“With Needle sending our outreach, CTOs started asking us for calls and for their bot report.”
Lucian Phillips
GTM & Partnerships at Centinel Analytica
8
Prospects asked for a call, an intro or their report
21%
Of prospects who connected wrote back
29%
Acceptance on their best invite copy
400+
CTOs, CIOs and CISOs invited
50
New target accounts found by their code each day
The problem
Centinel Analytica is a Berlin startup that stops scraper bots and unwanted AI crawlers, while letting trusted search and AI crawlers through. Its buyers are CTOs and heads of engineering at publishers, online shops, travel and ticketing sites. They are busy, technical, and most of them think their CDN already handles bots. The small founding team had to reach hundreds of them across Europe and the Americas, in several languages, without hiring SDRs.
What they did with Needle
Lucian Phillips launched the first campaign on his first day and approved every invite by hand. Within two weeks he moved the work into his own code on Needle’s API. Every day a job finds about 50 new target accounts through Sales Navigator search and writes the invite and follow-ups for each person. Needle sends them word for word from Lucian’s and Simeon Räthel’s LinkedIn accounts. Every lead is tagged, so they can A/B test the angle, the role and the copy. A one-day veto window lets them stop a lead before anything goes out, existing customers are skipped, and every reply flows into their own stack through a webhook. Their newest invite opens with something useful: a bot test of the prospect’s own website, and an offer to send the report.
The result
In five weeks they invited more than 800 people, over 400 of them CTOs, CIOs and CISOs. 21% of the people who accepted wrote back, and 8 prospects asked for a call, an intro to their decision-maker, or their bot-test report. The A/B tests paid off: their best invite copy got 29% acceptance, more than four times a variant they ran next to it. The report-first invite brought in half of the buying signals in its first week, and seven of the eight came from leads their code found on its own.
