Driving 3x Event ROI with Cognism Data

A leading state-funded trade and investment promotion organisation in Warsaw uses Cognism’s B2B data to:

• Increase output to find 6x the number of buyers.
• Triple the ROI of their events.
• Empower employees with accurate contact data, resulting in increased job satisfaction.
• Identify GDPR compliant contacts in Poland

Scroll 👇 to view the case study.

The company

An Export Promotion Agency with an office in Warsaw, Poland.

The challenge

We interviewed the Digital Marketing Team Lead, who runs the marketing operations for the Warsaw office, about his experience with Cognism.

How did they discover Cognism?

“I found the software myself by looking at online software comparison websites. For example, Trustpilot, G2, and other review sites helped me compare many sales intelligence platforms.”

What problems were they trying to solve?

“In the past, we used lead generation companies where they would do the lead generation for you. So we’d give them an idea of our target market, and they would then retrieve a huge  data set from them for a set fee.”

“The problem with that is that the person generating the long lists was not the final user of the data or even business development professionals who know the market themselves. So often, they wouldn’t know the correct parameters or filters to find the most accurate leads.”

“I thought there must be a better way to do this, so I suggested to my boss that I’d find some sort of marketing and sales intelligence software. That’s when we found Cognism.”

Did they look at any other tools?

“I came across a few of your competitors, including ZoomInfo and Lusha. But we were under a time constraint to find a suitable lead gen tool and didn’t have time to compare loads of platforms, so we ended up comparing Cognism and Apollo.ai.”

He explained their evaluation process:

“How we determined which would be the better tool for us was based on the features available, how detailed a data set we could generate, and how accurate that data set was.”

Why did they choose Cognism?

“While the software didn’t differ greatly in results, we chose Cognism because it’s fully GDPR compliant. The way that Cognism handles data gave us much more reassurance when explaining to our leads and prospects how we gained their contact information.”

The solution

What is their target audience?

“We operate as an overseas office based in Warsaw, responsible for identifying potential local buyers. These buyers typically include distributors or key players within supply chains, offering opportunities for East-Asian small and medium-sized businesses. So, we’re looking to speak to Polish buyers in distribution and retail companies in Poland are involved in export marketing, business matchmaking and general promotion of exporting East-Asian small to medium business goods.”

He added:

“When filtering in Cognism, we’ll search for titles like Purchasing Manager, Category Manager, Merchandiser and Buyers.”

How do they use Cognism day-to-day?

“We mainly use Prospector, but there are several different ways we go about it.”

“First, we draft a plan as to what kind of buyer profiles we’re looking for and try to index some key players in the market in terms of companies. We then input those company names and country in the filter, so we would use Poland. This will give us quite a few results generally.”

“We then narrow this down using job titles, such as Purchasing, Merchandising, Category Managers, and even Logistics and Retail Managers occasionally. This will usually return between 500-1,500 contacts and their information.”

“From there, each individual in charge of prospecting these buyers can use these lists however they want. Sometimes, this will be calling them directly, and sometimes, they will use this data for email outreach campaigns

The results

The Digital Marketing Team Lead told us about the quantifiable success he’s seen from using Cognism.

“Just before we adopted Cognism, we were given about 33 days to find 13 buyers for an event we were hosting. Once we adopted Cognism, we were given only 10 days to find as many buyers as possible. We found 59 buyers."

“That’s 6.25x the efficiency we previously had. We went from finding less than 1 buyer every day to finding 6 buyers every day.”

He told us about a result he was especially happy about:

“Typically, business representatives travel from East Asia (i.e. Korea, China, Japan etc.) to meet Polish buyers, incurring an average cost of £2,000 for travel, accommodation, and related expenses. They aim for the value of the meeting to exceed this cost.” 

“Based on this premise, I calculated that the event we hosted prior to adopting Cognism was valued at £45,000 for us. However, following the adoption of Cognism, the subsequent event generated £131,000, marking a significant increase to approximately 3x the previous value achieved.”

The top reasons why they recommend Cognism

1. Data accuracy

“We used to rely on Google searches to find prospects, but it was hit-and-miss, and verifying information on each company’s website was time-consuming.”

“Cognism does the heavy lifting for you. We don’t have to worry about manually searching for individual names, company titles, and contact information. With a few clicks, you can export the full data set you need.”

2. Employee morale

“It’s helped in ways we never expected. Cognism has alleviated the frustrations of cold calling by providing direct access to leads, removing the difficulty of receiving voicemails or getting stopped by a gatekeeper. It cuts out the middle-man in that respect, and in turn, it’s improved the organisation’s turnover rate dramatically.”

“Employees are feeling more empowered and better equipped with the right tools. They know that as long as they employ the right strategy, they can always find the right details of the leads they’re looking for. So it’s helped us to appreciate our jobs a little more.”

He added:

“At the same time, our bosses are generally very happy because we can find more buyers in a shorter period.”

3. Ease of use

“I was the first to adopt Cognism, but its simple UI made adoption easy, even with minimal training. Unlike Apollo.ai, which was complex and unintuitive, Cognism was straightforward to learn and teach to the team.”

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.

Why not see for yourself? Book your live screen share here. 👇