Context
Lisa Chen is a demand generation manager at a B2B marketing automation platform serving e-commerce and retail companies. Her company targets marketing directors, CMOs, and growth leaders at mid-market online retailers with 100-500 employees.
However, Lisa was not alone as many B2B marketers experience a constant nightmare with data quality. The campaigns were highly targeted, using a mixture of channels including email, LinkedIn and direct mail. However, they had a messy contact database. Data was collected from trade show leads, webinar registrations, purchased lists, and manual research. Data accuracy hovered around 60%. Email bounce rates averaged 25%. Phone numbers led nowhere.
The larger frustration was an incapacity to grow into new accounts in a systematic way. Lisa would research and discover 50–100 target companies that she felt were going to be a good fit. However, weeks were spent identifying who to approach at any of those businesses. By the time she created a mailing list, half of her targetswere approached by competitors.
It was an aggressive Q3 goal set by her VP of Marketing: 2,000 verified contacts with 500 targets accounts. The way Lisa was working now—doing research manually over LinkedIn, company websites and broken tools—wasn’t going to scale. She required a complete, high-fidelity database that could provide instant results.
Introduction
Lisa discovered SignalHire’s Database while researching account-based marketing solutions. The platform’s 850M+ verified profiles and 30M+ company database promised to solve both her data quality and coverage challenges. After signing up for a trial, she immediately saw how it could transform her targeting precision.
Her objectives were simple: Establish a complete database of verified contacts at target accounts, eliminate data quality issues destroying campaign ROI, find multiple stakeholders in each target company and allow for authentic account based marketing with full account coverage.
Following this assessment of alternatives, Lisa ultimately landed on SignalHire based on these three key factors. Systematically, based on the company database, they were able to highlight potential target accounts. Individual profile data covered stakeholders in each account. Data accuracy helped protect sender reputation through real-time verification.
Solution
SignalHire Database was what Lisa required. The platform offered not just the macro-level account intelligence but also the micro-level contact precision.
Starting with the company database as the most important feature, Using SignalHire, with over 30M+ company profiles, Lisa was able to find perfect ideal target accounts by industry, revenue, employee count, tech-stack and growth indicators. Instead of randomly, she could strategically build target account lists.
It was able to filter with granularity at both company and individual level. Lisa could use a search tool to find companies that fit her ideal customer profile, and then search directly for marketing decision makers in those companies. It guaranteed she never overlooked any important stakeholders as they followed a top-down approach.
The bulk enrichment of their contacts saved them weeks of work. Lisa was able to tag a maximum of 1000 contacts simultaneously and also fetch their data altogether. It took thirty minutes instead of the three weeks it used to take her team. The platform fetched emails, phone numbers and work profiles for all in seconds.
Lead Lists for ABM: The systematic organization of your accounts So Lisa made lists based on their industry, company size, and role in the buyer committee. Target accounts were represented by several contacts reflecting different stakeholders. This drove cross-threaded multi-threaded behavior across buying committees.
Campaign performance was safeguarded through real-time data verification. SignalHire gave instant validation for emails and phone numbers with 95% accuracy. Lisa saw her email deliverability increase from 75% to 94% Her sender reputation improved. Her campaigns actually reached decision-makers.
Manual data entry was no more, thanks to one-click CRM integration. SignalHire has exported full account and contact details right into HubSpot then and there. Profiles transferred for contact, job title, and social: Free All of a sudden, Lisa’s marketing automation platform had data that was clean, complete and fully compliant!
Because Lisa’s database was updated automatically hundreds of times a day by all the professional networks, it was always up to date.” SignalHire managed to catch it when contacts changed jobs. The names reflected reality when a company changed its name or was bought. Will no longer campaigns be sent to people who left the company months ago.
Process
Lisa began with a laser-targeted campaign of 100 e-commerce corporations within the fashion and apparel vertical. Here’s her systematic approach.
First, she identified target accounts using SignalHire’s company database. Then, she narrowed the data set down to e-commerce companies in the fashion/apparel industry, 100-500 employees, annual revenue between $10M-$100M, and that showed that growth would likely mean spending on marketing technology solutions. There were 347 companies that matched the search term.
Lisa then filtered through the 300+ accounts to identify her most ideal target accounts to the tune of 100 based on company profiles. Her focus was on firms using legacy marketing tech, with solid growth trends, and in major metro markets where her firm had customer success capacity.
This is a master Lead List she put together → Q3 Fashion E-commerce ABM Campaign. During the process, she built out this list of 100 target companies. The next most important thing was finding the right people at each of those companies.
For every target account, Lisa had to contact several members of the buying committee. At her 100 target companies, she looked up CMOs, marketing directors, marketing operations managers, and VP of growth. Across her target account list, SignalHire returned 387 matching contacts.
She created Lead Lists by role-based title that included categories like “Fashion CMOs,” “Fashion Marketing Directors,” “Fashion Marketing Ops,” and “Fashion Growth Leaders.” By segmenting each stakeholder role, this enabled our messaging to each be uniquely personalized while also orchestrating timing amongst the buying committee.
SignalHire bulk enriched all 387 profiles with verified contact data. The email identification was available for 91% of the contacts. Phone numbers for 82%. Each profile contained extensive information: current position, time in position, employment history, social profiles, and company info.
SignalHire’s one-click integration enabled Lisa to export each segment effortlessly into HubSpot. All of the contact information and company details, as well as buying committee relationships, passed over just fine. She now had account verification and full coverage of accounts in her marketing automation platform.
She used SignalHire’s company insights to inform the messaging of her campaigns. Her team was able to create relevant value props based on company size, tech stack, and growth stage info that emerged from the dataset. She had an idea of the companies that had competitor solutions and could directly seek the switching concerns.
Using the Lead Tracker, Lisa unveiled which target accounts were already coming to visit them on their website. It was this intent data that enabled her to prioritize the outreach sequence. Immediate personalised engagement was given to accounts showing interest.
In just over a month, Lisa rolled out a tactical ABM campaign. CMOs were sent content with thought leadership around scaling e-com marketing. Tactical guides on automation for directors Integration and implementation resources went to operations managers. The right content for the right stakeholder at the right time.
Outcomes
Lisa said, The results surpassed everything I could have imagined. She researched 2,247 contacts from 523 target accounts into a verified database over 90 days. She surpassed her goal of hitting 2,000 contacts at 500 accounts with 95% data accuracy.
Campaign performance improved dramatically. From 75% email deliverability, we jumped to 94%. Drop in bounce rates from 25% to 6%. More emails reached decision-makers. More decision-makers engaged with content.
387 contacts engaged with campaigns beyond her initial target list. That equals a 17% engagement rate within buying committees. Prior campaigns with her: 6-7% engagement. Finally, to provide more balance, it was the combination of better targeting along with verified data that tipped the scale.
Lisa’s team successfully set 89 meetings with target accounts. We ended up with 62 meetings resulting in product demos. Twenty-eight demos transformed into qualified pipeline opportunities. Closed fourteen new customer opportunities, landing $580,000 of ARR
Time savings proved equally valuable. Over a minimum of a two week period, we would then extract and build the database infrastructure The minimum amount of time to build our actual database was 4 weeks. Lisa cut that down to 2 days. Her team removed the need to do repetitive manual research that spans multiple sites and LinkedIn. SignalHire database provided everything in one place and verified with confidence level.
This led to the ABM strategy being evolved into account coverage. In the past, Lisa was at 1-2 contacts per target account. Using SignalHire, she averaged 3.8 contacts per account. This made it possible to reach out to the true buying committee in a multi-threaded manner, as opposed to single-threaded outreach.
DevOps best practices put the critical data quality headaches to rest. No more hours wasted cleaning bounce lists for marketing operations. Sales were no longer complaining about poor contact data. The entire go-to-market team was working off a single source of truth.
Organizing in a systematic way bolstered campaign coordination. Account-level orchestration with Role-based Lead Lists for personalized messaging Lisa had full visibility into account engagement across all stakeholders. No more fragmented visibility.
Soon, Lisa branched into eight vertical markets in the span of six months. She created specific databases for each vertical, including almost all the accounts. Year over year her qualified pipeline increased 4.3x.
Results that were as transformative for sales teams creating prospecting databases as they were for recruiters sourcing niche technical talent. The right data, in the right places drove performance in each function.
The Verdict
Data quality is the bedrock of good marketing and Lisa discovered this the hard way Her journey from a bad data ridden marketer to a full ABM practitioner with account intelligence, driven by SignalHire’s Database.
She was never just about the tech behind her success. She spent time articulating what her ideal customer profile was (and some exact target account criteria). Under her organization, each of which included sorting contacts by role and function of the buying committee. She did messaging on what is relevant to each stakeholder. The data in the database was correct or complete, but Lisa’s marketing strategy converted it into a sale.
Lisa has three recommendations about data quality for the other marketers who might have the same data quality challenges. Use the company database to filter and find target accounts systematically before moving onto finding contacts. Create role wise Lead Lists to facilitate and coordinate buying committee approach This means exporting directly to your marketing automation platform and getting rid of the friction between keeping data up to date.
SignalHire’s Database gave Lisa the foundation for scalable, effective account-based marketing. Her manual research is eliminated. Her data quality issues are solved. Her pipeline is stronger than ever.
Start your free trial today and transform your marketing database into a strategic asset.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What makes SignalHire the best database?
A: SignalHire offers a large and readily usable B2B contact database. Verified emails; deployed 850M+ profiles in real time; and designed talent sourcing features to make outreach the simplest to date.
Q: Can I find contacts for niche industries and roles?
A: Absolutely, we specialize in the niche professionals across all sectors. If you are looking for literally anyone, you can narrow down searches by role (e.g. account executive, marketer, or founder) to get closer to the sales contact details you are searching for.
Q: How accurate is the sales contact data?
A: 95% of all contacts are instantly checked and validated. It enhances your data with accurate information and reduces the chances of wrong outreach. There are email addresses for 90% of us and phone number available for 80%.
Q: Is there a free way to test the database?
A: We offer free monthly credits to new users to try out our platform. This allows startups and teams in expansion mode to prospect for the appropriate contacts.
