Cold-email case file
Bosquillon Executive Search
Retained search — food & ingredients, Europe
The ask
Referrals don't scale a boutique search firm
Philippe runs a retained-search practice built on decades of personal relationships in the European food industry — Managing Director, CFO, Head of Quality and senior commercial mandates for manufacturers across Germany, France, Poland and the Netherlands. That network wins mandates. It doesn't put new client companies in front of him on a schedule he controls. The brief: reach decision-makers at qualifying companies — 300 to 2,000+ employees, food and adjacent sectors, DACH/France/Benelux as the core market, UK excluded — without turning Philippe himself into a full-time prospector.
What we built
A signal layer under the cold email, not a mail-merge
Two things feed each other here. First, a signal layer: company news and hiring activity gets pulled from the open web (via Exa AI) and from five niche job boards per country — LinkedIn, Cadremploi, Xing, Indeed, Stepstone — then filtered against Philippe's actual ICP before anything gets touched by a human. Second, the outreach itself runs on two channels at once: cold email, and a LinkedIn sequencer connected to Philippe's own LinkedIn account, writing in his voice, triggered by the same signals — so a company expanding into a new market gets a message referencing that expansion, not a generic template. Every target's own site and careers pages also get scraped — in German, French and Dutch, not just English — so segmentation is based on what's actually happening at the company, not a guess from headcount.
The evidence
Seven exhibits, redacted where it matters
Retained executive search in European food & ingredients is not a large addressable market. Rather than treat that as a limitation, the list was built to exhaust it: 1,151 qualifying companies (300–2,000+ employees, DACH/France/Benelux, food and adjacent sectors) and 2,064 contacts inside them — company and contact identities masked below, numbers are real.
Infra was picked on purpose, not by default: the recipient mix skews heavily corporate — Microsoft-domain inboxes — so sending leaned on Outlook (which delivers well into Microsoft) plus a custom SMTP block warmed for two months beforehand, which ended up outperforming Outlook on reputation.
August is EU vacation season — most of the reply volume is out-of-office autoresponders, not people. Shown honestly, split from genuine engagement, and broken down by sending infrastructure to confirm nothing was quietly getting blocked.
What the live dashboard looks like for one of these sending weeks — not a cherry-picked best week, just what a normal week in the campaign reads like.
Reply rate here is total (includes autoresponders), not a quality signal — that's Exhibit C above. The 0.0%/n=19 cell is too small a sample to read anything into.
Real reply, CEO-level responder — copy exactly as sent.
Real thread (recipient last name/company not shown). The assistant asks what's actually needed before anyone's calendar gets involved — then hands off with Philippe copied directly on the thread.
Same thread as Exhibit C — Philippe and Marc Fuchs (Trikno), in Philippe's own words. Docs sent after the briefing, and Philippe's own read on the odds.
Every raw signal — a news mention, a job posting — has to clear Philippe's ICP before a human or an outreach sequence ever sees it. This signal layer predates the LinkedIn channel below: until this month, a matching signal was simply pushed into a separate email campaign as a regular lead, no special treatment. Live dashboard screenshots below.
Sourced two ways: broad web/news monitoring (Exa AI) and five niche, country-specific job boards run as scheduled scrapers.
New this month — the same signal engine that used to only feed email now also triggers outreach on Philippe's own LinkedIn account. Not a mail-merge: this message only exists because the signal (a trade-press piece about the company's expansion) fired. Recipient last name and company redacted — the send itself went out from Philippe's own LinkedIn.
The numbers
Two campaigns, read straight
| Campaign | Sent | Companies reached | Human replies | Positive |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Broad | 3,622 | 1,299 | 13 | 8 |
| Signals, personalized | 808 | 278 | 2 | 1 |
The read
Not a closed case study — a live one
This isn't a wrapped-up success story with a final invoice. It's a cold list, in a language-fragmented market, for a search discipline — retained executive search, not contingency staffing — that most cold-email operators have never sold into. Two campaigns in, with a signal-and-segmentation layer built specifically for this vertical, the pipeline is still producing positive replies on sends going out this week, not coasting on one list pull from months ago.
Sends are still going out and replies are still coming in — this page reflects where the pipeline stands, not a fixed snapshot from a single push.