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Case Study · Sports Equipment Platform
A market with no database, so we built one
GearLocker sells equipment management software to US school athletic departments. Athletic directors and coaches don't exist in Apollo or ZoomInfo. So we scraped and enriched every school in America into a proprietary dataset, then worked it state by state across email, LinkedIn and direct mail.
66,000
US schools in the proprietary database
71,502
Emails sent, all time
31,300
Athletic directors, coaches and principals contacted
668
Unique replies
194
Interested leads
0.5%
Bounce rate across the whole history
The challenge
You can't buy a list that doesn’t exist.
No commercial database covers school athletic departments with any depth. The contacts exist on 66,000 individual school websites, in different formats, behind different systems. For most vendors that makes the market unreachable at scale, which is exactly why it was worth solving.
The second problem was timing: school buying follows budget cycles and sports seasons. An evergreen, always-on approach had to be paired with state-by-state sequencing and seasonal re-engagement.
The strategy
Build the data asset, then never stop working it.
Proprietary TAM databaseEvery US school scraped from NCES and state athletic association sources, then AI-enriched: roughly $50 in API costs where data vendors quote thousands.
Role-level contact discoveryAthletic directors, football and multi-sport coaches, and principals identified per school: 8,189 high school and 707 college football coaches mapped.
Lead scoringSchools scored by enrollment, sports programs and student information system, so campaigns start with the highest-value districts.
State-by-state evergreen campaignsIllinois, Tennessee, California, Georgia, Ohio, Arizona, Texas and onward. Each state launches, learns and feeds the next.
Three channels, one systemCold email, LinkedIn outreach from real team profiles, and direct mail postcards for finished leads, all coordinated to avoid double-touching.
HubSpot integrationReplies, demos and pipeline synced into GearLocker's HubSpot so the founders see everything in one place.
Seasonal re-engagementBudget-cycle timing: athletic directors get re-engaged when next year's equipment budgets open up.
Real sender identitiesMailboxes mapped to real team members so reply threads keep continuity from first touch to demo call.
Results
Seven months from launch to staffed-up demo flow.
Monthly sending volume and interested replies from the Email Bison workspace, December 2025 through June 2026. March and April both delivered 44+ interested athletic departments.
Emails sent per monthInterested replies
| Top campaigns by interested leads | Emails sent | Replies | Interested | Positive share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ADs California | 3,581 | 60 | 31 | 52% |
| ADs Illinois | 3,862 | 63 | 26 | 41% |
| ADs Ohio | 6,773 | 69 | 21 | 30% |
| ADs High Schools Reengagement | 9,638 | 78 | 12 | 15% |
| Principals California | 5,342 | 43 | 12 | 28% |
How it unfolded
From scraper to staffed pipeline.
Phase 1
Months 1–2
Build the asset
The full school TAM scraped, enriched and scored while infrastructure warmed. The database is GearLocker's property, a moat no competitor can order from a vendor.
66,000 schools mappedPhase 2
Months 3–5
Launch state by state
Evergreen campaigns rolled across states with sport-specific personas. Volume scaled past 16,000 emails a month with bounce held near zero.
44 interested in MarchPhase 3
Months 6+
Scale and staff
Demo flow grew to the point GearLocker hired a dedicated team member to manage replies and book demos with the co-founders. Re-scraping and enrichment keep the database current.
Dedicated reply manager hiredIn their words
“LongRun built our outbound infrastructure end-to-end and we now get qualified leads daily and a calendar full of meetings with decision-makers.”
Selling into a market with no database?
That's not a dead end, it's a moat waiting to be built. Book a strategy call and we'll scope your TAM.