How Power Digital Marketing Grew Opportunities 35% With Three Fewer SDRs

When three SDRs left Power Digital Marketing, Justin Wells did something most RevOps leaders wouldn't. He didn't replace them.

Then he watched the pipeline.

SQLs and opportunity creation climbed 35% year over year. Revenue from demand generation rose about 27%. Win rates held. Fewer people, more pipeline.

It wasn't a fluke. It was a bet Justin had been making for a while: the best SDR team is one that never has to prospect.

"Every SDR team I've ever talked to has always said prospecting is the worst part of the job, the part they hate."

So he stopped asking his reps to do it. What he built instead is a prospecting machine that runs before anyone logs in.

3,4000 accounts and a guessing game

Every SDR at Power Digital carries close to 3,400 named accounts. Every morning opened with the same question: which of these do I work today? Answering it took about three hours, before a single call went out.

Worse, the answer wasn't always right.

Power Digital is a growth marketing consultancy that prices based on how big a client is. About 65% of its clients are direct-to-consumer, where size shows up in estimated revenue, Instagram following, and whether there's a TikTok shop. General B2B databases guess badly at all three.

"We'd find a $100 million brand on [another enrichment provider], and we'd talk to them and they'd only do $8 million a year," Justin said.

Reps burned their mornings picking targets, then their weeks on brands that could never afford Power Digital. Better-fit accounts sat buried further down the list. And with outbound split across a patchwork of sequencing tools, even the good targets took extra clicks to reach.

Moving to one platform, and one big bet

Justin's first move was consolidation. He moved the team onto Apollo for sequencing and enrichment, replacing the patchwork.

Data was the deciding factor. Apollo's D2C firmographics held up where the old provider's didn't, so reps could finally tell a real $100 million brand from a rumored one.

Deliverability was getting worse across the board, so Justin made a call that looked contrarian at the time. He pushed the team off email-first outreach and onto cold calling, using Apollo's verified mobile numbers.

But the phone only fixed half the problem. Calls need targets, and picking targets still ate the morning.

Automating the part reps hated

Justin's team built an auto-prospector on Apollo's agents and data. It ingests the company's TAM, reads every account a rep owns, and filters for three things: the account is in TAM, it sits in a prospecting stage, and no one has touched it in 90-plus days (Power Digital's window for re-engaging dormant accounts).

From there, it finds decision makers in the right persona and checks whether they already exist in Salesforce. If they don't, it creates and enriches the contact, then drops them into the correct sequence.

Three hours of research, gone. 

How mornings look now

The team meeting wraps around 8:30, a rep opens Apollo, and the prospecting is done. Tasks are built and sorted the way each rep likes to work them. From there, it's straight into calls, custom emails, and LinkedIn touches.

"All you worry about is how do I deliver the best message to these people, instead of going and finding who I should reach out to," Justin said.

The results

Justin didn't take the automation on faith. When three SDRs left, he held the seats empty and watched the numbers.

SQLs and opportunity creation grew 35% year over year, with three fewer reps. Revenue from demand generation rose roughly 27% while win rates held, so the added volume didn't cost any quality.

The phone is where it shows up. With research off their plates, each rep makes roughly 150 more cold calls a day (Apollo’s Parallel Dialer helps, too), and those calls now source 80 to 85% of Power Digital's opportunities. The bet on verified mobile numbers held, and the new mornings gave it room to run.

Now, budget that would have gone toward new hires goes into tooling instead.

Justin’s advice for other RevOps leaders

Justin's advice is simple: automate the busywork before you grow the team. Take the research off reps before you add bodies. Give them a tight, repeatable motion instead of open-ended AI and crossed fingers. And put the savings back into the stack, consolidating as tools earn it.

The auto-prospector worked for one more reason: Allan, Justin's go-to-market engineer at Apollo. The workflows Power Digital built are complex, and Justin has watched plenty of good tools die because nobody helped a team adopt them. He doesn't have time to become an Apollo expert, and he hasn't needed to.

The team isn't done building. Next up: intent signals, so each rep starts the day with the hottest accounts at the top of the list.

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