Case Study: Building a Prospecting Pipeline That Fills Your Calendar
The company
A Chinese auto parts manufacturer with a strong product and no systematic way to find overseas buyers. Their sales team was good at closing — but spent 70% of their time hunting for contacts instead of selling.
The problem
No pipeline. The sales team scraped LinkedIn manually, attended one show a year, and relied on inbound from a stale website. Reps were spending 4 of every 5 working hours on research and data entry.
What we did
1. Market mapping. Identified 1,300 distributors, wholesalers, and garage chains across the Middle East and Africa — markets with aging fleets and booming aftermarket demand.
2. Signal-based scoring. Ranked by import history, catalog activity, and fleet exposure. The top 300 became the priority list.
3. Handoff to sales. Reps received a scored list with company intelligence and suggested first messages. Their job became conversation, not research.
The results
- Sales team’s prospecting time cut from 70% to 20%
- 17 conversations with active importers in 10 weeks
- 3 container orders within 5 months
- Reps now spend their time on what they’re actually good at
(source: Polalead internal campaign data, 2023–2025. [ORIGINAL DATA])
For the complete method behind this pipeline, read the manufacturing lead generation guide, or have it run end to end through our manufacturing lead generation service.
The takeaway
You don’t need more salespeople — you need to point your salespeople at the right companies. The prospecting service builds that pipeline, or the engine runs it end to end.