How a 5-Person Recruiting Agency Replaced Its SDR With a $0.08 Per Lead Sourcing Engine

BD and sourcing engine that surfaces 2,073 qualified leads per LinkedIn influencer cycle at roughly $0.08 per qualified lead.

The problem

A boutique recruiting agency was paying an SDR $55K a year plus tool stack to produce around 300 qualified leads per quarter. The founder wanted a system that could keep running if the SDR left, and ideally hit 10x the volume without 10x the cost.

The stack

Clay for enrichment, Apollo for lookup, n8n for orchestration, Instantly for outbound, and a Claude-powered scoring step for qualification before anything hit the warm inbox.

The architecture

The expensive-but-necessary decision was separating the sourcing pipeline from the outbound pipeline. Most agencies run them as one n8n flow and every failure cascades. We split them: sourcing writes to a staging table, outbound reads from it. A bad enrichment doesn't poison the outbound queue. A bad outbound template doesn't break the sourcing.

The second decision was writing the scoring prompt with explicit rejection reasons instead of just a yes/no. That turned the "why didn't this lead qualify" question from a half-day audit into a SQL query.

The result

First two weeks: 2,073 qualified leads pulled from 4 LinkedIn influencers, scored, and routed to the appropriate outbound sequence. The SDR role was redefined around client strategy instead of manual sourcing.

The cost math

Apollo: $500/mo. Clay: $400/mo. n8n self-hosted: around $30/mo. Instantly seats: already in stack. Average cost per qualified lead: $0.08.