The sales engineering team Bearcroft never had to hire.

Tannto designed and built a custom AI sales operating system around Bearcroft’s existing stack: HubSpot, Outlook, and Smartlead. Active-hiring signals come in; Bearcroft-voice drafts go out; every send is approved by the team and every reply writes back to the CRM. The platform now books an average of 21 meetings a month, triages around 35 positive cold replies a week, and keeps hundreds of warm-client check-ins and active-hiring touches moving without an SDR on payroll.

bearcroft.co

Industry: B2B Recruitment
Location: London, UK
Team shape: Lean leadership, no in-house SDR
Engagement: Custom build + 2-week sprints

21meetings booked by the platform in an average month(based on the last several months of operation)

~35positive cold replies triaged per week

0SDR hires added to reach this operating volume

Open-plan studio with exposed brick walls and a wood-beamed ceiling, recruiters working at long desks under industrial lighting.

The adoption proof showed up before the headline meeting number: once the platform met Bearcroft’s live CRM, it turned dormant relationship data and active-hiring signals into an approval queue the team could clear in one sitting.

“Amonthintoonboarding,theplatformhadalreadysurfaced70ofourclientsactivelyhiring,plus300high-importancecontactsinHubSpotwehadn’ttouchedinovertwomonths,eachonewithadraftemailreadytosend.Theteamclearedthelotinsideanhour.That’snormallydaysofwork,andfranklythepartoftheweeknobodywantedtodo.”

Benedict AldousFounder, Bearcroft

Bearcroft's bottleneck was timing, not effort.

Bearcroft is a London recruitment firm. The sales motion is high-context and high-margin. The buyers are operators making real hiring decisions, often the founder or the head of the function. Generic outbound bounces off that buyer. Personalisation theatre bounces off that buyer. The motion only works if every touch reads like it came from someone who has actually thought about the company on the other end.

Built around Bearcroft's stack, with the team still in control.

The work ran in three phases: understand the motion, keep the tools that already worked, and ship a usable operating layer.

Phase 01
Map the sales motion and the signal that mattered
We sat with Benedict and his team and walked through the entire sales motion as it ran day to day: mailbox configuration, domain authentication across SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, sending infrastructure across Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, CRM hygiene, and lead-source mapping. The deliverable was a written priority list of where AI was going to move the numbers and where it wasn't. The biggest pain point was getting on calls with prospects who liked Bearcroft's service but weren't actively hiring. The fix: every lead the platform contacts is actively hiring for roles Bearcroft places.
Phase 02
Keep the stack; add the operating layer
We designed the platform around Bearcroft's existing tooling. They didn't have to switch tools to start. HubSpot stays the system of record. Outlook stays the actual sending channel for warm re-engagement; Smartlead handles the cold-email side. The platform sits on top of both, mirroring data in, drafting actions, and writing back through human-approved sends. Nothing leaves Bearcroft's tenant without one of their team clicking approve.
Phase 03
Ship V1, train the team, improve from live usage
The platform went live in production inside the build window. Bearcroft's team trained on the inbox in a single session and started running it the next morning. We continue to ship a feature or improvement every fortnight, only adding ones the team will actually use. Features that stop being used get removed in the next sprint. The application stays sharp.

From signal to approved send to booked meeting.

The platform still has eight modules, but the operating logic is simple: watch the right signals, use HubSpot for context, draft in Bearcroft's voice, route every send for approval, and write activity back to the CRM.

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Module 01

Multi-channel outbound engine

Cold email and LinkedIn outreach in coordinated sequences, with reply handling routed back into one inbox. The orchestration layer is custom-built. Sequence cadence and channel ordering are configurable per ICP segment, so the recruitment-led motion runs differently from the candidate-side motion without two separate tools.

Outcomes and impact.

Bearcroft’s team books an average of 21 meetings a month through the platform. The bigger shift is that the team now has a daily sales operating queue tied to live hiring signals, relationship history, mailbox ownership, and human approval.

Daily volume the team can handle.

Around 35 positive cold-email replies a week handled without anything slipping through the cracks. Hundreds of warm-client check-ins and active-hiring outreach a month, all tracked, all written in Bearcroft's voice. Every reply gets classified, drafted, surfaced, and either approved or discarded inside the same business day.

Re-engagement tied to live signals.

Past contacts at companies that go quiet for a configurable window, or that start hiring after a period of silence, get a draft surfaced automatically. Relationships that would otherwise have gone cold come back into the rotation without anyone having to remember they exist.

Coverage without adding headcount.

The work Bearcroft would otherwise have needed to cover across outbound, follow-ups, re-engagement, CRM hygiene, and tool wiring now runs as infrastructure. Bearcroft's senior GTM lead operates the platform every morning. The capital that would have gone into hires goes back into client acquisition.

The qualitative line.

The thing nobody puts on a slide: the team leaves the office on a Friday without worrying that a hot reply will sit unread until Monday.

Infrastructure beats hires, when the maths is honest.

Custom sales infrastructure changes the maths because it turns scattered sales work into a daily operating rhythm. The same team can see the right account, the right signal, the right draft, and the right approval state inside the tooling they already use. For founder-led services firms who care about voice and quality, the platform scales without diluting either.

If you’re running a B2B services firm and the next growth plan is another SDR, another sales-engagement tool, or more founder-led follow-up, the consultation is the place to start before you spend the headcount budget.

Book a 30-min consultation

Numbers in this case study reflect typical results across the engagement window described, not guaranteed outcomes. Results vary by ICP, offer, and market conditions.

The sales engineering team Bearcroft never had to hire.

Industry: B2B Recruitment
Location: London, UK
Team shape: Lean leadership, no in-house SDR
Engagement: Custom build + 2-week sprints

21meetings booked by the platform in an average month(based on the last several months of operation)

~35positive cold replies triaged per week

0SDR hires added to reach this operating volume

The sales engineering team Bearcroft never had to hire.

Map the sales motion and the signal that mattered

Keep the stack; add the operating layer

Ship V1, train the team, improve from live usage

Multi-channel outbound engine

Daily volume the team can handle.

Re-engagement tied to live signals.

Coverage without adding headcount.

The qualitative line.

Infrastructure beats hires, when the maths is honest.

The sales engineering team Bearcroft never had to hire.

Map the sales motion and the signal that mattered

Keep the stack; add the operating layer

Ship V1, train the team, improve from live usage

Multi-channel outbound engine

Daily volume the team can handle.

Re-engagement tied to live signals.

Coverage without adding headcount.

The qualitative line.

Infrastructure beats hires, when the maths is honest.