Summary

🔴 Challenge: Axios HQ needed to uncover new ways to grow pipeline.

🟡 Solution: After being targeted by UserGems, the team saw firsthand the benefits of a champion tracking playbook. They implemented UserGems and created their own playbook to track past users for new opportunities. 

🟢 Results: $155k pipeline generated within the first quarter and closed 2 UserGems-influenced deals totaling $38k in new business. 

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The challenge

Axios HQ, an internal communications software company, needed to replace its old pipeline playbooks, which were not achieving the results the team wanted.

The Axios HQ team’s challenges were two-fold:

• They wanted to uncover new ways to find and accelerate pipeline
• They were ready to move up-market from SMB to Mid-Market

It was the perfect opportunity for Axios HQ to experiment with pipeline channels, so when they learned about UserGems, they were ready to try something new.

The solution

Jessica Placencia-Perez, Director of Marketing, found UserGems through a recent hire on her team. This person had evaluated UserGems in his previous role, and a rep reached out to reconnect after he started at Axios HQ. 

Axios HQ was familiar with targeting past customers and new-to-role prospects at a small scale, but it was a very manual, labor-intensive process.

The team saw the past champion playbook in action and quickly understood the value of automating past champion outbound for generating new pipeline.

Implementing UserGems gave Axios HQ the resources to proactively track job changes and deliver hyper-personalized campaigns to past users to re-engage them for new opportunities. 

🚨 Key signals:

• Past users of the product, both ICP and non-ICP

Play: Axios HQ tracks past users to find warm paths into accounts

Axios HQ tracks all users of their product with UserGems. If someone has ever used the product, they are considered a warm pathway – ICP or not. 

→ If they are ICP, they are more likely to be a decision maker. 

→ If they are non-ICP, they can connect the sales team with someone who is an ICP at their organization and be an ambassador for the tool. 

UserGems does all the backend work, pushing contacts into their system and flagging and updating old records in Hubspot. Axios HQ then creates custom properties in Hubspot and uses those fields to trigger workflows that alert the sales team. 

Old contacts are marked as non-marketing, which keeps Axios HQ from being charged for inactive emails in HubSpot.

Past user contacts are tiered into categories that receive different messaging based on how likely they are to convert. 

ICP contacts in T1 and T2 are the highest priority – the messaging to these contacts emphasizes their past relationship and confirms if the contacts used the tool regularly and saw value in it. 

The results

✅ $155k in pipeline generated  

✅ 2 UserGems-influenced deals worth $38k in new business closed in one quarter

✅ Higher ACVs indicating a move upmarket 

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