How Strix surfaced 435 high qualified leads for under €1

Agency growth runs on conversations. Not cold outreach blasted at a purchased list, but the right conversations, with decision-makers at e-commerce brands who are actually in-market right now. For Strix, a Dutch digital-commerce agency that builds and scales e-commerce operations for ambitious brands, finding those people reliably was the bottleneck.

The manual alternative is what most agencies default to: someone scrolling LinkedIn, exporting a list, spending hours enriching contacts and guessing whether a CMO at a brand they vaguely recognise actually fits the profile. It's slow, expensive, and impossible to scale without headcount.

The questions leadership couldn't answer:

Which brands in our market are actively shopping for a new commerce platform or agency right now? Who are the decision-makers we should be talking to this week, ranked by fit? How much is it costing us, in time and opportunity, to find leads by hand? And what would a steady, repeatable lead flow actually look like at our scale?

The consequence of staying on the manual path wasn't theoretical. Every hour a growth hire spent on prospecting was an hour not spent on pipeline. And the leads they found weren't necessarily the right ones, just the findable ones.

What's Next built Strix an autonomous lead engine: seven live signal sources feeding one automated pipeline that captures buying signals, enriches them against company and contact data, verifies decision-maker identity, scores against Strix's ideal-customer profile, and delivers a ranked weekly digest. No manual prospecting. No per-seat tool bill that scales against you.

LinkedIn engagement intelligence is the engine's standout source. Instead of building a list and hoping it's in-market, we tap the pool of people already engaging with e-commerce content on LinkedIn, the ones reading, reacting and commenting on category posts right now. That engagement is the signal. We capture them, filter out competitors, internal staff and irrelevant profiles, then run the remainder through the pipeline. From a single engagement pool of roughly 900 people, the engine delivered 435 qualified leads, a conversion rate of around 51% from raw signal to scored, sales-ready contact.

Role change and platform intent signals round out the LinkedIn layer. A decision-maker stepping into a new commerce role has a budget conversation in their first 90 days. A brand publicly signalling a platform migration is already shopping. Both signals sit in public data, and the engine surfaces them before the competition does.

Website visitors, look-alike audiences, funding and M&A events, and manual imports complete the seven sources. Each one represents a different intent stage. Together, they mean Strix's pipeline doesn't depend on any single channel going quiet.

The cost picture is what makes the architecture genuinely defensible:

The deeper point is ownership. SaaS lead tools charge per seat and per contact: the more you use them, the more you pay. The What's Next stack is a pipeline Strix owns outright. Increasing volume doesn't increase the per-unit cost. Running it twice a week instead of once doesn't trigger an upsell conversation.

The verification layer is the piece most lead tools skip. Before any lead reaches the weekly digest, the engine confirms that the decision-maker is genuinely associated with the company it thinks they belong to. Mismatched contacts, a common failure mode when enrichment scales, are removed automatically. Sales receive only contacts they can trust.

The weekly digest is the delivery format by design. Leads arrive scored and ranked. No dashboard to log into, no manual export, no interpretation required. The list lands, and the first call goes out.