Case study
How ThinkPal took its reply rate from 2% to 7.4% on Upwork
A performance-marketing agency rebuilt prospecting on Vollna filters and proposal templates. Same team, same profiles: 3.7× the reply rate, and contracts won went from 5 to 31.
Overview
ThinkPal runs paid-search and performance-marketing campaigns for SaaS, e-commerce, and fintech clients, and has earned over $500K on Upwork. Finding the right clients there ate the team's billable hours.
The challenge
Before Vollna, strategists manually sorted hundreds of postings to separate “$50 Google Ads budget” jobs from companies with six-figure ad spend, then wrote every proposal from scratch. Across 247 proposals sent that way, only 2.0% got a reply — 5 contracts in total.
“We were paying skilled strategists to handle basic data entry. It was a huge waste of talent and money. Our main problem wasn't marketing; it was the ongoing struggle to find and respond to the right clients.”
What changed
In October 2022 the team moved prospecting to Vollna. Precise filters do the sorting — keyword logic like (Google Ads OR PPC OR "Paid Search") AND (SaaS OR E-commerce OR Fintech) plus budget and client-history conditions — so only real opportunities reach the team. A library of proposal templates per service turned proposal writing from an hour into minutes.
How they run it
- Filters tuned to high-budget PPC/SEM briefs — keywords, budget floors, client spend history — with instant notifications when a match lands.
- Reusable proposal templates per service line; a strategist personalizes a few lines and sends within minutes of the job being posted.
- Everything tracked in Vollna analytics — reply rates per filter and template show what to double down on.
“Vollna's proposal templates aren't about being generic; they're about being consistent. It allowed us to package our expertise into a reusable format. We're sending better, more strategic proposals, and we're doing it five times faster.”
Results
| Metric | Before Vollna | With Vollna |
|---|---|---|
| Proposals sent | 247 | 3,073 |
| Reply rate | 2.0% | 7.4% |
| Contracts won | 5 | 31 |
With sorting and writing automated, the same team sends 10× more proposals, each one still reviewed by a strategist before it goes out.
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