Case Study · Professional Services Founder

From zero LinkedIn spend to 15 booked calls in 30 days.

A professional services founder came to us with deep expertise but no LinkedIn audience and no inbound pipeline. We ran our 5-Week Build & Test. Here is exactly what the data shows.

15
Calls booked in 30 days
$186.94
Cost per booked call
$2,804
Total ad spend
149K
Impressions delivered to ideal buyers
01 · The Setup

A founder with expertise. No audience. No pipeline.

The client is a professional services founder with deep domain expertise and a real point of view. What they didn't have was a LinkedIn audience, paid amplification, or inbound calls from content. We ran the full 5-Week Build & Test to build the audience and the pipeline from scratch.

What we built

A complete LinkedIn growth system. Optimized founder profile. A high-converting landing page with Calendly embedded. ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) research and targeting locked in. Five Thought Leader Ads written from the founder's expertise, not borrowed from anywhere else.

What we tested

Two campaigns running concurrently. A cold prospecting campaign targeting the founder's ICP. A retargeting campaign that picked up every engager and pushed them back toward the calendar.

Daily budget capped between $25 and $150. Manual CPC bidding. Cost-per-conversion tracked through LinkedIn's native pixel.

02 · The Timeline

Week by week. Compounding.

First booking landed three days after the prospecting campaign went live. Retargeting fired up in Week 2. By Week 4, the system was producing seven bookings in a single week.

Week 1
Launch
2
Booked calls
  • Prospecting live Apr 25
  • First booking Day 3
  • $504 spent
Week 2
Ramp
3
Booked calls
  • Retargeting added May 1
  • 3 bookings in a single day
  • $701 spent
Week 3
Optimize
3
Booked calls
  • Top creative scaled
  • Underperformers paused
  • $851 spent
Week 4
Compound
7
Booked calls
  • Retargeting pool full
  • 3 bookings in one day
  • $666 spent
Week 5
Close
$95
Cost per call (week 4)
  • Reporting window closes May 24
  • System compounding
  • 5-week test continues
03 · The Math

$2,804 in. 15 calls out.

Every number below is pulled straight from LinkedIn Campaign Manager. No averaged blends, no projections, no theoretical models. This is the raw report.

$2,804.07
TOTAL AD SPEND · 30 DAYS

Across both prospecting and retargeting. Apr 25 to May 24, 2026.

15
BOOKED CALLS TRACKED

LinkedIn pixel conversions firing on the Calendly confirmation page.

$186.94
COST PER BOOKED CALL

In a market where B2B leads routinely run $400 to $1,200 per booking.

04 · The Five Levers

Every stage engineered. Every number reported.

The same five levers we pull on every client account. Here's where each one landed for us.

01 / HOOK
The Hook
12.99%
Engagement rate

First-line CTR on every Thought Leader Ad, optimized weekly until the see-more rate held above 12%.

02 / CTR
The Click
19,366
Total clicks driven

At a $0.14 CPC. Every click landed on a page built to convert, not just inform.

03 / CONV
The Conversion
15
Calls booked

Calendly fired native on the landing page. Confirmation page pixel tracked every booking.

04 / CPM
The Cost
$18.78
Average CPM

Driven down from a starting CPM near $43 through cost-cap bidding and creative rotation.

05 / BRAND
The Asset
149K
ICP impressions delivered

Founder name and face in front of 149,062 ideal buyers. Brand compounding past month one.

05 · What It Means For You

The same system. Built on your account.

The same five levers. The same 5-week build and test. Run by the same team that drove these numbers.

The math, applied

At a $186 cost per booked call, $3,000 in ad spend yields roughly 16 booked calls in a month. Even at half that efficiency, the unit economics work for any B2B founder closing deals north of $5K.

The system, not the trick

This isn't a viral moment or a lucky creative. It's an engineered funnel with measurable inputs at every stage. Pull a lever, watch the number move. That's the entire promise of the 5-Week Build & Test.

Audience, built from zero

Beyond the 15 bookings, 149K impressions ran in front of ideal buyers who'd never heard of the founder before. Profile views, follower growth, and inbound DMs all moved up. The audience and the pipeline get built at the same time.

Repeatable, not one-off

Week 4 produced seven bookings on a smaller budget than Week 3 because the retargeting audience had compounded. The longer the system runs, the cheaper each call gets. Month one is the proof. Month six is the payoff.

06 · The Offer

5-Week Build & Test. $3,000 flat.

No retainer. No long-term commitment. The same engine that produced these numbers, built on your account.

CONTENT GROWTH PARTNER
5-Week Build & Test

Full inbound and outbound engine built and tested on your account over five weeks. You get real performance data, a clear answer on whether LinkedIn is worth investing in, and an asset that compounds either way.

$3,000 flat

No retainer. No long-term lock-in.

Book a Free Marketing Audit 30 minutes. Walk through the system on your business.
  • ICP research and targeting locked in
  • Landing page built with Calendly embedded
  • LinkedIn profile optimized for conversion
  • Thought Leader Ads launched and managed
  • Outbound DMs and connection sequences
  • Weekly reporting on all five levers
  • Real performance data after 5 weeks

Source

LinkedIn Campaign Manager. Client ad account. Creative performance report exported May 24, 2026.

Window

April 25, 2026 through May 24, 2026. 30 consecutive days.

Campaigns

Thought Leadership Engagement (prospecting) and Retargeting with Thought Leader Ads.

Verification

Anonymized CSV available under NDA on request. Every number on this page is pulled directly from the export.