Tharsus, the UK’s award-winning advanced manufacturers of robotics and industrial automation, uses Cognism’s B2B data to:
- Increase open rates from 2-6% to 60%.
- Reach a wider target audience with Cognism’s advanced filters.
- To be the backbone of their email campaigns.
- Request and receive new data within 48 hours.
Teams using: Marketing
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The company
The leading UK manufacturer consists of two sister companies, Tharsus and Universal Wolf. The firm started as a traditional metal fabrication business in the North East of England in the 1960s. It's since grown and diversified to become a leader in complex metalwork, UK robotics and industrial automation, creating innovative solutions for the likes of Ocado, FreeWire and Small Robot Co.
From global giants to start-ups, Tharsus has turned complex tech products into successful scale manufacture for all types of businesses. Their unique end-to-end process brings engineering design, manufacturing and supply chain experts together under one roof to take care of the hardware and electro-mechanical assembly of their customers’ products.
The challenge
We interviewed Elaine Fullarton, Marketing Principal at Tharsus, about her experience with Cognism.
What lead generation activity did Tharsus Group carry out before Cognism?
“When I joined the business two years ago, the marketing efforts consisted of a website and a simple email outreach using MailChimp. There was no digital marketing activity per se and the lead generation consisted of finding contact details by trailing through LinkedIn, Google and word-of-mouth. It was a labour-intensive process that lacked scalability for the growth trajectory of our business.”
What prompted them to explore a sales intelligence tool like Cognism?
“Our senior leadership team made a conscious decision to invest in sales and marketing automation to fuel our business growth. The exploration of Cognism came at the same time as our investment in Salesforce Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud. This was simply because they work so well together with Cognism's native integration.”
The solution
Elaine is the internal champion and one of the primary users of Cognism. The sales team also self-serves the platform to source contact details of individuals within target organisations.
What are the sales teams' workflows with the platform?
“We actually work very closely with our Business Development team to build marketing campaigns. The BD team will typically source/pre-qualify the companies within the market sectors we wish to target. Then, we work together to ensure we pull the right contact data from Cognism.”
“The BD team self-serve for individual contact information, and our marketing team use Cognism to build more robust campaigns. I also work closely with Cognism to make sure Tharsus and Universal Wolf are educated on how to use the B2B contact database to get the most out of the platform.
“Together, we focus on finding net new leads in Cognism and import them to Salesforce for prospecting. This workflow means they will have pre-qualified leads ahead of time.”
What is Tharsus Group’s demographic?
“We predominantly target CTOs, Directors of Engineering, Heads of Purchasing and Heads of Manufacturing. We have a global geographical profile, but with a focus on UK manufacturing. As part of our Account Based Marketing model, it's key that we understand who the influencers and decision-makers are. This is so we can customise our messaging appropriately and create communications that truly resonate.”
“Our business model consists of two sister companies. Tharsus predominantly works with a global audience targeting EV charging, energy storage solutions, smart vending, as well as logistics and warehousing.”
“Meanwhile, Universal Wolf’s target market is broader in their segmentation, but predominantly focuses on the same sectors. I often segment our Cognism data into specific geographies, market sectors and type of contact.”
How is Cognism at the essence of their marketing workflows?
“A major part of my role is to find companies suited to our Solve Scale Supply manufacturing service offering and build campaigns around it to generate expertise, authority and trust. The Cognism platform delivers the B2B data for the majority of our marketing campaigns run through our CRM, Salesforce.”
What is Elaine’s standard marketing workflow with Cognism?
“Cognism has a very easy native integration with Salesforce. We use Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud as lead generation and nurturing outbound campaigns using marketing automation. I build specific audiences in Cognism’s Sales Prospector platform that reflect our ideal customer segmentation profiles.”
Elaine detailed how she formulated a specific campaign on the platform with success.
“I recently completed a campaign targeting the EV charge point OEM space. We had a few companies in mind that we wanted to target, but those businesses were already in Salesforce. My job was to find similar companies and build a campaign around it.”
“Initially, I inserted the website domains of the companies we already had in our CRM into the platform. This was to gauge how these companies describe themselves and draw up a list of keywords. From that, I add these keywords into the platform’s ‘keyword’ filter to find similar companies. It was actually very easy.”
“Based on these keywords, I then started building my campaign from the ‘Company Search’ filter. Once I drew a substantial list of appropriate EV charging companies, I double-checked the websites and LinkedIn profiles of these businesses to make sure they were suitable.”
“After filtering the best-fit companies, I then went to the ‘Contact Search’ filter to put in the relevant job titles and geographies to the search. Once these contacts were generated, I reviewed the list of key contacts (via LinkedIn profiles) to make sure we were targeting the right folk.”
What is Elaine’s favourite platform feature?
“I love the contact filters and the ability to develop key profiles. I can exclude irrelevant job titles and save a huge amount of time. It’s game-changing from a data perspective."
"With a lean mean marketing team, this kind of functionality allows me to scale as I don’t have to reinvent the wheel whenever I do a new campaign. I can use these personalised filters as my base for future campaigns and adjust it slightly depending on my target audience.”
What happens once the data is generated in Sales Prospector?
“Once the data is generated in Cognism, it's exported to Salesforce and synced to a specific campaign.”
“What’s fantastic about the native Salesforce integration is that Cognism flags leads are already in our CRM with a blue icon - so you avoid lead duplication. This means that Cognism updates the contact information fields of the leads already in Salesforce rather than creating duplicate contacts or overwriting any important data our BD team have added.”
Elaine detailed how she uses Marketing Cloud for email nurture campaigns.
“Our data file is exported from Sales Cloud to Marketing Cloud through a data extension. Our campaigns can be a journey of 4-12 emails, depending on the breadth and cadence of content we need in any given campaign..”
“A lead-generation campaign typically consists of 4-5 emails, while a nurture campaign may consist of a slower drum beat of content and can be as long as one email a month for 12 months.”
“In Salesforce, we can personalise our messaging based on the decision-makers and influencers in the campaign. Then we create tailored ABM dynamic messaging that resonates far greater than a standard one size fits all approach. That's the beauty of a segmentation strategy.”
“Having highly-verified emails in the CRM is the utmost priority. Without valid emails, email campaigns will not deliver results. Cognism’s verified emails are critical to making this happen.”
The top reasons why Tharsus would recommend Cognism
1. Results!
“Our open rates used to be between 2-6%. Now they range from 40% to 60% which is phenomenal compared to before - far above the industry average for B2B cold lead email campaigns. These high engagement rates wouldn’t be possible without GREAT data.”
2. Attentive customer support and rapid turnarounds
“What I love about Cognism more than anything is the efficiency of the technical support team. Occasionally, I receive hard and soft bounces; I feed that back to the Cognism team, and they are on it immediately to remedy and help keep the bounce rate down.”
“If there isn’t a verified email address attached to a contact detail, the support team will deliver the information to me within 48 hours. This fast turnaround on data requests is critical because I don’t have to wait weeks to get data which would seriously impact my ability to execute on campaigns and deliver results. It makes a huge difference to me as a marketer.”
“I’m confident that the technical support team will work hard to attend to my requests in ample time. That’s key to me.”
3. Exceptional compliant email address data quality
“Cognism is constantly working hard in the background to ensure its data is top-notch quality. Working with a database that has a pool of verified emails makes my job as a marketer easier. If my bounce rate increased, that would be a huge problem because I’m not reaching my audience and our investment in the tool would be questioned.”
“I don’t know another lead source where I’m 100% respecting GDPR guidelines and accessing verified email addresses simultaneously. People often ask how we found their email address and I confidently say that it came from Cognism’s leading compliant B2B database.”
Elaine summed up her thoughts about Cognism:
“Given the macro-economic climate, the finance team is assessing our spending more than ever. For us, Cognism is a must-have and is the machine growing our pipeline. It’s the blood that flows through the sales pipeline and keeps things moving from a cold lead all the way to a closed won deal.”
“If you want access to world-class leads that feed the pipeline and result in sales - then I recommend Cognism.”
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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