Diversifying Into New Markets With Cognism’s Data

A business consultancy specialising in culture change uses Cognism’s premium B2B data to:

• Consistently book meetings every month
• Increase webinar attendance by 50%
• Have five enterprise companies at RFP stage
• Generate conversations with well-established brands following webinars

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The company

Arcadia Consulting are architects of change specialising in mindset, communication, organisational IQ and leadership development. 

Arcadia works with the likes of HSBC, Amazon and JP Morgan. They help their clients design and deliver their desired culture and capabilities using the latest research from the intersection of neuroscience, anthropology and psychology to build creative and impactful solutions. 

Their work is focused in three key areas: mindset, communication and mobilising others. These solutions are designed to help clients build outstanding peak performance across their business.

The challenge

We interviewed Matt Worsdall, Principal Consultant at Arcadia Consulting about his experience with Cognism. 

How did Arcadia Consulting discover Cognism? 

“A Cognism SDR rang me via a cold call. I’d never heard of Cognism before but was immediately drawn to the idea of finding new clients through B2B lead generation technology.  After pitching the product to the wider Arcadia team, we were curious to find out more.” 

What prompted Arcadia to invest in Cognism? 

"For three reasons:

1. Time-saving 

“Until Cognism brightened our day, new business prospecting was minimal as we mostly relied on referrals and word-of-mouth.”

“When we did conduct outreach, we’d manually send emails one-by-one to a list of outdated contacts from our CRM alongside sending ad-hoc LinkedIn messages.”

“As a small team, this outbound strategy was unscalable and inefficient.”

“We were blown away by the speed at which contacts were generated within the Cognism platform.” 

2. Increasing brand awareness 

“As our marketing team was growing, we wanted a channel to help increase our brand exposure. Cognism seemed like the perfect fit; we’d be able to find the contact details of a high volume of people to send emails to. This would help us get the Arcadia name out there.”

3. Diversifying into new markets

“Most of our clients are in the financial services industry. While we were very happy with our client base, we wanted to start working with other industry verticals.” 

“Cognism’s breadth of business profiles would enable us to diversify into different markets.” 

Matt concluded: 

“As a business, we’re lucky that a lot of what we do is with existing clients and referrals. However, if you want to expand, you need to grow a team of salespeople to achieve this.” 

“We went with Cognism because we knew it was an effective, straightforward and efficient way to do new business.” 

The solution

Since the start of the year, Matt has run a sales development team consisting of two SDRs. They are the end-users of the platform. 

What is their target market? 

“Mid-level and senior managers within HR, Learning & Development and Employer Branding in EMEA and the US.” 

“As we typically target the enterprise space, most of our targeting is based on assigned industry verticals. One SDR is focused on targeting insurance and legal firms.” 

“The other SDR is dedicated to prospecting to accountancy and high-performance sports businesses. Sometimes, they will delve into other industries but these four are our primary ones.” 

What is the SDRs' typical workflow with Cognism? 

“Within the Cognism WebApp, they will refine the persona based on their target industry, job title and region. Once generated, this list of contacts will be seamlessly synced to our Salesforce CRM.” 

“As we offer a service, we’re focused on a more tailored approach to outbound by providing prospects with value-driven marketing material. The SDRs will firstly approach the prospects with a personalised email containing value-led content followed by a LinkedIn message.”

“Once the contact expresses an interest, they will ring them and discuss how Arcadia could potentially help with any specific needs they might have.” 

Matt told us more about how Arcadia’s marketing team has recently started using the platform.

“At Arcadia, marketing and sales work closely together. Marketing will create the content and sales will promote the content when communicating our services to prospects.” 

“Extracting data from Cognism is fantastic for marketing. Our marketers will build a list of key contacts in the platform and transfer the list to our Salesforce CRM using the integration. They will provide these contacts with value-led content by promoting webinars, podcasts and research pieces in an email campaign.” 

“Since using Cognism, our marketing strategy has become far more sophisticated.” 

The results

We asked Matt what success the sales team has seen since using Cognism. 

“As it's a very new team, the SDRs only started using Cognism three months ago. Within the last few months, we’re having fruitful conversations with businesses that may grow into an account for us.”

“As well as being very happy with the quality of meetings booked, we’re also now on the radar with a variety of organisations that we wouldn’t have previously worked with. We’ve achieved our goal of diversifying into new markets using Cognism’s extensive global B2B contact database.” 

“Our sales cycle can vary from 3-12 months as we primarily work with large enterprises. We’re in the RFP stage with five large businesses. If one closes, it’s not just proven ROI, we’ve paid for Cognism for several years. Investing in a data provider like Cognism is a no-brainer to us.”

Matt also told us the result Arcadia’s marketing team is most impressed with.

“We have seen a 50% increase in attendance to events. This is having huge impact on follow up meetings and opportunities including some really positive conversations with well-established brands.” 

The top reasons why Arcadia would recommend Cognism

1. Easy to work with

“From the first cold call to being a very happy customer for 18 months, the Cognism staff have been nothing short of brilliant throughout the entire relationship cycle.” 

“As a business, we preach culture and mindset. Working with Cognism mirrors us in terms of our values. The company has a fantastic culture. It’s a pleasure to be a part of.”

2. Good value for money

“One deal closed will pay for at least two years of our Cognism subscription. What you pay is what you get. It’s extremely cost-effective for us.”

3. Results!

“Despite the superb customer service, the proof is in the results. We’re steadily booking meetings through Cognism’s data and are exposing our brand to some of the most well-known organisations on the planet.”

Matt concluded:

“Cognism’s B2B data plays an integral part in our company's growth and evolution as the tech is consistently delivering results and on the expectation initially set out. It’s a must-have tool for any marketing and sales team.” 

“Overall, Cognism is our new business strategy.” 

Try Cognism’s sales intelligence solution

Over 3,000 revenue teams around the world trust Cognism to:

✅ Build qualified B2B contact databases

✅ Plan and launch their outbound campaigns

✅ Power up their social selling

✅ Meet and beat their revenue targets

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