Case Study: BRANDED (now Essor)

What They Do

BRANDED (now Essor) is an institutional acquirer of e-commerce businesses that primarily sell on Amazon. Their model: identify promising brands, acquire them, then develop and scale them. A portfolio play at scale, requiring a high-volume, structured acquisition pipeline to source and close deals with Amazon sellers who weren't necessarily looking to sell.

How I Got Involved

Referral from Split Dragon — a previous client. Almost every engagement I've had has come through referrals or existing relationships. BRANDED was no different.

I came in as a contractor at the company's inception — there were no systems, no pipeline, nothing. I helped them select HubSpot as their CRM and built the first acquisition pipeline from scratch. That pipeline lasted years. Later I joined as a full-time employee in a broader product role (Head of Product — DTC & CRM), but the work described here is the contractor engagement that preceded that.

The Challenge

BRANDED was a buyer, not a seller — which makes the psychology of outreach slightly different but the system requirements almost identical to a sales pipeline. They needed to reach Amazon sellers, build relationships, and eventually get them on a call to discuss acquisition. Most of these sellers weren't actively looking to exit. The outreach had to be persistent without being obnoxious, and the pipeline had to be tight enough that no warm lead went cold due to an overlooked follow-up.

At the start: no CRM, no outreach system, no pipeline, no data. Everything was built from zero.

What We Built

Lead Sourcing

Human researchers used Jungle Scout and Helium10 — industry-standard Amazon seller intelligence tools — to identify acquisition targets. They found company contacts via LinkedIn, located company email domains, and fed all of that raw data into the system. Later, we automated parts of this sourcing layer as well, but the outreach system stayed consistent throughout.

Email Discovery and Verification

Many Amazon sellers don't have obvious contact information. To reach them, the system used two methods:

• LinkedIn Sales Navigator via PhantomBuster to extract contact data where available
• Email combination generation + deliverability verification — programmatically constructing all plausible combinations of first name, last name, and domain, then verifying which addresses were deliverable before any send. Aggressive by consumer standards, but standard practice in B2B outreach.

Hunter.io and PhantomBuster.

Multichannel Outreach Automation

Built in Lemlist, connected to HubSpot via Zapier and native integrations. Two branches depending on whether a LinkedIn profile existed for the contact:

LinkedIn branch:

1. View their LinkedIn profile (using an exec account — this registers as a profile view notification)
2. Send initial cold email
3. Send LinkedIn connection request
4. Follow-up email
5. Attempt LinkedIn direct message (sent regardless of connection status — no reliable way to know if the request had been accepted)

Email-only branch: A shorter sequence of emails for contacts without a LinkedIn presence.

In both branches: the moment a lead replied in any channel — email or LinkedIn — the sequence stopped automatically. The team took over from there. No overlap, no continued automation to someone who'd already engaged.

The goal of the sequence was never to pitch the acquisition in writing. It was to get them on a call. The copy was written collaboratively with BRANDED's domain experts — I implemented the system, they knew what Amazon sellers respond to.

HubSpot Pipeline

Every lead moved through a structured HubSpot pipeline with stage-based automations — follow-ups triggered at the right moment, information shared at the right stage, progress tracked without manual intervention. The pipeline that was set up in those early contractor months served the company for years without fundamental redesign.

Results

• 5.4% conversion rate from outreach lead to successful acquisition
• Pipeline operational from day one of the company's existence
• System ran largely unchanged for several years — a sign it was built right the first time
• Enabled the team to focus on engaged, responsive leads rather than manual follow-up chasing

Note on Scope

This case study covers the acquisition pipeline work from the contractor phase. As a full-time employee, I subsequently managed the DTC, CRM, and CDP product verticals across 12 brands — a broader and different scope of work.

Stack

HubSpot · Lemlist · PhantomBuster · LinkedIn Sales Navigator · Hunter.io · Zapier · Jungle Scout · Helium10 · Email combination generation + deliverability verification