Challenge

Greenhouse struggled to identify when former users and champions joined target accounts in a consistent and scalable way. Manually conducting this research required too much valuable time from the SDR team and was not scalable. They needed a consistent strategy to efficiently identify and target new opportunities with past users.

Solution

UserGems was implemented to track job changes of former Greenhouse users and decision-makers. UserGems feeds this information into sales automation tools that trigger immediate action. This allows Greenhouse’s SDR team to target leads in a timely manner and with a high level of confidence.

Results

UserGems is consistently one of the top-performing lead generating platforms for Greenhouse. The company has seen approximately 150 opportunities generated through UserGems in 2024. This includes $5.8 million in pipeline and $1.6 million in closed-won revenue across 27 opportunities in less than a year.

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About Greenhouse

Greenhouse is the leading hiring platform to help companies get measurably better at hiring. Its software powers every stage of the hiring process – from sourcing to onboarding – to enable fast, fair and equitable hiring for top talent.

About Kristina Finseth

Kristina Finseth is the Senior Manager II of Growth Marketing at Greenhouse. Kristina and her marketing team jointly own UserGems alongside the SDR leadership team. Together, they choose the UserGems playbooks to generate and nurture leads. Kristina also tracks UserGems’ performance metrics and reports on them to RevOps and sales leadership for insight into what strategies are working and which ones they may need to update.

Before UserGems

Greenhouse identified that targeting past executives and users who had moved to new companies was a great strategy for winning new business. However, it was a challenge to figure out:

• Who changed jobs
• Their past status (champion, user, influencer, etc)
• Whether the new company is a target account

Greenhouse didn’t have a consistent strategy for attacking this group of leads. Instead, SDRs individually leveraged LinkedIn Sales Navigator to identify job changes. 

Research finds that new executives will spend 70% of their budget in their first 100 days, so speed is a crucial factor. Waiting too long could result in an opportunity closing before being considered in the purchase decision. This process was creating missed opportunities for Greenhouse.

Job changes in UserGems

Greenhouse now automatically tracks job changes with UserGems. The Job Changes buying signal works by detecting when a past user or champion of yours moves to a target account. With this buying signal, Greenhouse can make the most of existing relationships to sell into a new organization helping to increase revenue opportunities they may have never known were there.

A buying signal without an action is just noise. However, Greenhouse turns these signals into action with two timely plays:

Play #1: Tracking Job Changes for Pipeline Generation

The first play is for generating leads and driving sales with these contacts at scale. 

1. UserGems identifies a job change for a past user or champion.
2. The new company’s profile is matched with Greenhouse’s ICP to determine if it’s a target account.
3. The system sends an automated Slack notification to the SDR team with all pertinent information for follow-up.some text
   • The notification includes contact info, user status, and new account information.
   • Recommended next steps as well as email templates and content, are provided too!
4. SDRs have 30 days to start working on these leads before an integration with Marketo takes over to automate outreach, ensuring no contact goes untouched.
5. Opportunities are touched 5 times with automated outreach built into Greenhouse’s Job Change playbook!

According to Kristina, “SDRs have confidence in UserGems because they see their peers who leverage UserGems convert these contacts to opportunities at a higher clip. There's just an overall sense of ‘let's prioritize reaching out to these because we know it’s worth it!’”

Play #2: Tracking Job Changes for Churn Prevention

Greenhouse uses the Job Change buying signal for another key play: Churn Prevention.

1. UserGems identifies a Job Change for a Closed Won Opportunity contact, denoted as ‘Most Recent Primary Contact’ or as a decision maker in Salesforce.
2. The system sends an automated notification to the AM and CSM in charge of the current account.some text
   • AMs may get involved when a contract end is upcoming or when the primary owner of the account who received QBRs is in question.
   • CSMs typically take the lead on outreach to ensure a smooth transition of responsibilities within the account.
3. The notifications encourage the AM and CSM to collaborate so they can avoid duplicated efforts and present a united front to the customer.

Aligning Marketing and Sales

Since Kristina’s Growth Marketing team owns UserGems in partnership with Greenhouse’s SDR leadership team, the joint ownership has helped to foster and increase alignment between the departments.

“I think that UserGems just inherently drives alignment between go-to-market teams,” said Kristina. She goes on to add, “If sales is winning, then we're winning on the marketing side too!”

Results

Greenhouse averages approximately 15 opportunities from UserGems each month.

“In less than a year, we've seen approximately $5.8 million in pipeline generated and $1.6 million in closed won revenue across 27 of those opportunities!” said Kristina. “It just further proves that our teams are bought into the power of UserGems.

When we look at attribution reporting on the marketing side and for lead buy programs generating pipeline and revenue, UserGems is always consistently part of the top 3… We keep getting value out of UserGems.”

What’s Next for Greenhouse?

Greenhouse believes in innovation and testing as a way to continuously improve performance. Right now, they are piloting additional buying signals + action playbooks with UserGems to identify additional revenue levers.

They are also working on establishing their process for Promotions and New Hire buying signals which already led to some early success.

Kristina said after the initial interview "We recently added the New Hires & Promotions signal to automatically reach out to new buyers when they join interesting accounts and within the first couple of weeks it began generating another stream of pipeline for us. We consider it a huge win we're already seeing ROI."

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