Watch this video to see why Kory Himmer, Director of Marketing Analytics at Mimecast, chose UserGems over other tools. Or keep reading below for the full story.
Overview
Here’s the TL;DR:
Challenge: In the fall of 2019, Mimecast’s VP of Commercial Sales noticed that when people leave their customers and go to work elsewhere, they become really good sales leads. Mimecast evaluated LinkedIn Sale Navigator and ZoomInfo, and ended up building an internal manual solution to track these “champions on the move.” None of these solutions worked effectively.
Solution: Mimecast adopted UserGems to track their champions when they move after running a data test that surfaced 10X - 20X movers more than any earlier technologies could surface.
Results: By using UserGems in their pipeline generation workflow, Mimecast generated $18M in new pipeline for sales. Plus, their BDR team loves the warm leads.
Tracking champions on the move before UserGems
“It was terrible, to be honest,” says Kory.
“The internal processes we piloted were oftentimes dependent on individual Marketers, BDRs, and Sales telling us via logging info in Salesforce in a certain way in order to surface these moves,” he continues.
Cloud cybersecurity services tool Mimecast had built an arduous manual process to track champions and customers when they changed jobs after months of evaluating ZoomInfo and LinkedIn Sales Navigator. But they quickly discovered the process needed to be more consistent and trustworthy.
Marketing, BDRs, and Sales had their jobs to do — running marketing campaigns, booking leads for their sales team, or closing deals. So, it was tough incentivizing the team to track these leads manually.
Kory adds, “There was no incentive to do data or CRM clean-up. Linking the past and new records was impossible; our manual and tedious process couldn’t do that.
For Kory, taking advantage of champions on the move came down to overcoming three challenges:
- Completeness of information
- Data accuracy
- Automation
Here’s how UserGems helped Mimecast solve those challenges.
1. Completeness of information
Before UserGems, Mimecast’s manual tracking process struggled to automatically surface and create new contacts in the CRM with their new information.
“UserGems not only automated the process, but it also made the data better. It also surfaced more people that left companies than the other tools,” Kory explains.
2. Data accuracy
Having a handle on champion tracking means knowing when they leave to go work elsewhere and ensuring you are funneling accurate data into your CRM.
Kory says, “When we launched a month after implementation, we had leads hit people’s queues. These leads were accurately assigned and flagged as no longer working at a customer account.”
He continues, “I personally double-checked hundreds of movers from UserGems and looked them up on LinkedIn to validate the accuracy of the information. I saw they went from company A to company B.”
3. Automation
“We were demoing the tech and it wasn’t another generic solution that just flags someone leaving. It automates the entire workflow from capturing that someone has left, creates a new record in our CRM, then adds it to the right sequence under the right owner. This was an ‘Oh, we need to buy this’ moment for me,” Kory says.
Taking their previous experience into account, Mimecast wanted a solution that took away all the grunt work from the team.
Kory explains, “Specifically around creating the link between the past and new records. The other tools we evaluated only flagged and said something cryptic like “this person doesn’t work here”, but did not create a new record at their new org and wouldn’t give any dates, references when they left.”
“After months, quarters, years after these job changes happen, being able to see when this person left this is important being able to disseminate between movers who left the company last month or left 2 years ago so that Marketing and Sales can work these differently,” he continues.
Results
Adopting UserGems has enabled Mimecast to take full advantage of their “Champions on the Move.” Within eight months of using UserGems, Mimecast:
✅ 20X more meetings booked than other pipeline generation channels
✅ In total, generated 276 sales opportunities worth over $18M in new business pipeline
✅ Outside of demo requests, UserGems is the second highest converting channel at Mimecast.
Mimecast’s BDRs have also been some of the biggest beneficiaries of the UserGems program.
“Our BDRs are tasked with generating booked meetings for our Sales team. And they’re measured on booked meetings and having those meetings progress to sales ops,” says Kory.”We’re giving them a small volume that converts to a considerably high rate. If I need to book 10 meetings, I can comb through these leads rather than go through high volume to get one meeting, get my own leads, or use more inefficient ways.”
He continues,”They love them because they know if i can 5-10 of these ‘i’ll get a booked meeting out of this.’ So seeing these leads pop up is a really positive thing that happens to them monthly. It’s referenced in QBR meetings, we get a lot of success stories forwarded to us about leads that they’ve booked meetings with and I can’t say that about all of our programs right now but we can say that about UserGems.”
One UserGems tip
Kory’s number one tip for using UserGems: “Invest in enablement and understanding the program. Spend time creating communication, presentations helping the team understand why it matters and what it does. At Mimecast, different people care about a key customer leaving, and someone else cares about someone joining a prospect — 1 action, 2 outcomes needing to be understood by 2 people.”
“We in the buying committee were involved in the buying process, we saw the demos, so we understand the use cases. But when rolling out the tech, the end-users don't have all the context so they usually don't grasp the use case & benefits as well as we wanted them to. Most technology is self-served but how people are trained and enabled is critical to the success of the programs.”
What’s next for Mimecast with UserGems?
Companies miss 50% of key contacts in their target accounts (Internal UserGems data). So, Mimecast will be exploring the UserGems Account Tracking solution.
“The idea is that instead of picking a company we already have a relationship with, we’re now expanding to target companies we aspirationally want to get into. And UserGems tells us about all relevant contact movements within that account,” Kory explains.
He continues,”We’ll give UserGems a certain number of accounts and UserGems tells me anyone who joins these target companies based on who we are about to monitor over time. The Idea here is: it’s a lead generation tactic to arm our Sales and BDR team.”
Swipe-file: How does Mimecast action the UserGems leads?
Swipe these two playbooks:
- For pipeline generation. When a customer leaves and joins a prospect, Mimecast sends that person as a lead to their BDR team. The BDR gets the lead with a message saying, ‘Hey, Mr. Joe Smith joined company A and used to work for company B who was a customer. Here’s the person at Mimecast who owned the customer engagement. Please reach out to them for more context.’ The BDRs then try to book a meeting referencing their old company.
- For churn prevention. If Joe Smith leaves company B, Mimecast also wants to ensure they can retain and keep their customer happy. Joe leaving is a negative sales trigger and alerts the Customer Success team that a key person in their account has left. This triggers a series of activities by the CSM - such as multithreading other champions within the organization - to keep the account in good health.
Identify your best buyers and act on those insights with UserGems
If you’re looking to turn your buyer and champion job changes and relationship insights into revenue, book a demo or learn more here.
