Watch this video to learn why Rob Kiser, Director, Product, and the Diligent team love UserGems. Or keep scrolling for the whole story. 

So, what brought Diligent to UserGems?

Here’s the TL;DR:

Challenge: Diligent’s SDRs were seeing a lot of success from identifying past users and buyers who had changed jobs. But the process was manual, ad-hoc, difficult to track, and even harder to scale. 

Solution: Diligent identified UserGems as a solution to operationalize their job change workflow and be in the back pocket of their seller’s toolkits. 

Results: By using UserGems in their pipeline generation workflow, Diligent’s SDR team became more effective at identifying valuable job changes ( “Gems”) in their territory. This resulted in 30X ROI in pipeline generated from UserGems-influenced opportunities. 

The problem

It’s one thing to identify a potentially viable pipeline channel. It's another thing to scale up the channel. This was the case for Diligent, a corporate governance and compliance platform.

Rob quips, “We noticed our SDRs were having a lot of success by identifying past users and buyers who had moved to new roles in new companies. It was one of their most effective prospecting and outbounding strategies.”

“But we didn’t have a formal process in place. They had to manually go through LinkedIn and ZoomInfo to search who was at a new job and was a previous customer. Then the sales rep would manually create the contact in Salesforce as a rep-sourced lead. We needed a way to make this scalable and trackable,” he continues. 

Asides from the manual and ad-hoc process that saw reps flitting across multiple tools, Rob and the rest of Diligent’s revenue team couldn't place a number on the size of this pool of “forgotten Gems.”

And that’s when Diligent’s Sales team started looking to operationalize the job change play.

The solution

“Our Sales team asked that we operationalize the job change play as they were seeing great success via the manual approach. After evaluating different vendors, it was obvious the most efficient way to identify previous champions moving to new jobs was UserGems,” Rob says.

Why? 

Rob explains, “During the UserGems sales process, we ran a data test.And it was an eye-opener. We saw thousands of job changes from our ideal persona that we had missed out on by tracking it manually.”

Diligent has a good sense of the roles their target buyers move into based on the different solutions they sell. So they focused on using UserGems to capture the following buyer job changes (“Gems”):

• Primary contacts on closed won opportunities
• Diligent users
• Relevant titles within customer accounts that could know Diligent.

Results 

Diligent’s approach to the job change prospecting play has significantly impacted its success.

Each month, the team gets a new batch of UserGems contacts sorted by the most recent job change in Salesforce. These contacts are fed into relevant Outreach sequences based on their relationship with Diligent at their last company and their new role. The SDRs take over from there and manage the sequences.

Because of these, it has these results to be proud of:

✅ 30X ROI in pipeline generated

✅ 40 - 50% response rates on their Outreach sequences

✅ 3X higher return than other outbound tools 

While pipeline generation and high response rates are vital components of Diligent’s performance, increased efficiency across the team has also been among the stars of the show.

Rob quips, “We’re way more efficient. And we can give ourselves way more at-bats because identifying job changes is so much faster. It’s easy to see what account that individual has been at and what products they used.”

He continues, “UserGems provides a lot of critical account information alongside the contacts. So, identifying Gems and the relevant sequences/messages moves a lot faster than it did in the past.”

Within the first week, Diligent’s Sales team could already see the value of UserGems and how easy it was to run the job change prospecting play they had been doing manually. 

Rob explains, “The positive feedback from the Sales team was almost immediate. It was, ‘Wow, this is super easy to identify job changes. And the response rates are great.’”

How Diligent runs the UserGems play 

Diligent sells many products - which means they usually speak to a relatively broad audience. 

They run two sales motions with multiple sequences to get the best results. The sequences are determined by who influences the sales process and the target buyer. 

Sales motion 1: The M sales motion

Think of this sales motion like an image of the letter M. Diligent starts the process from the bottom (product users) to the top (leaders), then back to the users and the top again. 

The sequence here is focused on using end users as a groundswell. 

Rob adds, “ We find out information about the company, the pain points, what tools they’re currently using, etc. And then we use all that information and go up to the executives saying, ‘Hey, i talked to XYZ on your team, there are your painpoints and this is how I can help.’”

“In SaaS, your typical buying committee is 12 people. So, the M sales motions helps us start at the bottom and go back up to leadership then back down again. This way, we cover the different needs of all the people who’ll be using the product. And then figure out a path forward to creating and closing a deal,” he continues.

Sales motion 2: The W sales motion

The W sales motion is the reverse of the previous sales motion. 

Rob explains, “It’s a different starting point - from the top/leadership. But at the same time, what you’re really doing is leveraging the familiarity built by past relationships.”

Diligent runs two sequences with the W sales motion.

Here’s Rob on the nitty-gritty of the two sequences. 

The executive level sequence:

“These are not our buyers. But they’re very influential in the process. They rarely show up as the primary contact on a sales opportunity. But they are very influential in that process since they do work with our flagship tool which is designed for executives and board members. They are less likely to respond to outreach because they have more on their plate. So, we call back to the past relationship and ask them for a referral to a board admin or whoever is in charge of entity management.”

The buyer sequence: 

“With the decision makers, we take a more direct approach. If it’s a previous champion or buyer, we acknowledge the previous relationship or previous buying experience and ask whether or not they're looking to make a change at their current company.”

One UserGems tip

Rob’s number one tip for anyone starting with UserGems or considering investing in the pipeline generation tool: 

“We’ve discovered there are more creative ways to use it than just the immediate job change.”

For example, sales reps (AE) can leverage UserGems to accelerate deals.

“We’ve had reps who opened up opportunities and went back into UserGems to identify all Gems in the account they may not have been assigned to or didn’t initially follow up on to build a coalition within the organization. And these become part of the usual 12-person buying committee you typically see in SaaS.”

“It’s more like not looking at the job changer as a potential buyer. But as someone you can multithread during a deal. Or someone who can lend support to an opportunity that’s already in flight.”

One Product Marketing tip

We ask every customer we interview for a tip for someone in a similar role.

Here’s Rob’s tip for Product Marketers: Build credibility with your Sales team. You can have the most fantastic idea in the world. But if the Sales team doesn’t buy in and isn’t willing to execute it how it needs to be performed to be successful, you’re up a creek.

“We had been looking into other tools to better enable outbound. But UserGems wasn’t on my radar. Sales asked us to make the job change outbound for them. So, in an effort to build credibility with Sales, and knowing they were bought into this motion already, I stumbled backward into a great tool in UserGems.”

“And in the process, I built credibility for other ideas I had and other tools we wanted to implement. So, listen to your sellers. They’re a valuable resource. And your success or failure hinges upon their ability and willingness to execute.”

Support your sales teams with UserGems

Book a demo or learn more here if you want to turn your buyer and champion job changes and relationship insights into revenue.