As a company, LeanData is blessed to have a customer base that loves its revenue orchestration solutions. 

So, when one of the product users from LeanData’s portfolio of over 1,000 customer accounts leaves to join another organization, it opens up a potential expansion opportunity. LeanData terms this a “customer virality play,” where the LeanData and UserGems platforms integrate to drive repeat business by accelerating the identification of relevant buyers, improving lead and contact assignment accuracy, and re-routing lost opportunities for follow up. 

This post describes how this revenue orchestration play is executed. However, let’s first define “customer virality.”

What is customer virality?

A critical component to any outbound strategy is tapping into relationships with past customers. Previous customers refer more people, promote our business, and have a higher chance of converting. They already have an excellent understanding of our products and solutions, and they don’t need the education or extensive meetings characteristic of the typical SaaS buying journey.

LeanData defines customer virality as the set of circumstances that leads a customer to evangelize the LeanData product, solution and experience, sharing with their professional networks. 

Importantly, customer virality results in a previous customer bringing the LeanData solution suite with them to subsequent stops in their career ladder. When customer virality works, previous LeanData customers become repeat LeanData customers.

Job turnover & its effect on marketing to previous customers

A recent Pew Research study found 2.5 percent of workers — or approximately 4 million people — switched jobs each month in 2022. This equates to a 30 percent annual turnover of workers. As such, identifying previous customers can be a significant challenge to any customer virality play. 

One solution is to pore over LinkedIn. And, while that task can be performed, its manual nature is both time-consuming and expensive. More importantly, it simply won’t scale. 

Enter UserGems, a Salesforce-native application that supports customer virality by alerting sales reps when opportunity contacts and former customers change companies. At LeanData, our RevOps team integrates UserGems with LeanData’s own revenue orchestration platform to execute on customer virality and drive sales pipeline growth.

Defining LeanData’s viral customers & opportunities

LeanData’s customer virality play breaks previous customers and potential buyers into the following four categories:

1. Past Champion Contact: Initially identified post-sale as a power user or champion of LeanData, this contact has now moved to a new company.
2. Past “Closed Won Opportunity” Contact: Previously added as a contact role to a Closed/Won Opportunity in Salesforce, this contact has now moved to a new company.
3. Past “Open Opportunity” Contact: Previously added to an Open Opportunity in Salesforce, this contact has moved to a new company.
4. Past “Closed Lost Opportunity” Contact: Previously added to a Closed/Lost Opportunity in Salesforce, this contact has moved to a new company.

While the first contact category includes past LeanData administrators and the like, the last three categories represent prospective customers who were likely once members of a buying group or buying committee. As such, they typically have a good understanding of LeanData, having already evaluated and/or purchased our solutions.

Integrating UserGems into LeanData Routing

Once surfaced by UserGems, each category of potential buyer is automatically entered into a workflow in LeanData Routing. The following four steps summarize the automated actions shown in the graph.

Step 1: The LeanData routing scheduler automatically creates or updates new records for new job changes detected by UserGems (this can also be performed with the LeanData UserGems trigger node).

Step 2: LeanData Lead-to-Account Matching attaches new leads to accounts or updates existing contact records, and converts new leads to a contact. Leads and contacts from assigned accounts get routed to their respective owners, while those attached to unassigned accounts get distributed to round robin accounts. Various alerts are sent to reps, taking into consideration, for instance, accounts or contacts that may already be active in an open deal cycle or Outreach sequence.

Step 3: LeanData automates Slack alerts to the appropriate account executive (AE) or sales development representative (SDR) with context and the appropriate call to action. SDRs research the contact and account, strategize with their AE, and follow up within 48 hours.

Step 4: LeanData automatically enrolls the prospective customer into a persona-based Outreach sequence.

Contextual outbound motions supported by Slack alerts

When the LeanData FlowBuilder graph automates a Slack alert to the appropriate LeanData sales rep, the alert is complete with contextual information that helps personalize any proactive outreach. This contextual information includes the contact’s past relationship with LeanData, as well as their new job title, start date, company name, and new email address. 

The LeanData sales rep simply clicks on the contact name in the Slack alert and is taken to the contact record in Salesforce. The contact record now includes a section for UserGems, providing context into the contact’s past interactions with LeanData. The sales rep can investigate the previous account or opportunity to gain intelligence, or potentially identify a LeanData teammate to help make a warm introduction. 

Test, learn & repeat

Upon launching UserGems-powered customer virality play, the LeanData revenue team was able to generate $100,000 in new sales pipeline in just over one week. Importantly, the open rates for SDRs’ Outreach sequences proved higher than usual while overall bounce rates were similar to other non-UserGems campaigns. 

This entire customer virality play is monitored and maintained by one RevOps professional, amongst all her other duties — a considerable time savings when compared with the custom code and manpower necessary to duplicate this same go-to-market play in Salesforce. Additionally, LeanData’s no-code, drag-and-drop platform makes it easy to evaluate the motion through detailed audit logs, and make any necessary changes in real time.

Integrating LeanData and UserGems is a game changer. Taking a manual process that’s difficult to scale and automate, but adds tremendous value, and turning it into a process that’s automated, efficient, and generates pipeline more quickly is a “no-brainer.” 

By combining UserGems and LeanData, revenue teams gain a powerful edge in lead generation, management and conversion, ultimately driving more sales pipeline and revenue.

Why UserGems

UserGems is a pipeline generation software that helps revenue teams generate and protect revenue efficiently. With UserGems, companies can track and automate outreach when their champions change their jobs, and capture the buying groups to find the warmest path into every account.

Companies like Mimecast, Greenhouse, Medallia use UserGems to reach their revenue goals, quickly and efficiently.