Ep. #8, Data Driven Sales

Andrew O'Neal: We do a lot of automation around our outbound efforts.

Our goal is just to approach someone in a way that makes them feel comfortable.

The end of the day, sales is about the people involved. You don't want to automate away any of that personal interaction.

Yaron Sadka: Hi, I'm Yaron Sadka, senior sales engineer at Runscope. You're listening to Road to Growth, a podcast about startup sales organizations brought to you by Heavybit, a nine-month program for developer-facing startups.

Road to Growth is a bi-weekly series that breaks down SaaS sales organizations one piece at a time. From the first person to kick off sales at a company all the way down to the partnership and cohesion with the marketing and product teams, we'll take you through what it takes to build a powerful, fine-tuned sales organization.

If you're interested in being a guest, have a topic for us to discuss, or a role you'd like us to dive into, send an email to roadtogrowth at heavybit.com. On this episode, I'm joined by Andrew O'Neal, head of growth at Clearbit. We discuss how to leverage data derived from sales tools and the importance of making your product easy to interact with for devs and non-devs alike.

From Film to Clearbit

Hey guys, today I have Andrew O'Neal of Clearbit here with us. He's their head of growth over there. You just shared a first non-engineering hire with the company. So that's always a lot of fun.

I've been in that role as well. Definitely. Thanks for coming by. Glad to have you.

Andrew: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

Yaron: So we normally open up the show with a couple minutes, basically an intro of yourself, how you got to be where you are today, Clearbit. So, last couple jobs and what kind of drew you into Clearbit?

Andrew: Yeah, so I guess I got started in the film industry of all places, on the agency side. So we were representing writers and directors and I was down in LA. And at some point got into the internet marketing thing, started some side projects and different things, and ended up starting a company called Solidwize, which was in the education space.

And so we grew that out mostly through enterprise sales, although we had a B2C component as well. Worked on a few other projects and kind of was winding that down, and Solidwize is still doing pretty well, but it was kind of time to move on, and so I was looking for other projects.

I was introduced to our CEO, Alex, who was doing some amazing things, and I kind of just said, put the feelers out, anybody who's doing amazing stuff, I want to work with world-class people. And so Alex was the first on the list there and we hit it off, and so I came on, and at the time there were three engineer co-founders and we're looking for somebody to handle the business, the sales and growth side of things. And it's been great.

Yaron: Cool. So you had sales experience prior to coming into Clearbit.

Andrew: Yeah, and I think, not necessarily on purpose, through running the last company. Obviously a huge portion of that is just hustle when you're getting started. And so kind of de facto sales experience there.

I ended up doing most of our sales through the kind of early, before we made the first few hires. And so that's kind of how it got started.

Yaron: So were you using any sales tools before joining Clearbit?

Andrew: Yeah. So when we started that company, that was about four years ago now. And so there weren't kind of the same types of tools that are available today. So even when Rapportive first came out, that was huge, right?

It was the ability to kind of quickly check and find people's emails that you wanted to reach out to, even though it was very manual. None of the stuff was really automated. And so you would kind of hack together Excel macros and different things like that to kind of get the closest proxy there.

But generally speaking, a lot of it was very manual, and of course, as tools came out, you start seeing more prospecting tools and things like that, and we grabbed them when we could.

Yaron: Okay. I've been in sales for a couple years now. When I first started, the only real tool that I would use was Salesforce. So it's just keeping track of what's going on with sales and kind of the pipeline.

But I'm also a sales engineer, so it's a little different for me. I have my clients that I take care of and whatnot, and that's what I need to know.

Andrew: And I should say that obviously the CRM space has been around for a long time. We've always used some form of CRM. But I guess when we're talking about tools, there's a whole nother kind of category that's been emerging in the last couple of years.

Yaron: Yeah, definitely.

What Clearbit Actually Is

You're at Clearbit. Clearbit is, I guess we can categorize it as a sales tool.

Andrew: Yeah.

Yaron: But is it more than that? I mean, you work with it, so how would you kind of describe Clearbit, if not a sales tool?

Andrew: Right. So just to give, I guess, a background of what Clearbit actually is, we started as an API-first company, and so we were building APIs that would, essentially you could pass us an email or a domain, and we would return tons of information about an individual or a company.

So things that are valuable to salespeople, things that are valuable to marketers, employee count, funding, location, social handles, those types of things, right? And so obviously there were a couple different use cases there. One was towards engineers, people building products that needed that type of data.

And then we found pretty quickly that sales engineers were hacking together kind of internal tools with that. And so we started kind of going down the path where we said, all right, well, let's just make that easier, be where they live.

So we built out integrations into things like Salesforce, Close.io, Marketo, and even Google Sheets.

And then before too long, the enrichment was great, and we kept hearing from customers that, all right, so that's great if we have an email address already, if we have a lot of inbound. But a lot of companies aren't so fortunate to have enough inbound that completely fills their pipeline, right?

And so we started thinking, okay, let's move towards the prospecting side and building out what we call the Discovery and Prospector tools. And basically the Discovery tool lets you essentially say, hey, find me companies in San Francisco that have raised at least five million dollars and are in the retail space, maybe tag with specific tags, and find those companies. And then Prospector lets you say, I need to talk to the head of marketing at that company.

Who is that person? What's their company email address? And so really to kind of fill out that prospecting side.

And so yeah, I would say, to answer your question a little more succinctly, certainly probably our number one use case is in that sales and marketing. We definitely have folks using us for a variety of things, even like financial underwriting. But for the purposes here we'll keep it pretty tight there.

Yaron: So taking down this sales piece, basic premises, a domain or an email comes in, you guys provide all the research you've been able to collect. How is this being done on the back end? Are you guys mainly going out and finding this information? Is it automated? Who's doing that kind of work?

Andrew: Right. So it's all automated. And kind of how we differ from a lot of the enrichment services out there, because things like data.com have been around for a long time. What we're doing is actually looking at hundreds of sources across the web live and pulling those back.

So we keep a cache of about 30 days, but if there's any data that's older than 30 days, we're gonna go fresh and look at that. So what that means is that that data is always accurate and is always current. And so that's kind of a key tenet for us, focusing on the technology and being able to return that in a few milliseconds to a second or two is really valuable.

And that's kind of where we focus our time. So we're looking at everything from social signals to legal filings.

Eating Their Own Dog Food

Yaron: Okay. And so you as a head of growth, I take it you use Clearbit on a day-to-day basis for your own job, correct?

Andrew: Yep.

Yaron: What's provided you with the most value? Coming in, you were at a company that you didn't have Clearbit at, you're now at Clearbit and you have that data in front of you. What's been the most value that you've gained from that?

Andrew: Yeah, I mean, no, it's huge. So I think there's a couple things, and the fun thing about it is because we are API first and I do a bit of development, we've hired a really interesting team. It's an amazing team and every member has some kind of level of technical ability.

And so we're constantly building tools with our own APIs and kind of eating our own dog food. And so that comes in the form of every time someone signs up, in our Slack channel they get enriched and we can see kind of who is signing up to the service even though it's just an email address.

So we absolutely do use Clearbit kind of in our day-to-day and in almost everything that we do. And that goes from enrichment down to kind of our outbound process, which I can certainly chat a little bit more about because we do a lot of automation around our outbound efforts.

But generally speaking, we are in a fortunate position where we have a lot of inbound, and so that really needs to be qualified. So we're able to very quickly, even through our Slack channel, through our CRM, any place that that information lives, it lives alongside kind of the full Clearbit data points.

And we use that for segmentation, we use that in kind of even identifying our ideal customers so we know who to spend time with and who to reach out to in the future. We build campaigns around the data and it really is kind of used in our everyday sales and marketing efforts.

I think generally, I can give you a couple specific examples of how other customers are using it, and that's a lot of times easier for me than talking about other processes. But one really common use case is in just simple sign-up flow, right?

A customer comes to your website, they enter their name. We kind of all know at this point that the fewer fields they fill in, the higher the conversion rate is going to be.

And so if you put, for instance, we have customers who will put the email form first, and then once that's typed in, they'll only show fields for those things that we couldn't find. If that makes sense. So potentially a customer could hit the website and essentially just see an email, fill in your password, everything else is done for them, they're good to go.

And so we have customers who've seen 20%, 30% boost just within a couple hours to their conversion rates by reducing that form fill. And what's nice is then you have the full kind of array of information that you can then segment against.

We have one of our sales guys spends most of his time on enterprise-level accounts. He's really good in that space, and so we'll automatically route to him those kinds of things.

One Owner for Every Customer

Yaron: So has Clearbit filled a need for another, let's say sales development representative to go through and kind of qualify these leads? Or is Clearbit kind of taking that on for you and now saving you, one, the time of interacting and hiring another person, but also giving you better, more succinct information a lot quicker?

Andrew: Right. We definitely see it as augmenting the sales process. Certainly you need people to have those interactions.

At the end of the day, sales is about the people involved.

We do take a pretty different approach, though, in the way that we've structured our sales team thus far. And so essentially the way we think of it, you think of an Aaron Ross-style predictable revenue kind of approach. You have your SDRs handed off to your account executives and so on.

The way we think about it, especially at the size that we're at now, is we very much want a single person to own the entire life cycle of a customer. And so from the first outreach in our outbound efforts all the way through to support, we want a solid touch point so you don't have that handoff experience.

Maintaining this, I understand, becomes more difficult as the org grows. But certainly for now this has been working really well for us. And so in order to be able to do that and have one person own the entire relationship, there are steps that need to be automated out.

And so for us, a lot of that comes in that kind of prospecting SDR side of things. And so what we actually do, kind of how our stack works currently.

Let's say that we have an idea, we release our Marketo integration and we want to reach out to users of Marketo. So we built these internal scripts that will hit our Discovery API and say, okay, find me folks that use Marketo in a particular territory that are of a particular size and are the right target accounts for us.

We'll then use Prospector to find the right people. And then we've written some scripts that basically will dedupe against our CRM. It'll find who we need to reach out to.

We even have kind of custom GIFs, because we're in the people business, right? We can find information on the people that we're sending it to. So we'll generate a GIF of us finding that person. So when you open the email you see your own face and kind of information about that.

Which people have loved, actually. If you look at Twitter, you'll see a bunch of people tweeting out that picture.

Yaron: And that would be at Clearbit? Or what's the Twitter handle?

Andrew: Okay, at Clearbit. And so then we'll shoot that out. It'll go into an outbound, so whether you're using Persist or Outreach.

And then so the first time that kind of our sales team is really seeing this individual is, it's all prepped, ready to go. They double-check the emails, they hit send, and that work has largely been taken care of for them.

They're still doing kind of individual outreach to particular accounts, but for the most part, that's helping a lot on that kind of SDR side of things. And then from there, they're able to continue on that relationship when they hear back. There's no kind of awkward handoff, and it works really nicely.

Tools Without Losing the Personal Touch

Yaron: So you guys, I mean, as part of your sales flow, you've automated a lot of pieces.

Andrew: We do.

Yaron: And because you have great engineers on the back end, they've helped you guys build a lot of tools that are technically considered, let's say, sales operations or whatever you want to call it.

Andrew: That's right.

Yaron: I personally have been getting a lot of outreach from new founders or what have you with all these new great sales tools and blah blah blah that are promising all these great things if you use the product right.

For me as a sales engineer, there's only so much I can do from a sales perspective that these tools will help me with. Most of these are some sort of email automation tool, some sort of integration of getting information back into your CRM and things along those lines. Have you guys found a need for any of that or has Clearbit really just been so powerful for you that you don't even really need any of that stuff?

Andrew: No, I mean, absolutely. So we use a variety of tools. And I think the big thing with Clearbit is that it's, at the end of the day, the data that you need, and it's up to you kind of how you use it, and it fits into kind of whatever tools you want to use.

We use, I guess, kind of, if I'm thinking through our stack, obviously we have our CRM, currently using Close.io, which has been great. And then we'll use an outbound tool, so something like Persist or Outreach, which really helps.

And again, I think the idea is you don't want to automate away any of that personal interaction. It's really important to be talking to people, right, and not feel like this robotic spam bot, right?

And so at the end of the day these tools are just ways to kind of make that easier for you if you have that data at your fingertips, if you have all of those emails loaded up into whatever kind of outbound tool you're using.

At the end of the day, I would never suggest that people are blindingly sending out 50,000 emails to anyone. But, you know, people do do that.

Yaron: They do, absolutely. And it's become so easy to send out quote unquote personalized emails that people are asking me about my volunteer service and I know you have no interest in that. So don't even put it in the email.

This is purely business. But you mentioned a good point, which is the people aspect and the connection of sales that a lot of people don't really understand, and they think it's kind of this gross thing that needs to happen. Like, salespeople are these evil things that just want to talk to you, take your money and leave.

So taking that in relation to tools, how often do you guys drip to your customers when they're first signing up? Do you just kind of leave it? Do you just send them one email? You guys probably have their phone number. What's your kind of process for outreach initially once a customer signs up?

Andrew: Yeah, so we have an interesting, I guess, customer base in that it's split pretty evenly between developers and sales and marketing folks. The developer market tends to be a little bit more wary of getting a call out of the blue from a salesperson, that's a total turnoff, and we want to respect that. Whereas kind of the sales and marketing crew, they're a little bit more okay with being reached out to, and that's fine.

That said, we don't do any calling. We do have phone numbers, but we don't use them typically. But yeah, we have a typical drip is between three and five emails. I would say it's a little bit on the lower side compared to what some folks use.

And then we are very personalized. So we actually do, because once somebody signs up, they're hit with Clearbit data and routed to the appropriate person. We will actually create manual outreach from that, which will coincide with the drip.

And so we do spend a lot of time just manually sending one-off emails. Hopefully because of our processes they are well-informed emails and very targeted, and they're to the right people that have the kind of highest level of qualification.

Yaron: So you guys are trying to go for hopefully the closest to the decision maker as possible using the information you have.

Andrew: That's absolutely right.

Yaron: So if I sign up, you're not gonna go to my boss right away. You'll come to me first.

Andrew: No, absolutely.

Yaron: Okay. So there's no deviation from the standard cycle in that sense.

Andrew: Not at all. No. I would just say that it just depends, right? So with the information that's coming in, we're able then to send very targeted personalized emails because we have this whole, you know, a hundred data points on somebody, or more actually on the company, rather than the individual. And so we're able to make really informed emails that speak to the correct value proposition, I would say.

No, we're not gonna sidestep people. We never do that because it's just bad business, frankly.

And so no, we're very focused on the folks that have come to us, and especially on inbound.

Developers Versus Sales and Marketing

Yaron: So taking the differentiator, I mean, you guys get it both sides. You get the developers signing up and you also get the sales marketing folks, and those are very two different types of sales, at least from my experience. And what I've seen is normally as a sales engineer, I'm paired with some sort of account executive or some salesperson. Myself taking the developer, working with them, and them taking on the business person.

So you guys see both ends. The big thing is, right, developers don't like to be called. They don't like to really have too much of a discussion. They just want to dig in, see what happens. Whereas the sales and marketing folks, they're, give us a call, we want to demo, we want to talk to you and see what's going on.

Do you treat them any differently on just a step-by-step basis, or they're just getting different personalized emails from one another?

Andrew: Basically our goal is just to approach someone in a way that makes them feel comfortable. With developers, if we just go full bore, heavy pitch, it turns them off, and this is obviously generalizations, but a lot of times it's just like, they'll go to some other platform, and that's just the way it is.

Typically kind of our best move with developers is to get them playing with the tool quickly. And so we're sending more kind of educational pieces on how to implement the API. We're releasing free products, which is something else that's worked really well for us. It has products that they can use for free, start using in their product, within their own development, as kind of an easy way to start using our suite of APIs.

With sales folks, it's just a bit different, right? For us, we still want to get them using the tool, but we've instead built it into systems that they're comfortable with, Salesforce, different ways so they can implement without developer resources. And so we may push them to try to start using maybe our Google Sheets integration, which is very plug-and-play.

Typically we'll want to hop on the phone with them much quicker than we will with the developer set. And then from there, once they've used the tool kind of in something that's easy plug and play for them, it's a lot easier for them to go back and pull developer resources and say, let's build something more bespoke for our company.

But in either case it's about demonstrating value very quickly, and it's just in a kind of wrapper that makes sense for that group.

Yaron: Yeah, and that's great, right? A lot of times people miss that with their tools. They have this thing that for some reason it was a pain point for them. They've developed a whole tool around it, which can only get you so far, but it seems like with Clearbit at least, there's a lot more than just the initial kind of step that you provide, right?

And there's the easy, get started really quickly kind of path for the sales and marketing folks. There's the hands-on, fun to play with integrations you can do as a developer, and both are treated as you imagine they want to be, right? I mean, everybody's different, but for the most part everybody's kind of made to feel comfortable and getting going in the way that they want to, which is great. And I think a lot of new companies are starting to realize that as well.

Andrew: Yeah. And I think actually that goes for not just, we were talking a little bit before we got started that there is kind of a growing kind of similarity between sales and marketing, or at least more tight cooperation. And so that actually goes through, when you talk about growth, a lot of times the idea of growth has more to do with, tends to have more of a product focus than traditional marketing, for instance, or sales.

And so when we talk about the way that we are approaching kind of our email correspondence or calling people, I should also say that the way that we direct folks within the website itself differs depending on the type of person that's signing up, and giving people options to explore in kind of a way that makes them feel comfortable.

And so we put a lot of work into, as soon as you sign up, there is an integration page that gives you the ability to kind of explore the way that you want to. And it very much, in terms of messaging, follows kind of our approach as we reach out to people as well.

Yaron: Nice. That's great to hear. You guys are doing a lot of great stuff over there. I've used the tool, I loved it, especially because I was put into an SDR role. And if I had to go and scrub leads all day, I would hate myself.

Andrew: Right, absolutely.

Yaron: We did have the Salesforce integration built in. I could quickly open up the lead, get the basic information that we need, classify them at least as a first scrub, and then let my AE take it from there to at least kind of get things going.

So totally, a lot of value for us over at Runscope. I'm sure a lot of your clients love you guys as well. So looking forward to a lot of great stuff out of you guys. Thank you again for being on the show.

Andrew: We really appreciate being here.

Yaron: A lot of great information around the sales tools environment, but also making sure to tailor your outreach in a way that people feel comfortable with. And I think you guys are doing a great job with that. So thank you again and all the best to you guys.

Andrew: Thank you.

Yaron: That's all we have time for today. Questions? Feedback? Contact me at roadtogrowth at heavybit.com.

Thanks again to Heavybit for sponsoring our program. To learn more about Heavybit's nine-month program for developer-facing startups, visit heavybit.com.

And while you're there, make sure to check out their library. It's packed with great educational talks from developer company founders and industry leaders. Thanks again for joining us. Have a great week.