When Frederik Jakobsen and Martin Rasmussen first started Danish Lead Co., the company looked very different from what it is today.
Like many early-stage agencies, the business originally experimented with Facebook ads and traditional digital marketing before gradually realizing something important: for many B2B companies, especially in complex industries, outbound consistently outperformed paid social.
Not because ads do not work.
But because high-value B2B sales often require direct conversations with very specific decision-makers at very specific companies, something most traditional acquisition channels struggle to deliver predictably.
That realization became the foundation for Danish Lead Co.'s evolution from a small lead generation agency into what is now a fully managed outbound acquisition infrastructure company operating across private equity, healthcare, manufacturing, SaaS, financial services, aviation, renewable energy, industrial supply, and other complex B2B sectors.
Today, Danish Lead Co. has:
And at the center of nearly all of that infrastructure sits Smartlead.
This case study delves into the dynamic journey of Danish Lead Co., exploring how Frederik Jakobsen and his team navigated from traditional marketing techniques to the world of cold emailing.
We will uncover the obstacles they faced, the innovative solutions they implemented with Smartlead, and the remarkable milestones they have achieved.
Danish Lead Co. is a fully managed outbound acquisition infrastructure company helping B2B organizations generate qualified commercial conversations through AI-assisted outbound systems.
The company operates across:
and other high-value B2B industries.
When Frederik Jakobsen and his business partner Martin Rasmussen co-founded Danish Lead Co., their vision was clear: to transform lead generation through innovative methods.
With a focus on cold emailing, a strategy they discovered as more effective than traditional Facebook ads, the duo launched on a mission to help clients generate valuable leads and set up meetings with their ideal customers.
Particularly, they are working in the manufacturing, accounting, solar, and renewable energy sectors.
Initially, Jakobsen's efforts were concentrated on optimizing Facebook ads. While this approach yielded some results, it wasn't until they pivoted to cold emailing that Danish Lead Co. began to see substantial growth.
The turning point came when a client in the commercial sector expressed a need for more targeted outreach. Jakobsen decided to apply cold emailing strategies to this client's campaign, leading to impressive results that far surpassed those achieved through Facebook ads.
During Fredreik's interview with Smartlead he shared "I started, think around three years ago. Like, I think a lot of young people start with Facebook ads, and I got a few clients in a lot of different industries there and never really liked getting it to work like fantastically created okay results. Then, I like to niche down to try and help or focus on solar companies with these Facebook ads primarily. And that worked okay.
But the way that I was getting these clients was through cold email. And at one point, I was talking to one of my clients who actually wanted to go or get more deals on the commercial side. And Facebook can be tricky to really find people B2B. So I thought why not just try cold email for this client as well. Turns out it worked way better than Facebook ever had. And since then we've been wrapping up and doing it for more than 15 solar clients on and off."
From these humble beginnings, Danish Lead Co. has grown into a formidable player in the lead generation space, driven by a commitment to innovation and results.
In a recent interview, Frederik shared how broadly the agency has grown since those early solar-focused days. Today, Danish Lead Co. operates across virtually any B2B vertical where there is genuine product-market fit.
"We work in quite a few sectors to be honest, anything B2B related. We have very good results, especially in private equity and M&A, helping them source deals and founders looking to sell their business within their thesis. But also various other different types of businesses. We work with anything from industrial manufacturers, a company in the Netherlands selling duvets where we reach out to hotels, betting retailers, education, literally anything you can think of, as long as there's actually a product-market fit."
As Danish Lead Co. scaled, the company quickly realized that outbound at scale is not really about sending emails. It is about infrastructure.
The team was no longer managing a handful of campaigns. They were operating:
Their clients are not all in one box. Some are private equity firms trying to find founders before they go to market.
Some are manufacturers expanding into new countries. Some are SaaS teams chasing enterprise deals. The industries are different but the pressure is the same: outbound has to work, consistently, at scale.
And when you are running systems across that many verticals, the cracks in a platform show fast. Inbox placement drops. Reply rates slip. Domains get flagged. Most traditional outbound tools were not designed for this kind of operational weight.
Despite the promising start, Danish Lead Co. encountered several hurdles as they scaled their operations.
Danish Lead Co.'s initial platform, Instantly, could not cope with their scaling operational needs.
As the team took on more clients and campaigns, the need for a more robust management system became apparent.
Instantly's inability at that time to efficiently handle the complexity and volume of their operations resulted in significant operational bottlenecks.
Campaign organization became cumbersome, and the lack of advanced features for tracking and optimizing campaign performance created substantial inefficiencies.
Another pressing issue was the platform's inadequate system for managing out-of-office replies.
During peak times, such as summer vacations, Danish Lead Co. faced a surge in out-of-office responses.
Without an effective mechanism to address these replies, many potential leads were lost. The inability to re-engage these contacts after their return meant that valuable opportunities were being wasted, undermining the overall effectiveness of their outreach efforts.
Inaccurate email categorization hindered their ability to organize and respond to communications promptly, impacting overall efficiency.
Danish Lead Co. struggled with the platform's auto-categorization features, which often misclassified emails. This inefficiency not only slowed down their response times but also impacted their ability to manage communications effectively.
The lack of a streamlined system for sorting and prioritizing emails further compounded their challenges, leading to disorganization and missed opportunities.
As Danish Lead Co.'s operations grew, so did their need for detailed performance analytics. Their previous tools fell short of providing actionable insights into key performance indicators like email-to-lead ratios and contact-to-lead metrics. Without these crucial data points, refining their strategies and demonstrating value to clients became increasingly difficult.
The introduction of Smartlead marked a pivotal shift in Danish Lead Co.'s operations.
The platform's comprehensive features addressed the specific needs that had previously been unmet. Smartlead's advanced capabilities streamlined campaign management, improved email warm-up processes, and facilitated seamless account handling.
This transition allowed Danish Lead Co. to organize their campaigns more effectively and maintain high-performance levels across a growing client base.
One of the standout features of Smartlead for Jakobsen was the master inbox and its auto-categorization capabilities.
Initially, Danish Lead Co. faced challenges with managing out-of-office replies. However, Smartlead's ability to re-engage leads automatically after a specified period proved invaluable.
This functionality was particularly beneficial during periods of high out-of-office replies, such as summer vacations, ensuring that potential leads were not lost.
Danish Lead Co.'s transition to Smartlead proved transformative for their operations:
Several Smartlead capabilities became especially important as Danish Lead Co. scaled.
The API infrastructure allowed Danish Lead Co. to build internal systems instead of relying purely on platform-native workflows.
This enabled:
As outbound volume scaled across industries, inbox placement became increasingly important.
Smartlead enabled:
This became especially important for clients operating in high-trust industries.
Managing reply workflows across many clients and campaigns quickly becomes operationally difficult.
Smartlead’s inbox systems helped streamline:
This became increasingly valuable as Danish Lead Co. layered AI-assisted reply management systems into its outbound operations.
Morever, Smartlead's ability to re-engage leads automatically after a specified period proved invaluable. This functionality was particularly beneficial during periods of high out-of-office replies, such as summer vacations, ensuring that potential leads were not lost.
Danish Lead Co.'s transition to Smartlead, a move that proved transformative for their operations.
Several factors have contributed to Danish Lead Co.'s success with Smartlead.
The platform's reliability in handling high email volumes, over 500,000 emails per month, has been crucial in maintaining Danish Lead Co.'s operational scale.
Additionally, the ability to generate over 500 meetings for clients within the first months of using Smartlead underscores the platform's effectiveness in driving results.
The detailed performance metrics provided by Smartlead enabled Danish Lead Co.. to refine its outreach strategies continually.
By focusing on email-to-lead and contact-to-lead ratios, Jakobsen and his team were able to identify high-performing campaigns and allocate resources more efficiently.
This data-driven approach has been instrumental in achieving significant milestones, such as closing 22 new clients solely from Smartlead campaigns.
Danish Lead Co.'s success with Smartlead can be attributed to factors:
In a recent interview, Frederik highlighted just how central Smartlead's API has become to the way Danish Lead Co. now operates, to the point where it has enabled the agency to build its own proprietary operational platform on top of Smartlead.
"Back then it was things like just being able to tag email accounts and campaigns to keep track of them and separate between clients and workspaces. Today, pretty much everything goes through the API and through our own operational system that we've built. We have all of that data in Supabase, and we can access it through Claude or ChatGPT as well."
The agency now has more than 10,000 email accounts connected inside Smartlead, a scale that would be unmanageable without deep API access. As Frederik put it:
Frederik highlighted the value of Smartlead's Slack-based support channel, which his team now relies on for fast issue resolution.
"It's definitely helped , we have a Slack channel now and that's already proving super helpful. When there's something we need help with or need fixed, we get help super fast."
He also praised the broader Smartlead content ecosystem:
"You do put out super valuable content. Some of the office hours are genuinely gold, and a lot of what you share there is also on the blog. In general it's super helpful. Also the help articles, you can find pretty much all your questions documented if you just search them up. And now you have the AI support chat as well, which should find most of it in there."
One of the most recent additions to Danish Lead Co.'s workflow is SmartProspect, Smartlead's built-in email finder. Frederik and his team have integrated it as the first verification layer before passing contacts through other tools like LeadMagic.
Danish Lead Co. also uses SmartDelivery, specifically the spam testing feature, as a reactive diagnostic when campaign performance dips.
"We use the spam tests when we can see reply rates slipping. It's primarily to check if the copy might be triggering spam for some reason, not so much on the email account or domain level, but more on whether the copy is likely triggering spam. It lets us test and iterate in that way."
The agency also runs LinkedIn DM campaigns via Aimfox, and has begun replacing some of their Make (formerly Integromat) automation scenarios with Smartlead's native workflow builder.
"The workflow builder has actually taken over a few Make scenarios. We run LinkedIn campaigns on Aimfox as well. Setting it up was super easy, when we receive a positive reply, it gets sent to the right client workspace in Aimfox .
One of the biggest differentiators for Danish Lead Co. is the complexity of the industries where the systems operate successfully.
Many outbound providers focus primarily on:
Danish Lead Co. increasingly operates in markets where:
Examples include:
Not every outbound campaign is about booking a demo. For private equity and M&A firms, the goal is something far more nuanced: getting the right founder to pick up the phone.
For firms like Merritt Healthcare Advisors and Agency Futures, Danish Lead Co. built outbound systems designed to generate consistent founder conversations and surface off-market deal flow opportunities that would never appear on a marketplace.
The foundation of these systems was Smartlead's cold email infrastructure, which allowed the team to run highly targeted outreach at scale without compromising deliverability or sender reputation.
Merritt Healthcare Advisors saw 46 qualified founder conversations generated within the first 60 days. That eventually scaled to an average of 13 or more qualified founder conversations every single week.
Agency Futures secured their first sell-side mandate within 60 days of launching and now consistently averages 8 off-market founder conversations per week.
These results did not come from blasting a list. They came from nuanced founder outreach, high-trust messaging, careful deliverability management, and highly targeted prospecting built around the specific type of founder each firm wanted to reach.
Manufacturing is an industry where most companies still rely on referrals and trade shows to generate new business. Danish Lead Co. showed that a well-built outbound system can change that entirely.
For Deltex BV, a Dutch textile manufacturer expanding into Germany and the wider DACH region, the team built a deliverability-first outbound system targeting retail chains, hospitality groups, and independent retailers across the region.
Within under two months, 94 qualified buyer conversations had been generated. The demand outpaced what the sales team could handle, and Deltex made the rare decision to pause campaigns entirely while they hired additional sales capacity to keep up.
SOFi Paper Products had a similar experience, generating 34 RFQs within two months, including conversations with procurement teams at Four Seasons and 7-Eleven.
Healthcare outreach is one of the most demanding environments for outbound. Trust is non-negotiable, compliance matters, and the same message rarely works across different audience types.
For BeyondMed, Danish Lead Co. built outbound systems spanning healthcare providers, employer partnerships, and wellness networks. Managing reply workflows across such varied audiences required the kind of centralised inbox management and reply categorisation that Smartlead's master inbox makes possible. Over the course of the partnership, more than 1,200 provider leads were generated. Weekly booked meetings grew from around 3 to 4 per week up to around 20 per week, while close rates remained exceptionally strong throughout.
The challenge was never just volume. The messaging had to speak differently to healthcare providers, employers, HR decision-makers, and wellness operators, each with different priorities, language, and buying processes, while maintaining relevance and trust across every audience.
For SaaS and fintech companies, outbound is often about reaching enterprise buyers who are hard to find through inbound alone. Danish Lead Co. built systems focused on enterprise prospecting, account-based outreach, and multi-touch orchestration for clients in these spaces.
Grasp.gg generated $72,000 in new ARR within two months and sustained more than 10 demos per month for over 13 consecutive months, making it one of the most consistent long-term outbound programmes Danish Lead Co. has run. Appointwise generated 104 qualified meetings within 90 days and acquired 25 new clients off the back of those conversations.
Voila Insurance needed to reach financial institutions at scale. The outbound system generated meetings with institutions collectively serving hundreds of banks and credit unions, and the first deals closed within 60 days of launch.
Today, Danish Lead Co. operates much closer to a software-enabled outbound infrastructure company than a traditional cold email agency. Rather than manually managing campaigns inside a platform interface, the team has built internal systems and workflows on top of Smartlead's API infrastructure. This includes:
This operational layer allows Danish Lead Co. to manage outbound systems across a large number of industries and campaign types while maintaining high inbox placement and operational consistency.
Instead of treating outbound as isolated campaigns, the company treats outbound as a continuously evolving acquisition infrastructure layer.
Campaigns are constantly adjusted based on reply behavior, conversion quality, deliverability signals, inbox performance, meeting quality, ICP fit, and downstream sales outcomes. This creates a significantly more adaptive system than traditional outbound workflows.
Smartlead's impact on Danish Lead Co.'s business has been profound, with several notable achievements:
Furthermore, Frederik also shared several specific examples of results generated recently for clients through Smartlead:
Exceptional long-term reply rates. For some clients where Danish Lead Co. has been running Smartlead campaigns for a year and a half or more, the agency averages just 35 emails per positive reply, a metric Frederik described as "unheard of" and comparable to what email outreach yielded back in 2010.
"For those clients we've generated literally thousands of personal replies."
Rapid ramp for a new client. A client onboarded just three days before the interview had already generated 30 leads and their first meetings, outperforming that client's own prior cold email results by roughly 100x.
$240,000 ARR in 60 days. A client in investor relations closed three to four deals within their first 60 days, resulting in $240,000 in ARR from signed contracts, all generated through Smartlead.
Looking ahead, Frederik Jakobsen envisions continued growth and innovation for Danish Lead Co., driven by their partnership with Smartlead.
The agency is focused on expanding their reach into new industries and geographical markets, leveraging Smartlead's capabilities to maintain their competitive edge.
Future plans include exploring advanced features and analytics offered by Smartlead to further optimize lead generation strategies.
Jakobsen is particularly interested in enhanced metrics and performance-tracking tools that can provide deeper insights into campaign effectiveness and client ROI.
and toward:
The companies that win long-term will likely not be the ones sending the highest volume.
They will be the ones operating the most adaptive, trustworthy, and infrastructure-aware outbound systems.
For Danish Lead Co., Smartlead has become a core operational layer powering that evolution.
And as outbound becomes increasingly technical, infrastructure-heavy, and AI-assisted, that partnership will likely continue becoming even more important.
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Founder, StackOptimise
Smartlead's combination of automation, unlimited inboxes, and easy campaign management has completely transformed how we run cold email campaigns.
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Founder, Cold Email Hackers
We have about 15 companies and we use Smartlead for all of them.
Founder, DutchSave Media
One of the things I love about using Smartlead is the deliverability feature. If they landed in the bounce or spam folders, we could resolve this quickly.
Co-Founder, Growth Today
I want to continue to use Smartlead to make operations more seamless - the plan is to bring more clients here and build more SOPs.
Founder, FueltoFly
Smartlead listens to the agencies and customers and builds according to what people want, that has really made things easier for us.
Founder, OutboundSync
We build an infrastructure product, and OutboundSync communicates with Smartlead itself. I love the webhook and API. They're really well done and keep getting better.
Founder, Axoleads
With SmartDelivery, you can put all of that in the hands of the tool. It ensures your emails land in inboxes, and by running a simple test, you can see if you're hitting the mark.
Founder, Claygen
Deliverability is the cornerstone of cold email outreach. You could have the best email copy in the world, but if no one is seeing it, it's useless. I really love the feature where you can actually give client accesses to your clients.
Co-Founder, Cymate
I do not want to switch to another software. Pick a solution you trust, stick with it, and keep refining your copy.
CMO, Avalanche Capital
Managing large volumes of emails through multiple inboxes used to be a logistical nightmare. With Smartlead, the process is seamless. We book thousands of discovery calls through cold emails. These campaigns are generating leads at a scale we never thought possible.
Founder, Growth Engine X
We came for the unlimited inboxes, and we stayed for the API. 1.5M cold emails/month, 7,767+ inboxes managed.
Head of Community & Ecosystem, TxtCart
You cannot replace having 10,000 touches with potential clients. When you have that much distribution and reach, you really start to see incredible results. The simplicity of Smartlead made all the difference. It doesn't require you to be a technical wizard.
Founder, Hyperke
Smartlead has been a game-changer for us. It increased our appointment volume, improved ease of use, and offered valuable features. 80% increase in appointments/month, peak of 276 appointments in a single month.
Founder, Kinetyca
Smartlead has been our cold email backbone from day one. The platform evolves constantly, keeping pace with how deliverability and personalization need to work today. 21% overall reply rate, $175K in 4 months for multiple B2B clients.
Founder, Reachflow
Smartlead is centered around deliverability and constantly evolving. Their API is not like any other platform. Smartlead covers all our needs. The focus on core features like deliverability and API integration is unmatched.
CEO, Halfwarm
Our approach to crafting conversational emails led to reply rates that many of my peers thought were unattainable.
Co-Founder, letstrike
We've grown on zero capital, zero marketing, purely cold emailing - and that's the story we love to tell. The best approach is no approach if you can't handle domain meltdown. The second best is something like Smartlead that's built from the ground up for deliverability at scale.
Founder, Fenixtal
Smartlead's white-labeling and automation let us punch above our weight. The 12M euros sales potential? That's what happens when you combine human creativity with Smartlead's precision.
Co-Founder, Digital Creativs
Nine out of 10. Ninety percent of our clients are on Smartlead unless they come in with an existing setup. That's the default.
Co-Founder, BuildingReach
At the end of the day, you have to take a bet on one tool or another. It was a no-brainer taking that bet on Smartlead. We had to even turn down the volume of our marketing campaigns - Smartlead was capable of driving more volume than our sales team was able to fulfill.
Founder & MD, Prospectiv
Since starting the business in January of this year, we've already generated $200K in sales exclusively from cold email. Smartlead has been central to our operations and has exceeded our expectations.
Founder, Growthlynk
There's so much stuff built on top of it. I would be dead if I had to rebuild it with another tool. I can manage hundreds of senders easily. I can send hundreds of thousands of emails.
Founder, Corebits
The platform's HubSpot integration, real-time Slack updates, and advanced campaign customization have been game changers for our business and our clients'.
Founder, Apex Ascension
From day one, we've never used anything else.
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