An environmental services company uses Cognism to:
- Generate 17% of SQLs which has increased overall results.
- Stay compliant with GDPR when prospecting.
- Identify and find contacts within just a few seconds.
- Increase leads generated, with 2,000 sourced.
- Integrate seamlessly with LinkedIn.
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The company
An EU-based environmental services company that provides modular filtration services to help its clients purify air, gas, water, and liquids.
It serves clients across a wide variety of industries. These include adhesives, automotive, battery production, food production, pharmaceuticals, and waste and wastewater management, to name a few.
What teams use Cognism?
Its external sales team primarily uses Cognism, in addition to (to a lesser extent) the internal sales team and marketing.
The internal sales team gets people into their database and books meetings for the external sales engineers. The external team consists of trained bio- and chemical sales engineers who are looking for new opportunities within their existing capabilities.
The challenge
We interviewed the company’s Marketing Manager to find out how their company uses Cognism and what it helps them achieve.
How did you first find out about Cognism?
The company’s Marketing Manager told us:
“I first heard of Cognism about 4 years ago, and then more and more in the years after. That was partly due to Alice – you guys are frontrunners in demand generation. From that perspective, it adds trust.”
“We brought Cognism in after somebody from Cognism contacted us. Then, we got in conversation and signed the contract within less than one month.”
What problems was the company trying to solve?
They explained their main use cases for Cognism:
“We wanted Cognism to have more sales-qualified leads in our database. We have quite an elaborate marketing setup and nurture flows with webinars.”
“The indirect goal is more opportunities.”
The company explained how Cognism’s direct dials save them time and effort:
“Our old process required our salespeople to call the reception desk. If they were lucky, they found the contact’s phone number, but otherwise, they had to phone the reception desk. It was becoming a bigger and bigger challenge to get past the gatekeeper.”
“It’s much easier to get in direct contact with somebody and ask them, ‘Are you responsible for the emissions of your company?’ No. ‘Okay. Can you send me through the person who is responsible?’”
“We also needed a GDPR-compliant prospecting tool. That was really important to us.”
How does Cognism perform against its competitors?
The company explained how Cognism’s high compliance standards and more valuable EU data were key factors in choosing it:
“The reason we don’t use ZoomInfo in the EU – and the reason we chose Cognism – is EU data and GDPR.”
“ZoomInfo has a less valuable EU database.”
“With ZoomInfo, we couldn’t put anything about GDPR into the Terms & Conditions of the contract. I wanted a clear GDPR statement in the T&Cs stating if somebody asks where we got the phone number from, that we could ask Cognism and you would tell us.”
“A GDPR fine can be 4% of total revenue, so we needed to ensure that doesn’t happen.”
The solution
Who is the company’s ICP/target audience?
They explained how Cognism helps them find their prospects, who typically don’t have standardised job titles:
“For us, prospecting is a bit different – we try to find the person who’s responsible for emissions at a certain company. It can be an environmental manager, a production manager, or the CEO – it all depends on the company itself.”
They emphasised the variety of organisations they need to target:
“We target companies ranging from anywhere between 10 employees and 100,000 employees.”
“Our targeting is broad in terms of industry too – animal feed production, furniture production, the waste industry (waste collection, waste incineration and recycling) and the chemicals industry.”
How do the company’s teams use Cognism?
They explained how the external sales team uses Cognism to find regulation-related demand:
“When a new environmental regulation is published, we know which companies have to take action and they have to comply within a certain timescale.”
“We can look for those companies on Cognism and try to contact them to make them aware of our solution.”
They also explained their sales team’s process:
“Our internal teams mostly use Cognism when browsing the web to find out about the people working at a company from that company’s website. Then it’s easy to look for a certain person, find the job title and contact them.”
“They use Cognism to create their lists. Once they have reached their contact, they push it to Salesforce.”
Using Cognism, the company’s marketing team creates contact lists and exports them to either the LinkedIn advertising planner, audience creation tool or matched audiences.
“We use Cognism to drive webinar sign-ups. We use it to test. LinkedIn is very expensive, so when we’re testing, we want to make sure we’re testing with the right audience. LinkedIn recently launched those sponsored messages again; for us, that’s a clear indicator to test with a Cognism contact list.”
They explained how they use Cognism as part of their demand generation efforts:
“The main objective is that we get qualified leads into our system and that they can interact with content to educate themselves. At a certain point, they will need a solution. And then they’ll reach out to us.”
The results
How has Cognism helped the company?
The company’s Marketing Manager explained the results Cognism is helping them achieve:
“17% of our sales-qualified leads come from Cognism, in total around 1,400 SQLs. The sales organisation is generating more SQLs as a result. This means that we have future opportunities that are set to be vested by these SQLs.”
“Cognism is the biggest channel of leads coming in. In total, 2,000 leads came from Cognism.”
“Cognism has made it much quicker to find the people we want to talk to.”
Have there been any intangible benefits to having Cognism?
The Marketing Manager explained how Cognism is improving ramp-up time for new salespeople:
“We give Cognism to new salespeople who don’t have a database to work on already. We give them access to Cognism in the first few months so they can build their own database. And they can do that a lot quicker than before.”
There’s also a motivational aspect, as they explained:
“Because we have fewer licenses than salespeople, 35 vs 50, it keeps everyone on their toes. If they’re not using it, it’ll go to the next person.”
How did the company find Cognism’s onboarding process?
They told us:
“It was easy to adopt.”
“Customer support has been really responsive. I got some great help when I asked questions about the intent data.”
Why the company recommends Cognism
“I would definitely recommend Cognism – in fact, I have already recommended it – for companies of the right size.”
They further explained their main reasons for recommending Cognism:
“Cognism gives you the ability to find your target audience in only a few clicks.”
“It also helps create a LinkedIn advertising audience and keeps the steering wheel in your own hands compared to giving it to LinkedIn.”
“If you want to scale up and have the resources to prospect in-house, then it’s an absolutely brilliant tool.”
Try Cognism’s sales intelligence solution
Over 3,000 sales and marketing teams around the world trust Cognism to:
✅ 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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