How a B2B publisher automated its sales outreach: the Sales Cockpit
D2 Emerge, publisher of SD Times and ITOps Times, went six months without a single human reply to its cold sales email. The problem wasn't the pitch. The mail wasn't reaching inboxes. After fixing the sending address and its deliverability and building its own Sales Cockpit on Supabase and Cloudflare Workers, the same outreach has produced 10 strong leads and 4 major deals in three months, while prospecting time fell from 12 to 15 hours a week to about 5.
The situation
D2 Emerge sells sponsorships, webinars and lead generation to software companies, and one person runs sales. Cold email is how new accounts start, so it has to work without a sales team behind it.
For six months, it didn't. Emails went out on schedule and none drew a reply from a real person. Prospecting, follow-ups and sorting the inbox all ran by hand, which left less time for the conversations that actually close deals.
What we found
The emails were being sent, but they weren't arriving. The problem was the address they went out from and its deliverability. Mail from that address was landing in spam folders or being filtered out before anyone saw it, so no amount of rewriting the pitch was going to help.
The fix started with infrastructure, not copy: get the mail into inboxes first, then make the work of following up fast.
What we built
We fixed delivery, then built a lightweight sales system around it on infrastructure D2 Emerge already owned:
- A sending address that reaches the inbox. Sales email moved to a proper sending domain with SPF, DKIM and DMARC authentication in place, so the same HTML emails now land where prospects read them.
- The Sales Cockpit. A custom dashboard on Supabase and Cloudflare Workers that holds the target accounts, the contacts at each one and where every conversation stands.
- A campaign agent. It works a defined universe of 191 target companies, drafting and scheduling outreach so prospecting no longer starts from a blank page each morning.
- Reply triage. Incoming replies are sorted automatically, so the ones worth answering surface first. It saves about 6 hours a month on its own.
The Cockpit works alongside the Pipedrive CRM D2 Emerge already used, and adds about $20 a month for Supabase.
Results
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Human replies to cold email | 0 in six months | 10 strong leads in 3 months |
| Major deals from cold outreach | 0 | 4 in 3 months |
| Hours a week on prospecting and the inbox | 12 to 15 | About 5 |
That's 7 to 10 hours a week back, about a full working day, with reply triage alone covering about 6 hours a month.
What it means for you
If your cold email gets no replies, check whether it's arriving before you rewrite it. A small company doesn't need an enterprise sales stack to fix that. It needs a sending setup that reaches the inbox, a clear list of target accounts and automation that handles the repetitive work.
We build that as a fixed-price project: outbound email that reaches the inbox, wired into your CRM, a sales cockpit for your accounts and reply triage, then a modest retainer to keep it running.