a mapped, trackable pipeline across two distinct sales motions.
- Cold outreach converted at a healthy clip and produced a named, engaged partnerships contact at a DEI-aligned gifting platform.
- Identified an entire adjacent sales motion the original DEI-partnership strategy hadn't considered.
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