Sparta Global, a leading UK hire, train and deploy firm, uses Cognism to:
- Generate significant sales leads on a monthly basis.
- Double ROI and triple the number of contacts compared to Lusha.
- Increase leads and contacts made by 200%.
- Achieve campaign open rates of 50-60%.
- Save 8-10 hours of time per week.
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The company
Sparta Global offers digital education for career changers and newcomers to the tech industry, assigning them to work with organisations to build business and technology capability.
It has over 750 employees, including hundreds of “Spartans” (contractors it has hired, trained and deployed) on assignment.
What teams use Cognism?
Sparta Global only has one Cognism licence, which is a fully featured licence used by marketing in a sales support capacity.
The challenge
We interviewed Jack Brewster, Digital Marketing Manager at Sparta Global, to find out how he uses Cognism and the results he sees from it.
How did you first find out about Cognism?
Jack explained:
“At the time of joining Sparta Global, Cognism was already in place. When it came to the renewal at the start of the year, I re-evaluated competitors, and some of the sales team mentioned trying Lusha.”
What evaluation process did you go through?
“To test Cognism and Lusha’s data set, I picked out a specific job title to reach out to, in this case, in the defence sector. I searched for the same job title in Cognism and Lusha for a direct comparison.”
“The metrics I looked at were the number of contacts we got, plus the number of valid email addresses and valid phone numbers.”
How does Cognism perform against its competitors?
“Cognism brought back three times the number of phone numbers compared to Lusha and more than double the number of contacts.”
The solution
Who is Sparta Global’s ICP/target audience?
“Sparta has targets on both sides of the hiring process - prospective Spartans and clients.”
Regarding its geographic reach, Sparta does most of its business with UK-based Spartans and clients, placing about 80% of its Spartans in the UK. It also works with companies in Poland and other places in Eastern Europe, Hong Kong and the US.
On the UK focus, Jack explains:
“Sparta is primarily focused on the UK, as this is where our client demand lies. When we’re training Spartans, we can bring them into the office and make sure they are getting those personal skills as well, which is always a bonus.”
How does Sparta Global use Cognism?
“I use Cognism to identify potential clients for our hiring solution. When using LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which I utilise quite a lot, I work with account managers to identify the contacts we’d like to reach out to, before moving these across into Cognism.”
“From there, I create a list and export it to double-check for any duplicate records.”
In addition to using Cognism directly himself, the sales team tells Jack what data they’re looking for, and gets the data for them.
“When I’m working with one of our account managers, for example, we identify a list of clients in, say, the financial sector, and I’d go into Cognism to find the job titles and seniority that we’re looking for. We reach out to and get into conversations with those people.”
Cognism also helps Jack and the team grow existing business:
“If they’re a business that we’ve worked with before, using Cognism every few months to get an updated list of employee roles, how they’ve progressed, and what team they’re in is really useful as well.”
On Cognism’s intent data, Jack explained:
“We’re finding intent is quite useful when searching for people looking for talent acquisition, upskilling and bringing new talent initiatives into their business.”
“Where those indicators are positive, we know that’s an area of the market we can reach out to. Without the intent feature, I wouldn’t know where to look.”
“Finding people who have been searching for those terms has been a massive help. We’ve been using it all the time to find new businesses to outreach to.”
We asked Jack how much time he saves using Cognism:
“Regarding time savings, it would take us ages to do this all manually. But even in terms of the bottom and top of the Cognism learning curve, the time saving is big – 2-3 hours.”
“Each week, I save 8-10 hours from being able to remove duplicate records on Salesforce and any emails that aren’t 100% verified.”
The results
How has Cognism helped Sparta Global?
Jack gave us an insight into the top-line metrics that Cognism has helped Sparta achieve:
“Last month, we identified 39 opportunities to place Spartans through contacts obtained via Cognism, so that’s incredibly positive.”
“To put that into perspective, that was a good month, but an achievable month, not one that massively pushed the boat out for us.”
Jack also explained his ROI on Cognism:
“Compared to the tool we were using before, we’ve seen a 200% increase in the leads we’ve made and contacts we’ve reached out to.”
And comparing open rates from Cognism to those he’d seen previously, Jack said:
“In previous jobs, I’d see open rates of around 30%, and my understanding was that it was kind of an industry norm, 25-35%.”
“In the campaigns we’re running, we see open rates of 50-60%. That’s due, in part, to how specific we can get with the personalisation of subject lines and intros thanks to job title and seniority data.”
“If you ensure that the emails are verified and the direct dials you’re reaching out to are verified, then you’re heading into the 98-99% success rate, which is fantastic for when we’re sending out our emails. We know that everything’s going to hit and the bounces won’t affect us too much.”
“We targeted a list of 6,000 contacts and had less than 20 bounces.”
And that low bounce rate results in a high rate of meetings booked.
Have there been any intangible benefits to using Cognism?
Jack told us:
“Cognism has facilitated a better sales process. It took some persuading, with some of the sales team scarred by some of the mass data-scraping that sometimes goes into sales enablement tools.”
“But they know now the value that Cognism as part of my role can bring. We will support sales in going for a target area with a campaign. Before, everything would be a lot more manual. They’ve now seen the value – it has proven itself.”
A high hit rate has allowed Sparta’s sales team to work more efficiently. Jack said:
“This confidence in success rate has really helped our account managers streamline their processes when they’re phoning mobile numbers. They know it’s going to be worthwhile.”
How did Sparta find Cognism’s customer service?
“We’ve been working closely with Sophia, who has been absolutely fantastic in setting up regular calls and making sure that we’re always up to date with the tool and if there are things that she thinks we’re not making use of. She would reach out to me and say, we noticed you haven’t been in this area of your account recently. Are you familiar with it?”
“Whenever we’ve needed assistance with anything, we’ve got it straight away.”
Why Sparta Global recommends Cognism
Jack told us:
“I’ve already been recommending Cognism to people I know working in digital agencies and things like that.”
“If anyone’s looking at doing outreach, new business or even just an updated list of their existing list, I’ll always recommend 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
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