tl;dr: Mattermark can help you find more of your best customers, quickly.
What group is marketing’s most important partner within a company? Most people say sales. But while it’s true that the sales and marketing relationship is critical, customer success is an equally important partner. Let me explain why.
As Tomasz Tunguz points out, the role of the marketing team within a SaaS business has broadened from simply building awareness and creating interest, to guiding customers much deeper into the funnel.
In today’s environment, it’s customer success that helps marketers accomplish that task. This seems counter-intuitive as we often think of customer success entering the customer journey post-sale — helping users get more out of the software to grow recurring revenue and identify upsell opportunities.
Through this work though, they do something else that is extremely important: they identify potential high-growth customers – those customers who add the most value to the business. DigitalOcean is one such company that defines and seeks out these special groups of customers. Their Customer Success team uses Mattermark to track real-time information to segment potential VIP customers. Here’s their take on it:
“From the moment a customer signs up to DigitalOcean, our Customer Success Engineers can see how much funding they’ve raised, who their investors are, and how quickly they are growing in terms of company size and social media presence. We complement this private company data with a few internal product usage metrics to predict end of month spend.”
That’s pretty forward-thinking, and I’m going to use DigitalOcean’s thinking to help fill my sales funnel. Because the only thing better than identifying existing high growth VIP customers is finding more of them to sell to.
Today we’re going to use firmographic data from Mattermark to do that. Let’s pretend that a real company called Zscaler has been identified by our customer success team as a VIP customer. What should we in marketing and sales do with that information to help us fill the funnel?
Find Similar Companies
The first and easiest thing to do is simply find companies that are similar to Zscaler. In this example, we’ve found nine new companies in Mattermark for sales to prospect to. In this case marketing doesn’t even need to get involved. The sales team can simply get to work That means better, cheaper leads.
Run Queries On Criteria That Describe Your VIP Customer
Continuing the Zscaler example, marketing wants to find a larger set of companies to qualify and send to SDRs for contact, so let’s take a look at some other compelling information about this company.
We know that IoT, Security and Cloud Computing are hot sectors that Zscaler plays in. We also know that companies in these sectors with over $100 million in funding tend to be large enterprise customers for us.
With about one minute of effort, we come up with a list of 107 companies that immediately hit our qualification criteria. Our SDRs are off and running.
Expand Intelligently
Perhaps we want to test the waters on other industries to expand our market. So let’s get rid of the industry filter, lower our funding threshold to $25 million to include all customer sizes, and set the employee count to a minimum of 100 to get rid of any dogs before they appear in our results. This gives marketing almost 3,000 companies to market with highly targeted campaigns.
Find The Up-And-Comers
At one point in time, Zscaler was a Series A company on it’s way to its next round of funding. So while these types of companies may not be ready to buy, they will be by Series B. It’s minimal cost and effort for marketing to add these companies to their nurturing drips so that when the time comes for purchase, they are warm and qualified.
These are just a few examples of what can be accomplished when you look towards your best and most profitable customers to find new ones. In today’s hyper-competitive SaaS world, quantity wastes sales time and quality makes them rock stars.
Introducing Self-Service Pricing + Contact Info Beta
We are happy to share that we’ve rolled out self-service pricing plans, and Mattermark is now easier for sales and marketing teams to adopt than ever before. Sign up for 14 days free (no credit card required).
Don't just take our word for it.
Use data to find more qualified customers today.
