StoreForce, the workforce management tool on a mission to simplify retail, uses Cognism’s B2B data to:
- Gain a 41% positive email reply rate.
- Book approximately 25% of trade show meetings with Cognism-generated email addresses.
- Provide accurate, compliant European & North American B2B data.
- Run email marketing campaigns in HubSpot.
Teams using: Sales & Marketing
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The company
StoreForce is a Retail Operations management solution built by retailers for retailers. With clients in over 60 countries, StoreForce is proud to partner with world-renowned retailers such as Vans, Build-A-Bear Workshop, Fabletics, Kate Spade, LUSH, and many more.
The team uses their know-how and experience to build simplified but sophisticated solutions to help speciality retailers streamline their operations. From improving employee and business performance to accurately executing retail strategies across all stores and supporting employee centricity, StoreForce covers it all.
The challenge
We interviewed Harvey Jaggard-Hawkins, Business Development Manager at StoreForce, about his experience with Cognism.
Firstly, Harvey explained the lead generation difficulties they experienced prior to Cognism.
“I started at StoreForce in 2019 as a Business Development Executive. The role embodied the grunt work that comes with prospecting. Such as manually finding contact details and actioning them one by one."
"It was a matter of Googling relevant leads and working out what their email address was. I’d also rely on my network to leverage any existing contacts. It was a hard slog and a great deal of effort.”
“I also conducted a two-way approach between LinkedIn and third-party data lists. Our ICP is retail, and people frequently move jobs in this industry. Especially during the pandemic. So the data from these channels was often stagnant and useless, which had a domino effect on overall team performance and morale.”
How did Harvey discover Cognism?
“Another software vendor recommended Cognism. After an initial demonstration, I saw the benefits of the platform instantly, and I was sold. We’d finally found a tool that could provide a B2B contact database that’s clean, GDPR compliant and up to date.”
“We didn’t need to look elsewhere because Cognism ticked the boxes from day one.”
The solution
StoreForce has been a customer since 2020. Harvey is now a Business Development Manager which involves managing the entire EMEA SDR team.
What is their target market?
“The StoreForce tool is designed to support day-to-day retail operations and get maximum value out of each of the stores and staff. Executives, operations, payroll and IT decision-makers in retail businesses across EMEA and North America are our target audience. Following the success with Cognism in EMEA, the SDR team in North America started using the tool for this region.”
What are the different workflows that the sales team use with Cognism?
“Acquiring data from Cognism is always the first touchpoint in our outreach process. First, the SDRs use the WebApp to build qualified lead lists. This begins with researching relevant companies and inputting the chosen company domains into the platform. The data is generated and imported to Salesforce and eventually Salesloft so that we can keep track of the leads.”
“We also use Cognism’s Chrome Extension. The SDR finds desired contacts on LinkedIn and inputs their full contact profiles enriched with phone and email data directly to Salesloft and Salesforce. Both these workflows are supported by the system integrations Cognism has.”
“The LinkedIn Chrome Extension integration is a game-changer. It’s really easy to use and a huge productivity saver.”
What channels do the sales team use to acquire new business?
“The SDRs manage their cadences in Salesloft. They use LinkedIn, email, and cold calling as their core outreach methods.”
“LinkedIn is a powerful tool, but its InMail functionality is limited. We find that the success rates of LinkedIn InMail don't even compare to the replies we get from emails pulled from Cognism.”
Harvey elaborated on how impactful Cognism’s emails have been to his SDRs performance.
“The SDRs spend time researching and crafting personalised emails to send to prospects. As a result, 50% of the team's outreach target is driven by email, and of the responses we receive from emails taken from Cognism, 41% are positive. Anyone in my position will agree that this is a fantastic statistic."
Cognism’s database is used to book meetings at trade shows. He told us more:
“Before using Cognism’s B2B contact database, we’d extensively research what companies and contacts would be going to a trade show. It was a very cumbersome procedure.”
“Since using the platform, we can find the contact details of an event attendee at the click of a button."
"Here’s an example: we’ve just concluded NRF and we’ve had our best ever number of pre-booked meetings. Approximately 25% of these meetings came from email addresses that were pulled from Cognism!”
Harvey also explained how the platform has been used by the marketing team:
“Our marketing department is in Canada and they use Cognism occasionally for pulling mass lists into HubSpot. The team creates a persona in the WebApp and exports the data to HubSpot to run a campaign."
"Overall, the read rates are far higher than they were before. The campaigns have been a success and this wouldn’t have been made possible without Cognism’s data.”
We asked Harvey to sum up his feelings about Cognism:
“Cognism makes a traditionally difficult job a lot easier. It’s mind-boggling how I used to prospect without it.”
“The tool has paid for itself as we’ve closed opportunities generated from Cognism’s email data."
"Many vendors promise ROI and don’t deliver. With Cognism, we’ve seen ROI and not everyone can say that. Cognism does what it promises which is why I’m a huge advocate. It actually works.”
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.
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