Mollie, a leading European payments processor, uses Cognism to:
- Drive growth in Europe and the UK.
- Save 10-15 minutes of time per account.
- Outreach with confidence, improving connect rates by 80%.
- Obtain 30% better data quality compared to competitors.
- Generate double the amount of pipeline.
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The company
Mollie is a payments processor business that has a European money license to offer businesses bank accounts. The company has raised around EUR 1 billion in the last five years and has scaled across Europe.
Mollie now has about 800 employees.
What teams use Cognism?
All Mollie’s sales teams use Cognism, along with a few customer success teams.
The challenge
We interviewed Dave Smallwood, Managing Director at Mollie, to find out how he and his sales teams use Cognism.
How did you first find out about Cognism?
Dave told us:
“I’ve been in sales for quite a long time, about 20 years, and for half of that, I’ve been building outbound teams and working to get them effective.”
“As part of that, I look at all sorts of data sources, and came across Cognism three years ago.”
What problems was Dave trying to solve?
Dave explained the problems he’d been having with other data providers:
“Most of the providers we were using had a promise of a really slick interface and correct data.”
“But when you scratch the surface of it, the data’s old or the phone numbers are incorrect. You try to get hold of a CFO, but you end up getting a truck driver.”
The truck driver anecdote was a real story, as Dave shed light on:
“We had an account with another provider and were going after an ecommerce business in the UK. I knew the name of the CFO, and I was going after him. I got everything lined up, email sent, first few warmups done, everything set up great.”
“It was my first call of the day in the room with everyone around, and I ended up getting a truck driver who told me in some very blunt words to get lost.”
“I thought, there’s got to be someone that’s doing this right.”
“And so we started exploring and looking across all different providers. We put Cognism in the race with about four or five others. We thoroughly tested 500 contacts by splitting them out across the five providers to see what connect rates and proper conversations we got, as well as emails.”
“It was a trial and learn – we put a toe in the water in the UK and let it run for a while.”
How does Cognism perform against its competitors?
Dave told us:
“Cognism’s data quality was about 30% better than everything else we were looking at at the time.”
“With ZoomInfo, the data quality in Europe isn’t what we would need. With Lusha, we get something, but when we dial, it’s not at all where we would expect it to be.”
We asked about non-data aspects, and Dave said:
“I think the UX – the platform’s design, the way it works – has been carefully thought through for people doing my job. And the product is well put together for the purposes of building a list, getting that list integrated into your CRM and then getting out there and engaging them.”
“Other tools are a little bit clunky and not integrated as deeply as you’d like. The ability to exclude your CRM from your results is very powerful and isn’t always there in other solutions that we’ve looked at.”
The solution
Who is Mollie’s ICP/target audience?
Dave told us:
“We are predominantly an SMB-focused business, though we’re also seeing a lot of adoption and attention in mid-market to enterprise. We have a very product-led growth methodology but we also have a direct outbound focus.”
“The teams that use Cognism within our business today are the direct sales partnerships, marketplaces – folks that are outbounding to generate new business or new partnerships.”
“We’re focused on Europe entirely, so we don’t step outside of that EU/UK world.”
How does Mollie use Cognism?
Dave told us:
“Our workflow with Cognism’s browser integration is looking at a contact on LinkedIn or sometimes on their website (or sometimes on Salesforce as well) and then go, ‘ah, the information is a little bit out of date, or there’s a phone number, or there’s a bit more information about the company that I hadn’t seen.’”
“We then export that into the tool we’re using.”
Dave also makes good use of the web app:
“The web app is more for deep work.”
“It’s for when I’m building my portfolio and thinking about how I want to go after it. ‘What’s my ICP?’ ‘What are the right type of people for me to go after?’”
“It’s for building lists and groups and then also helping my team with that. That’s the main workload that I have on the web app.”
“And also ensuring the integrations are working and our team are all active.”
He added:
“We have a very active RevOps team that deactivates licenses left, right and centre if we’re not using them, so we’re looking at activity almost daily.”
We asked Dave about how he manages the CRM integration:
“We’re integrated from Cognism to Salesforce, and we’ve, literally in the last couple of weeks, turned on all the integrations.”
“Cognism works out if we’ve got overlap within our base – within our ICP profile, by geography, by country, by industry, etc. – so it really helps us identify the people who we don’t have in our CRM.”
“And then our outbound sequencing sales automation tools are all running off Salesforce. So we’re leveraging it that way – the data in and then the tools out.”
“I know that you can do direct to Outreach and others straight from Cognism; I think we will explore some of those options in the future.”
Dave also explained Mollie’s marketing use case for Cognism:
“Partnerships and marketing are also looking at, and working with, Cognism data to build out our CRM, build out ABM and our focus lists on different industries, verticals and geographies.”
“We’ve recently started looking at direct outbound cold email off the back of it. We’re testing that at the moment.”
The results
How has Cognism helped Mollie?
“I know for sure that the people in my team who are higher performing are the ones who are using the tool. It’s very, very easy to see.”
Dave gave an example of this:
“One of the German teams is doing hundreds of calls a week and has the highest-performing pipeline by a long way. In terms of activities, output and pipeline creation, they’re probably 2X higher than pretty much everyone else.”
“So they’re out there doing very well and you can see Cognism is behind it.”
“When someone isn’t using Cognism, the connect rate is about one-fifth as good as it is when they are using Cognism. 80% better is maybe the way to look at it.”
Dave also spoke about the time savings achieved through Cognism:
“In terms of time saved in research or increase in work speed for the SDR team, I’d say we save 3-5 minutes per business. Dialling the number and whether it’s good or not is a multiplier.”
“So it’s more like 10-15 minutes saved per account.”
Have there been any intangible benefits to having Cognism?
Dave also spoke about the confidence he has in Cognism:
“Cognism’s Diamond Data® is very reliable. I can pick up the phone now and very likely get the person or very, very confidently leave them a message – that’s very powerful.”
“And then there’s the promise of, if a business is above £10 million in turnover, that the data will refresh every 60 days. Again, it gives you that level of confidence across the platform.”
“In terms of general benefit around the business, Cognism has made our jobs easier. That gives us a lot of confidence.”
“If we were starting from scratch and trying to buy this data in and then clean it and dedupe it and all that stuff, it would be hard to do.”
“Outbound sales is hard but Cognism makes it easy to do.”
How have you found Cognism’s customer success?
Dave said:
“I’ve been very impressed with the team. I’ve had very quick responses either on email, phone or the chat feature. The team is very, very focused on giving results and fixing things, but not just fixing things, but showing us how to properly use the tool.”
“Cognism’s team has been very, very good at that.”
Dave also told us about how an intensive session with Cognism helped his team get comfortable with Cognism and understand what it can do:
“We spent a day with the Cognism team doing a head-to-head cold calling blitz.”
“And I think we walked out of that with about 9 or 10 meetings that we didn’t have the hour before.”
“The session reset the team’s thinking on ‘How scary is cold calling?’ ‘How scary is an outbound day?’ ‘How scary is this stuff?’ and ‘How hard is it to do?’”
“Having the Cognism team with us while we used the tool helped our team dramatically. I saw people walking off saying, ‘Actually, I’ll do this tomorrow’. And that’s hugely valuable.”
Why would Mollie recommend Cognism to other organisations?
Dave said:
“I definitely recommend it to other salespeople!”
“Cognism makes our lives easier, our team happier, gets pipeline going and makes complex tasks simple.”
