Bright Network, a graduate careers platform, uses Cognism to:
- Improve their contact data deliverability by 10-15%.
- Improved contact data accuracy from 50% to 80%.
- Used Cognism to grow in the UK and Germany.
- Generate £903K in pipeline and £300K in closed revenue.
Teams using: Sales, Marketing
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The company
Bright Network’s careers platform connects new or soon-to-be graduates with private and public sector organisations. More than just a hiring platform, Bright Network’s student and graduate users can access career tools, advice and upskilling, as well as graduate jobs, internships and work placements.
A two-sided platform, Bright Network’s clients can access its +1 million members with messages and alerts to reach target demographics.
Bright Network’s clients are mainly in the financial services, banking, consultancy, engineering, tech, and public sectors.
The challenge
We interviewed Justin Humphreys, Head of Revenue Operations at Bright Network, to learn more about his and his team’s experience using Cognism.
What problems was Justin trying to solve? He told us:
“We had problems to solve around data. We previously used ZoomInfo, which has good US data, but we found its data in our primary growth regions, EMEA and UK, to be below par. It was clear we needed a new solution to unlock growth in Europe.”
How did you first discover Cognism?
“Cognism performed well in my comparison and analysis process using G2 and several other comparison sites. I’d also heard good things about Cognism from business development managers I’d worked with before.”
“We did a few demos as UI is also important to us. Based on those metrics, I decided Cognism would be our best option.”
How does Cognism perform against its competitors?
“We saw accuracy rates for contact information of around 50% with ZoomInfo.”
"When we tested Cognism’s data as part of the procurement process, we recorded data accuracy of around 85%."
“This has settled to around 80%, which represents a solid increase from before. Our data quality has now increased to a level where we are able to maintain it, rather than fix it. The quality and reliability of contact data isn’t something we’d be able to get from other providers.”
The solution
Who is Bright Network’s target market?
“We heavily target the UK and Germany. Our strategy is to evaluate new markets to move into, and Cognism forms a basis for that research.”
Justin added:
“The best prospects are those that hire a lot of graduates, which doesn’t always track with company size as you might expect. Small companies can hire many graduates and large companies might not hire any.”
“We focus on consultancy, financial services and banking (the core of our business), the public sector, engineering and tech. We have clients in pretty much every industry.”
How does Bright Network use Cognism?
“The main thing we use Cognism for is exporting data in bulk from Sales Navigator to Salesforce.”
“The team uses the Chrome Extension exclusively when they’re looking through LinkedIn. We have seven team members using Cognism directly and another 13-14 using the data.”
Justin shared a common workflow:
“Typically, our team uses Cognism to build a list of contacts in Sales Nav – usually it’s recent hires that they look at – which they’ll filter based on the location, the job title, and whether they’ve moved recently or not. They’ll then export those lists into Salesforce.”
“We also use Cognism to find potential accounts. When I joined Bright Network, we had no data sources for contacts or accounts. We did a massive exercise when we onboarded Cognism to find accounts we should target that weren’t in our database. We then did the same thing for contacts.”
Justin explained a further use case:
“Cognism is useful for doing quick and easy analyses of customer segments. If my CEO comes to me and says, ‘I want to know what our market share is across all the financial services companies in the UK and how many of them could we go after?”, it’s a lot simpler to answer with Cognism than it is with Salesforce.”
The results
We asked Bright Network about the results that Cognism has helped them achieve. How has Cognism helped Bright Network?
"With Cognism, we’ve generated 77 MQLs with a total pipeline value of £903k, and we’ve closed just over £300k in revenue from contacts we’ve sourced through Cognism."
On those results, Justin said:
“The biggest thing is the deliverability rate of the contacts we get through Cognism.”
How did Justin find Cognism’s onboarding process?
“The onboarding process was pretty easy because I’d used ZoomInfo before. It was a relatively similar onboarding process. The Salesforce implementation was easy.”
“The only challenging area, which I guess any company will have, is matching existing accounts and contacts to what’s in Cognism. So we did have a few duplicates created initially, just because the name was different or we didn’t have a domain in the website field when we did the initial sync.”
How has Bright Network found Cognism’s customer service? Justin said:
”I’ve been happy with the customer experience. We had some help from Cognism’s data team with some more bespoke data requests, which they did free of charge. This was really useful for some recent analyses of our total addressable market, specifically looking at UK employees.”
“The support team generally are very quick and very good at diagnosing problems.”
What are Justin’s top reasons for recommending Cognism to other organisations?
“For companies who are struggling to find leads and who they need to talk to, I definitely recommend Cognism. It’s a massive database of contacts that you wouldn’t otherwise have access to.”
On functionality, Justin added:
“The way that Cognism’s list creation and export works makes [list creation] a lot easier than going through Sales Navigator or manually searching for people.”
“For anyone who’s struggling with finding contacts or uncovering new accounts to go after, Cognism is definitely a useful tool to have.”
And Justin had some final thoughts on Cognism’s data quality:
"The data quality for the UK and Germany is better than ZoomInfo."
Try Cognism’s sales intelligence solution
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✅ Build their ICP and discover their ideal buyers
✅ Connect with decision-makers in accounts that are ready to buy
✅ Plan and launch their outbound campaigns
✅ Power up their social selling
✅ Meet and beat their revenue targets
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