€522K of study programmes sold to US universities for Irish College Leuven.
Cold outbound to US faculty, from the scraped list to the signed programme
- Sector
- International education, residential study-abroad campus
- Based in
- Leuven, Belgium
The numbers
Jan to Apr 2025
- 7,385programmes mapped
- 4,964faculty emailed
- 477replies
- 56interested
The 2025 campaign: the new scrape and four email campaigns
2023 to 2026
- 100+campus demos
- 13US universities won
- 15programmes closed
The whole engagement: €132,000 in 2024, €274,890 in 2025 and €115,000 in 2026, from the college's pipeline
Outcome
- 170%of target in year one
Against the college's US revenue targets
- 150%of target in year two
Where they started
Irish College Leuven is a residential study-abroad campus half an hour from Brussels, with 59 rooms and thirty years of hosting university programmes. Its gap was demand from the United States, where the faculty who choose a programme's destination are spread across hundreds of universities, each already taking students somewhere else in Europe. Nobody was searching for Leuven, so the work was to find every one of them and take each conversation through to a signed programme.
What we built and ran
Stephen Mullan, now the founder of Forás, ran the US market for the college as its Head of International Programmes, part time and remote from Australia, from first list to signed contract.
US universities publish their faculty-led programmes on study-abroad portals, so we scraped them programme by programme and turned each record into a lead whose first email named the reader's own programme, its theme and its destination before it introduced the college. Each programme was a deal in HubSpot from first reply to handover, and the four-step sequences, A/B tested, ran in Lemlist and, from a fresh scrape in 2025, in Smartlead.
Every interested reply went to a Zoom demo of the campus and a draft itinerary written for that programme's subject, from international business to criminology to food science; the college then priced it, booked it and ran it.
The stack
How it ran
- Sep 2023
- The first leads and sequences live
- 2024
- First six programmes delivered
- Jan 2025
- Outreach restarts on a fresh scrape
- Feb to Apr 2025
- Three more campaigns to US faculty
- Summer 2025
- Six more programmes delivered
- 2026
- Three programmes delivered, four drafted for 2027
We had the campus and thirty years of programmes, but no way to reach American faculty at scale. Stephen built that from the other side of the world: the lists, the outreach, the demos and the contracts. Universities we had never spoken to are now bringing students to Leuven every summer.
David GrantCEO, Irish College LeuvenNeed a sales team before you hire your own? Talk to us first.
First meetings in 30 days, and no lock-in after 90 days.