ep: Building a modern AI-based allbound engine

"We came to simon&co with a recruiting business that had been built on referrals and relationships for years. That worked, but it was capped. We had no modern outbound motion, our ATS was slowing us down, and our account managers were spending hours in LinkedIn Sales Navigator with little to show for it. simon&co didn't just plug in tools. They built us a proper allbound engine, reactivated dormant CRM data we'd forgotten about, and gave us a lead generation tool tailored to our exact ICP. A 26% reply rate on signal-based outreach speaks for itself."

— Christoffer Keppler, COO and Managing Partner @ Engineering People GmbH

About

Engineering People GmbH (ep) is a specialized recruitment and talent solutions firm serving the engineering and IT sectors across the German-speaking market. With deep domain expertise and a strong reputation built over years of customer and candidate relationships, ep had reached a point where its growth model needed to evolve. The business was running almost entirely on inbound referrals and personal networks, supported by manual prospecting workflows and an ATS (HR4YOU) that was never designed to support modern, transparent sales processes. To unlock the next stage of growth, ep needed a structured, repeatable, signal-driven commercial engine that could complement their existing strengths rather than replace them.

Challenge

ep was operating without the modern GTM foundation needed to scale proactively:

=> No prior experience with modern outbound sales tooling, leaving the team without a structured way to identify, prioritize, or engage target accounts at scale.

=> Lead generation was entirely manual, executed through LinkedIn Sales Navigator search queries by account managers, which capped output, created inconsistent data quality, and pulled senior team members away from higher-value work.

=> The existing ATS (HR4YOU) acted as a bottleneck rather than an enabler. It blocked transparent pipeline visibility and made it nearly impossible to run efficient, data-driven sales processes alongside recruiting workflows.

=> Commercial growth depended almost entirely on referrals from existing clients. There was no proactive motion to surface new opportunities, reactivate dormant relationships, or systematically work the long tail of past customers and placed candidates.

Solution

We rebuilt ep's commercial motion from the ground up with a signal-first allbound approach:

=> We designed and launched an allbound engine that retargeted existing CRM data, including past clients and previously placed talents. We identified each talent's current employer, mapped the buying center, and ran formal outreach sequences. This turned a previously dormant data asset into a high-converting outbound channel.

=> We built and executed reactivation campaigns aimed at former ep alumni now working at SMEs and IT enterprises. These warm-but-cold contacts surfaced new deal opportunities that referral-led prospecting would never have reached.

=> We designed and developed a custom lead generation tool tailored to ep's specific ICP. The tool identifies relevant target accounts, scores them, and enriches each record with live signals such as relevant job postings, company news, funding announcements, and structural changes.

=> We operationalized those signals into individualized, multichannel outreach across phone, email, and LinkedIn. Each account manager now receives prioritized accounts with the context they need to open conversations relevantly, rather than starting from a blank Sales Navigator search.

=> We integrated the new workflow alongside ep's existing ATS environment so that recruiting operations were preserved while the commercial layer gained its own clean, transparent process.

Results

=> 26% reply rate generated through signal-based outreach to retargeted CRM contacts, a step-change from the previous referral-only motion.

=> Multiple new deal opportunities surfaced through alumni reactivation campaigns within SME and IT enterprise segments, opening a revenue channel ep had not previously worked systematically.

=> 100% of account managers shifted from manual LinkedIn Sales Navigator prospecting to working scored, enriched accounts delivered by the custom lead generation tool.

=> A reusable ICP-based lead engine now feeds the pipeline daily, replacing ad hoc search queries with a structured, signal-driven account list.

Why this matters

ep's transformation illustrates a pattern we see repeatedly with established, relationship-driven SMEs: the business is healthy, the reputation is real, and the referral engine works. But referral-led growth has a ceiling, and once a company hits it, scaling further requires a different operating model, not just more effort inside the old one. The shift from manual Sales Navigator prospecting to a signal-driven allbound engine is not a tooling upgrade. It is a change in how the company decides who to talk to and why.

For recruitment and professional services firms in particular, the data that already exists inside the CRM, the ATS, and the alumni network is almost always the highest-value asset on the balance sheet that nobody is actively working. The work we did with ep shows what happens when that data is treated as a live signal layer rather than a static archive: reply rates that would be impossible cold, opportunities that referrals would never have surfaced, and a commercial engine that runs alongside (not against) the relationships that built the business in the first place.