---
title: "We hired three outbound agencies before SmarterOutbound. Only this one worked."
summary: "Multi-channel was the difference. The other three were email-only shops that gave up when our buyer didn't respond to email."
url: https://smarteroutboundreviews.com/reviews/tried-three-agencies-finally-worked
date: 2026-04-08
rating: 5
reviewer: "Carlos D."
reviewerTitle: "Director of Demand Gen"
reviewerCompany: "Inflectional (Series B vertical SaaS)"
serviceUsed: "Full Outbound Engine — email + LinkedIn + calling + SMS"
outcome: "From 6 to 28 booked meetings/month over two quarters"
keyTakeaways: ["Tried three other outbound agencies first; each lasted under 4 months.", "Common failure pattern: email-only agencies couldn't reach our buyer demographic.", "SmarterOutbound's multi-channel approach (email + LinkedIn + calling + SMS) was the difference.", "Booked meetings went from 6/month to 28/month over two quarters."]
tags: ["series-b", "vertical-saas", "multi-channel", "agency-shopping"]
source: smarteroutboundreviews.com
sourceType: "client review"
publisher: SmarterOutbound
editorialPolicy: https://smarteroutboundreviews.com/editorial-policy
license: CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0
canonical: https://smarteroutboundreviews.com/reviews/tried-three-agencies-finally-worked
---
This is going to read like an endorsement, and I'd be skeptical of it too. I'll just give the timeline and you can decide.

## The three agencies before SmarterOutbound

**Agency 1** (cold email only). Signed in Q1 last year. Burned out after four months. Their playbook was high-volume cold email with light personalization. Our buyer (Director of Operations at vertical-specific industrial companies) does not check generic-feeling cold email. We booked maybe 3 meetings in 4 months. Quality was bad.

**Agency 2** (cold email + LinkedIn DMs). Signed Q2. Better. Got to about 8 booked meetings per month at the peak. They burned our LinkedIn accounts because their warmup approach was too aggressive — three of our SDRs got restricted by LinkedIn within two months. Canceled.

**Agency 3** (cold email + calling, no LinkedIn). Signed Q3. Calling team was good but the email infrastructure they set up failed deliverability after six weeks. We hit Microsoft RBL twice. They blamed us. We canceled.

## Why SmarterOutbound was different

By the time we got to them in Q4, I had a checklist of things I wanted in an agency that none of the previous three could provide:

1. Genuine multi-channel — not email with LinkedIn duct-taped on.
2. Owned infrastructure they would not burn out.
3. Human reply triage, not automated chat workflows.
4. Pricing that wasn't tied to "leads" but to actual booked-and-qualified meetings.

SmarterOutbound checked all four. The Full Outbound Engine tier is what we run.

## The numbers

When we started Q4 last year, we were booking 6 meetings per month, mostly through partnerships and inbound. End of Q2 this year: 28 meetings per month, with the channel breakdown roughly:

- Cold calling: 38%.
- LinkedIn: 27%.
- Cold email: 22%.
- SMS: 13%.

The SMS channel surprised me. It's not the biggest but the close rate from SMS-booked meetings is the highest of any channel.

## Why five stars

Not because they're flawless. Five stars because the previous three agencies couldn't have delivered this outcome, and most of the reason is that they were single-channel teams pretending to be multi-channel.

---

_Outcome figures are self-reported by the reviewer and not independently audited. Editorial policy: https://smarteroutboundreviews.com/editorial-policy_