Creating an ABM Strategy With Cognism

4 minute read
By: Verche Karafiloska
Sales, B2B Data

Find out how a software development firm used Cognism to:

Build better-structured sales processes.
Exceed sales targets in a difficult year.
Adopt an effective ABM system.
Recycle data into a successful marketing campaign.
Start exporting B2B data on day one

Website: www.dcsl.com
Number of employees: 280
Industry: IT Services & IT Consulting
HQ: Hampshire, UK

Teams using: Sales

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The company

DCSL GuideSmiths is a multi-award-winning software development firm.

They design and build intelligent, cost-effective and intuitive web applications, cloud systems, desktop applications and mobile apps that help streamline processes and create new revenue streams.

DCSL is the UK’s leading bespoke software development company, with an in-house team of over 250 Microsoft-approved developers and technology professionals, and offices throughout Europe.

We spoke to James Smith, Business Development Executive at DCSL GuideSmiths. He gave us an insight into the ways in which Cognism shaped their recent revenue journey.

The challenge

Despite operating since 1994, DCSL didn’t have an outbound team in place until just two years ago. They encountered some problems when they decided to set one up.

“We started off buying lead lists from a well-known data provider, and we had a lot of issues with out-of-date and poor quality data. We decided to run our own manual prospecting from LinkedIn, which is time-consuming.”

Without extra information about their prospects, DCSL were struggling to reach out at the right time.

“We were missing out on opportunities, such as contacting prospects who had just received funding. We had a mismatch between the types of people we wanted to be contacting, and the people we were able to contact.”

The solution

With reliable data, DCSL GuideSmiths were able to build more robust sales and marketing strategies.

“We were able to adopt an effective ABM approach. We ran a search through Cognism and found 15,000 relevant companies. We then filtered these lists to find people who matched us really well.”

It didn’t take a long time for DCSL to get started on the platform.

“Our onboarding process was smooth. We’ve had two Customer Success Managers and both of them have been fantastic. When we were getting set up on the tool we had help from a couple of Cognism employees. We were exporting data on day one, and we had our first campaign running within a week.”

The best results came when DCSL started running a multi-channel cadence, which is facilitated by Cognism’s arsenal of outbound tools and integration capabilities.

“We started mixing different activities such as cold calling and emailing, rather than just running an email cadence. Within a couple of months we started finding some really good opportunities and saw ROI.”

This allowed them to make full use of Cognism’s direct dial data.

“The direct dial data was much better than anything we’ve seen elsewhere. We’ve used a few major data providers and it has been a bit mixed. Cognism has just been way more accurate.”

The results

Making Cognism Prospector a part of their sales process has saved DCSL GuideSmiths a lot of time.

“When we were originally getting these big lead lists, it was taking us so much time to qualify them and cut out all of the unnecessary and inaccurate data points. We would then have to go back to them and complain that we weren’t getting what we had paid for.”

“With Cognism we’ve been able to pick out exactly what we want before we export it. It’s saved us a lot of time.”

This is largely down to the reliability of the platform as a key aspect of their outbound sales process.

“The biggest thing to highlight is the structure it has given our sales team. We know where we get our data from, how we use it, how we qualify it, and we are now in a position where our pipeline is consistently being filled with opportunities.”

“The structure is the single biggest result for our team.”

This reliability has helped guide DCSL GuideSmiths through a difficult year.

“We had a really weird year in 2020. As soon as we went into lockdown we thought we were going to drop off a cliff. Suddenly we were having 30-40 enquiries a week. Since then business has boomed. The processes are in place, and things are working really well.”

There was also another benefit which DCSL GuideSmiths didn’t initially expect to find.

“We’ve been recycling data by creating retargeting lists in Cognism and sending them to our Marketing team. They’ll then add these contacts to a drip nurture campaign, promoting content and webinars. We’ve seen a big increase in sign-ups and attendees because over time we’ve built up a big list of people to put into this drip campaign.”

We asked James whether he would recommend Cognism.

“Cognism is unique. It’s not just a data company, it’s end-to-end. It gives you total control to take your own route. I’ve already had conversations where I recommend Cognism to people, and I think a few of them have gotten in touch.”