# Compliance SaaS - 14 Sales Meetings in a Market Nobody Could Find

> How a compliance SaaS opened a brand-new market - 913 decision-makers found, 14 sales meetings, €36K pipeline

Source: https://sellsuccessfully.io/work/compliance-saas-new-market-14-meetings/  
Author: Wouter van de Velde, Sell Successfully

## The Challenge

The company makes compliance and inspection software. In 2026 they launched a new product for a very specific group: industrial sites where a safety failure can turn into a major accident. Chemical plants, tank storage, gas installations. A few hundred of them in the Netherlands, each with a safety system an inspector comes to check.

When the founder and I sat down, the first question was the uncomfortable one: who do you actually talk to? The person who decides is a site director or an HSE manager. They are not on any list you can buy, there was no outbound behind the launch yet, and the product page lived on a separate domain nobody had heard of.

## What We Built

I sit inside the company as their fractional go-to-market lead: outreach, website and marketing in one seat.

- A list built from the sites, not from a database. We start from the sites themselves, find the director and the HSE manager for each one, and check that the person actually works at that site before anyone writes to them.

- LinkedIn in the founder's own name. A short connection note and follow-ups about the problem each site really has, keeping its safety system current between inspections. Not a product pitch. A second lane follows up people who engage with his posts. Every name is checked against the client base first, so an existing customer never gets a cold message.

- A launch page on the main site. We moved the product off its own domain onto the main site, so it borrows the authority the company already had, and built a page that tells the story and ends in a quote request.

## Results

Every number below comes from the company's own CRM and the outreach tools, counted in October 2026. I traced each deal back to its first touch.

## Leads

- 913 decision-makers found and enriched into the CRM between March and July, at 254 companies.

- 621 LinkedIn connection requests from the founder's account, 120 accepted .

- 45 replies in the first wave alone, 16 of them marked interested.

## Meetings

- 14 sales meetings at four industrial sites: ten held so far, four more booked for the coming week.

- The biggest started with one LinkedIn message to an executive director. He replied the same day with two colleagues to talk to. Ten weeks later those two sat in the first meeting, and the deal was opened that morning. Four meetings followed in seven weeks, including a proposal and a quote review.

## Pipeline

- €36K in open pipeline across two deals: one at business-case stage, one site already signed up for an account.

- A third site is having its safety management system scanned, with a gap analysis of its procedures booked.

One thing the CRM got wrong: it filed the biggest deal under paid social, because the director had once downloaded an ebook from a 2021 ad campaign. The CRM credits the first source a contact ever had. Read the source field alone and this work is invisible.

## The Lesson

What stuck with me is how that biggest deal actually happened. The message itself didn't sell anything. The director forwarded it to two colleagues within hours, and they were the ones who sat down with us.

In a market of a few hundred sites you are not working a list. You are writing into a small room where everyone knows each other. So I write every message as if it will be forwarded, because the good ones are.