SparkForce, a leading Danish B2B SaaS marketing firm, uses Cognism to:
- Contribute to $1 million in pipeline in 3 months.
- Help reduce churn by improving the quality and refinement of work.
- Target clients’ ICP on LinkedIn, with 95% accuracy.
- Save 15 hours per month in manual work.
- Build credibility with clients.
- Enrich company data.
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The company
SparkForce is a B2B digital marketing agency founded in 2022 that takes a channel-agnostic approach to marketing. That means they create tailored growth strategies, run ROI-focused campaigns to attract quality leads, and deliver effective content that drives consistent growth and positions their clients as industry leaders.
SparkForce has 23 full-time staff and focuses on B2B SaaS marketing.
What teams use Cognism?
SparkForce has two licences, utilised on an ad hoc basis by client-facing teams as part of their service.
The challenge
We interviewed Casper Rouchmann, Founder, and Ethan Collins, Growth Lead, at SparkForce.
How did you first find out about Cognism?
Casper told us:
“I’d used ZoomInfo, Vainu and Lusha before, but Cognism had always been on my radar thanks to Alice’s advocation for demand generation. That was how I got into understanding what Cognism does.”
What problems were Casper and Ethan trying to solve?
Casper and Ethan explained how they needed company data to support their client work:
“Last year, when we won business with some clients with an ABM focus, we needed to target specific companies and account lists and companies using specific technology pieces. And Cognism was perfect for that.”
The solution
Who is SparkForce’s ICP/target audience?
SparkForce’s customer base comprises B2B SaaS clients in the US and Europe. But in terms of how SparkForce uses Cognism, it serves clients in all industries.
How does SparkForce use Cognism?
Casper explained:
“We use Cognism as part of the marketing services that we offer clients. We’re given ICP criteria that we put into Cognism, download a list of companies and put it into LinkedIn. That helps us run better targeting than LinkedIn can do natively.”
SparkForce also gets a lot of use out of Cognism’s technographics. Ethan explained:
“I take the entire ICP criteria such as “must have SAP”, or “headquartered here” or “over $X in revenue”. I can’t target SAP-using companies without using Cognism.”
Ethan went into more depth on the LinkedIn integration:
“The issue with LinkedIn is that, while you can specifically target the companies and the job titles and everything you want to go after, LinkedIn has limits. You can only manually type in 200 companies at a time.”
“That’s a pain in the butt! I’ve typed in 200 companies and feel like I’m wasting my time, and it relied on me spelling everything right. And a lot of companies we work with are going after 200 companies.”
“So where Cognism comes in is we use it to get a list of companies that fit the ICP criteria, download that, export it to LinkedIn and use that to power our campaigns.”
Ethan also explained how he uses Cognism to enrich lists:
“Even when the client supplies us with a list of companies to target, we still need to use Cognism. We’ll often find the data provided is missing a company’s LinkedIn data, like its URL, which is what LinkedIn needs for targeting. So we use Cognism to enrich those client lists.”
The results
How has Cognism helped SparkForce?
Casper summarised the impact of Cognism on SparkForce’s service delivery:
“With Cognism, we can now do something we couldn’t before. It has made our targeting much more effective. Instead of targeting, for example, 10,000 people, we target 8,000 in the knowledge that those are the right people to be targeting.”
“We’re growing so fast because our clients are seeing success, and Cognism plays a role in that.”
Ethan added:
“Cognism saves us a lot of time and drives higher accuracy. It stops us from targeting irrelevant companies. The value it gives us is the data quality, more than quantity.”
Ethan emphasised the time savings that Cognism generates:
“Before Cognism, I would go through a list of 500 companies and manually extract their LinkedIn URLs. That’s 5-10 hours of manual work, repeated 2-3 times per month for every client kickoff. Cognism can do it in about 30 seconds.”
“That saves us in the region of 10-15 hours per month.”
SparkForce’s use of Cognism is unusual in that it’s used as part of its client work rather than to enable its own sales and marketing teams.
“In terms of Cognism’s contribution to our pipeline, it’s hard to put an exact number on it, but Cognism plays an important role in the $1 million in pipeline we’ve generated over the past three months.”
“Our pipeline more than doubled in Q3 2024 year on year and nearly tripled since the start of this year.”
Have there been any intangible benefits to using Cognism?
Casper explained how the intangible (or harder to quantify) benefits of Cognism were those that had the biggest impact on SparkForce:
“We’ve had a lot less churn this year than last year, and that has something to do with the overall quality and the refinement of our work. Cognism is part of that.”
Ethan explained the role Cognism plays in SparkForce’s relationships with clients:
“It builds credibility when we can say, this is your ICP, here is a list of companies we think are relevant to you, let’s push forwards with it. It builds credibility with the client that we can narrow the focus even further.”
How did SparkForce find Cognism’s onboarding process?
Ethan found Cognism very easy to use from the word go:
“As far as SaaS tools go, it was so intuitive, and I knew what I was doing from day one. I’d never been in the platform before and I was like, I can build our account list pretty easily. That was massive from a UX perspective.”
Why SparkForce recommends Cognism
What are Casper and Ethan’s top reasons for recommending Cognism to other organisations?
Ethan said:
“I would recommend Cognism to anyone trying to reach the right companies in their ICP. If you need to build a target account list, you need Cognism!”
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
Why not see for yourself? Book your live screenshare here 👇
