SmarterOutbound built our B2B pipeline at Sportmaster Malta from zero

Sportmaster is best known as a retail brand. Most of our growth in Malta has come from our stores and our e-commerce site selling directly to consumers. What we did not have, until last year, was a serious B2B function.

We wanted to start selling sports outfitting and team equipment directly to gyms, sports clubs, schools, corporate wellness programs, and the kind of buyers who don’t walk into our retail stores. That is an outbound problem, not a retail problem, and we had no team and no infrastructure to do it.

Why we hired SmarterOutbound

We looked at building this in-house and at hiring a local Malta-based agency. The in-house route required hiring at least one full-time outbound specialist plus tooling, which made no sense for an experimental B2B channel. The local options were generalist marketing agencies — none of them had a track record specifically in B2B cold email infrastructure.

SmarterOutbound came up through a recommendation from a peer in another European retail company. The conversation that closed the deal was about deliverability. We had previously sent a small internal cold email test that landed almost entirely in spam, and we needed to understand why before scaling.

What they delivered

The Build phase took about three weeks. New sending domains specifically for our B2B outreach, properly configured DMARC and SPF, gradual warmup, and a separate inbox infrastructure that would not affect our consumer-facing email reputation. They were specific about not mixing the two.

The Launch phase produced the first booked meetings within about two weeks of the campaign going live. The ICP we targeted was buyers of corporate gifts, team uniforms, and sports facility outfitting — a category we had never approached systematically before.

Outcome

The corporate outfitting line now has a steady inflow of qualified meetings booked directly into our commercial team’s calendar. We have closed deals in three categories we did not previously serve: corporate wellness programs, private school athletic departments, and local sports clubs needing team kit programs.

The retail brand still does what it does best. SmarterOutbound built an entire new revenue channel on top of it without touching the consumer-facing operation.

Recommendation

For a retail brand looking to add a B2B layer, this kind of dedicated outbound infrastructure is what we were missing. Doing it in-house would have taken six months and an expensive hire. Outsourcing was the right call for us.