Poor results for a US outbound campaign

We (Euformatics) hired CIENCE to deliver qualified leads in the area of clinical labs and hospitals in the US for genomic data analysis software. Everything seemed fine in the beginning when ramping up their knowledge about our offering even though the onboarding took longer than we were told during the sales process. Once the actual outreach started we saw very few results, only a few meetings over the course of 4 months, and costs of more than $20k. It was quite frustrating to listen to their explanations every 2 weeks during our calls about how we are just where we should be in terms of metrics (open rate of emails, connection rate on calls, etc.) even though the actual deliverables (qualified meetings) were not produced. During the sales process, their representative talked about getting 10-12 qualified meetings per month. The reality was 0.5 per month. So the gap between promises and reality was just too high.