Crisiscentrale

Client Background

For eight years, Crisiscentrale grew through its own network. The occasional mailing, some LinkedIn posts, but mostly waiting for someone to call. 

Mariska wanted to go out and find clients instead of waiting for them. The problem was that cold outreach felt like a different profession. 

She had ignored plenty of agency emails before. Ours arrived at the right moment, she took the meeting, and we kicked off a pilot in the summer of 2025.

The Challenge

Crisiscentrale had the opposite problem of most of our clients. The service was crystal clear, but the market was endless because any sector can end up in a crisis. 

With no sales setup and too many directions to choose from, they were stuck at the starting line. 

So the pilot had to answer a question before it could build pipeline. Which sectors reply, and which replies actually turn into proposals?

Our Solution

We ran the pilot as a market test. On Instantly, we launched separate campaigns at provinces, water boards, municipalities, and healthcare institutions like elderly care homes. 

A fifth campaign scraped RSS feeds for protests in the Netherlands, spotted which organizations were involved, and reached out while the risk was live. 

The test gave a clear answer. Municipalities delivered 19 opportunities from 999 emails and healthcare delivered 13 from 767. But replies were not turning into enough concrete proposals. 

So we pivoted to housing associations and rebuilt the campaign as a multichannel sequence in Lemlist, because email alone undersold this audience. 

It starts with a LinkedIn connection request. People who accept get a chat message and email follow-ups. People who don't get an email track with a breakup message at the end. 

The switch to Lemlist also gave Crisiscentrale full visibility. Their own team now manages the mailbox and handles every reply themselves.

Results

• 34 sales opportunities during the pilot phase, from a company that had never sent a cold email before.

• 203 replies from 1,881 cold emails, a 10.8% average reply rate where most cold email campaigns land between 1 and 5%.

• Reply rates up to 29.2% on a single campaign, with the province campaign turning nearly one in three prospects into a conversation.

• A large quote in final negotiation with a care institution, including a resilience track for running 72 hours without power.

• 5 conversations booked with housing corporations while the campaign is still running, with 98.5% of messages delivered.

• A pilot that became a permanent partnership, now running multiple campaigns on multiple target groups.