Case study · HubSpot · Database reactivation
Old contacts in. Conversations out.
Coral EV's HubSpot held 2,767 contacts nobody had time to call back. Since July 28, 2026, six of them have written back asking for a call, and three of those calls have happened.
For B2B companies with a few thousand quiet CRM contacts, a sale that starts with a conversation, and a salesperson with no hours to go back through the list.
The list
Years of property managers, facility leads and developers sat in Coral EV's HubSpot. Each had taken a call, asked for pricing or traded a few emails, then gone quiet. Many had also received a four-email cold sequence in early 2025.
Nobody had the hours to go back through them one by one. Old lists also rot: when every address was checked before the first send, 517 of 2,767 failed.
What happens now
Every weekday the system picks the next contacts, reads what Coral EV and that person actually said to each other in HubSpot, and writes a short note in Alex's voice that picks up that thread. An owner at Coral EV approves or rejects each draft with one click before it can send.
Eight go out a day from a dedicated, warmed-up Coral EV address, with one follow-up seven business days later and nothing after that. A reply cancels the follow-up, pings Alex in Google Chat and copies Coral EV's owners. Alex takes the conversation from there.
Where a person stays in charge
No email reaches a prospect without a yes from Coral EV. Approvals went from 15 of 17 on the first batch in July to 33 of 35 in late September, the best on record. The usual reject is a vendor or partner mistaken for a buyer, so companies Coral EV has marked as vendors are now held back automatically.
When Alex answers someone by hand from Gmail, the system sees it in his sent mail and stops writing to that person. The system never sells. Its job ends at the reply.
What we learned
Who you write to matters more than what you write.
Two months in, the clearest lesson is about the list itself. People who had once written to Coral EV, even years ago, answered at more than ten times the rate of people who had only ever received Coral EV's emails.
We learned it when replies slowed to almost nothing in August. Every bounce was a dead address, so delivery was fine. The list order was the problem: it put people who had only opened a 2025 cold email ahead of people who had once had a real conversation. On September 9, 2026 we re-ranked 2,539 contacts so the 830 who had ever written back come first. Within a week the next 32 new contacts produced two conversations and one request to stop, with the same emails, the same address and the same eight a day.
In your CRM, the people worth writing to first are the ones who once wrote back. That is now the first thing we look for.
“I used to spend a lot of time digging through HubSpot contacts and restarting old conversations. Now the people who remember us write back, and the reply is already in my inbox when I sit down.”
For your sales lead and whoever owns your domain
Your domain.
A dedicated sending address on its own subdomain, separate from your main email. SPF, DKIM and DMARC pass, 10 of 10 on mail-tester. A month of warm-up before the first real email. Eight a day, permanently.
Bounces.
Every address is checked before it can be drafted. If bounces ever pass 5%, sending stops on its own and we are told. 8 bounces in the first 280 sends. Not one bounce message has mentioned spam or reputation.
Your CRM.
Reads the history already in HubSpot and marks each contact as sent or replied in a field of its own, so your team can see who has been written to without asking us.
Opt-outs.
Every email carries your business address and a plain way to say stop. Anyone who asks is removed at once and never written to again. Contacts with a live deal or your own customers are held back.
Your voice.
Each email can only use facts from that contact's own record and conversation. No invented history, no mass template, no two emails alike.
Your salesperson.
Every reply lands in your salesperson's inbox with a ping. The system writes first notes and one follow-up. It never carries on a sales conversation.
Where it stands
Live since July 28, 2026. Eight a day, every weekday, with Coral EV approving every draft.
No proposal or site visit yet. EV charging takes six months to a year and a half to buy, so we measure the part this system owns: replies, and the calls they turn into. Verification: a reference call with Alexander Boom, on request.
Thousands of contacts in your CRM who once talked to you and went quiet? One working session finds who is worth writing to and what it would take. You leave with a one-page pain map, hire us or not.
Or start with the free Time Back Finder.
Reply-rate split measured September 9, 2026 on the 129 contacts emailed July 28 to September 7, joining sent mail, replies and HubSpot's own email log. A genuine reply excludes auto-replies and bounces. Send and bounce counts read September 18, 2026. Reply, call and partner figures reported by Coral EV, October 2026. Coral EV named with permission, October 10, 2026.
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