Halden sells freight-visibility software into an industry that has been burned by software before. Their buyers were operations directors who had personally lived through at least one bad implementation, and who had learned to be sceptical of anything a vendor said about reliability.
By late 2024 the pattern was consistent enough to name. Deals reached the technical evaluation and then stalled — not because Halden lost on features, but because the buyer wanted to talk to somebody who had already made the switch and survived it. Marketing had two customer references on file. Sales sent every serious prospect to the same two people.
“We were rationing our own customers. There were maybe three people we could call, and we were spending them one deal at a time.”
Halden sent a list of eleven names. Outworks handled the outreach, the scheduling and the rescheduling, and ran a structured hour with each customer who said yes — seven of them in the first two months.
Each interview produced a full story film, a set of social cuts, two objection-crusher clips aimed at the specific doubts Halden's reps kept hitting, a written case study with a one-page version for the sales deck, and a set of pull-quote cards. Every asset went back to the customer for approval before Halden's team ever saw it.
The clips were then tagged by objection and dropped into a shared library, so a rep facing a question about migration risk could find the customer who had already answered it rather than improvising.
Two quarters after the first stories went live, Halden's average sales cycle had moved from 94 days to 61. The reference call did not disappear entirely, but it stopped being a prerequisite — it moved to the end of the process, for the deals that genuinely needed it, rather than sitting in the middle of every one.
The written case studies became the third most visited section of the site. Marketing stopped budgeting a week per case study.
“The video does the reference call's job before the first meeting. Our customers get their afternoons back, and our reps stop waiting on calendars.”
Thirty-minute call. Bring your customer list and two stalled deals.
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