Customer data platform Segment has been using UserGems for over a year. So, Trinity Nguyen, VP, Marketing & Account Development, UserGems, and Steven Farina, Manager, Customer Success Manager, UserGems, sat with Alex Griffin, Director of Global Sales Development, Segment, to understand their experience with UserGems' champion tracking sales play.

Editor’s note: The following has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Trinity: Thank you for making the time. 

Alex: Yeah. It’s so great to see y’all. And nice to meet you, Trinity. 

Trinity: Nice to meet you, Alex. I’m in the Marketing & ADR team here at UserGems. And I’ve heard so many great things about Segment. So, Steven and I thought it would be great to chat briefly to understand how it has been with UserGems so far.

Alex: Well, I hope you know by now, Steven, that I am a big fan of UserGems. So my role at the organization - I oversee our Segment SDR team. We have a global team based out of North America, EMEA, APAC, and LATAM, who all get UserGems leads. 

So, we’ve been using it since October last year. And it’s one of my favorite buckets of leads that come through to our SDRs. They get them monthly, and they follow up. I looked, and in this quarter alone, we’ve gotten 400 leads. All of these leads were accepted by reps to work. And then, we have 63 open opportunities from UserGems leads, which is exciting.

Trinity: I’m sure your team has multiple channels for pipeline. You mentioned that UserGems was one of their favorites. Can you elaborate on why? Any anecdotes would be great.

Alex: Our SDRs have been trying to find this information manually for years, right? They would get on LinkedIn, try to track job changes, and stay in touch with people from different companies. And it gets so messy and inconsistent from rep to rep, as you can imagine. So there was a lot of training around that through the SDRs at first. 

And then when we launched the UserGems and said, ‘you no longer have to take the time to go and do this research on your own and track this down. We’re going to be pushing it to you on a monthly basis for you to then action and follow up.’ 

It was a game changer for their workflows. It’s a much warmer conversation to reach out to someone who knows what Segment is, who has been a part of the buying process, or who used it. And so it’s easy for our SDRs to connect with people. 

Of course, we still get a lot of no responses, right? Just like any type of bucket of individuals you are reaching out to. But it’s a good nurture pipeline for the SDRs. And that’s what we often see them do. They reach out to them as they get the leads. But they also continue to nurture them and circle back over time, which is excellent.

Trinity: You talked about the nurture. Can you touch on the workflow when the UserGems leads arrive? What is the experience like for the SDRs?

Alex: For our SDRs here, the workflow we’ve set up for any leads that come through and the way we’ve bucketed our UserGems leads in particular (because we partner with Marketing on this program, and it comes from the marketing budget), we decided to send them as open marketing qualified leads (MQLs). 

And that also ensures the leads are going to get sequenced. We can also hold the reps accountable for that. So, if I’m a rep at Segment, I’ve got a dashboard where I can see all my open leads and check them daily.

And with UserGems, we get them in bigger dumps at a particular time of the month. We get it on the dashboard. And then, the SDRs have two different sequences they use in outreach to follow up with these leads.

One is messaging around if someone’s been in the role for less than three months. And then the other is if they’ve been in the role for longer than three months. The main difference here is when you’re new to your position, you’re drinking from the firehose. Unless you’re gung-ho and ready to dive into new technology, most of the time, you need a little bit of space and time to get there.

So, it’s a bit longer, a bit more nurture oriented. And we just say, ‘Congrats, we’re excited for you. When the time is right, we’d love to connect.’ And then it kind of circles back later. The other one is more direct and straight to the point because they’ve been in the role for a bit longer. It says, ‘Hey, we’re excited to see this new position, and we’d love to touch base if it makes sense.’ They go through the sequence and then go into a status that says ‘not progress, no response.’ And then, from there, they can continue to be nurtured by Marketing and the SDR.

Trinity: Okay. Marketing comes in as a nurturing after that and hopefully brings them back into the funnel at some point?

Alex: Marketing's doing many things on the backend that our SDRs don't have to see or even deal with. With these marketing qualified leads, we know we’re going to get a high volume of no responses. So, once they get into that status, we’re sending them a monthly nurture email. 

That’s just helping Segment stay top of mind. And if anyone ever replies to that, it’s set up such that it goes straight to the SDR.

Trinity: Got it. So people change jobs, and sometimes they join your target territories or join non-ICP accounts. How does Segment handle that? Is it still going to nurturing, or it's disregarded?

Alex: So, I will say there are a lot of instances for our enterprise SDRs in particular, where job changes will happen, and it’s people moving into roles that aren’t our typical buyer personas. The SDRs make the judgment call at that point on that one.

They either reach out and say, ‘Hey, we love a referral.’ But it all depends on what company they’ve joined, right? If they’re joining a massive organization like Amazon, they aren’t going to know who the right person is to refer us to. It’s just too big. And there are too many people for them to be able to help us in that sense.

So, there are some immediate instances where they’re not getting accepted and put into a sequence because they’re not in a role that would make sense for us to connect with.

Trinity: For other Marketing leaders, SDR leaders, or Sales leaders out there, especially with how things have been this year and how things could be going next year too. Could UserGems be helpful for them to continue to hit their targets, whatever those targets maybe?

Alex:  I agree with that. I mean, I will never not use UserGems again because it’s such an impactful bucket. And it’s a way to stay connected with people who have gone through the process in any organization. There’s so much value in that. 

I’ve worked at many companies where we’ve tried to do this manually. And UserGems removes that inconsistent manual work. I’m excited because, after a year, our AEs understand these leads' importance and prioritize them with their SDRs. 

Globally, we have like 200 AEs. So, it’s hard to ensure everyone is up to speed on the different plays we’re running. But because we just had such excellent traction with NerdWallet. I don’t know if you heard about our recent win with NerdWallet. Everyone is like, ‘UserGems, I wanna be all over this.’

Trinity: That's amazing. So, you mentioned that when you have a sales team of 200 people, it’s tough to get someone to adopt all the plays and do it consistently. I want to tie that piece back to automation. When the UserGems leads show up, the SDRs go through them and put them into outreach. Does Segment automatically route them to a specific outreach, or do the SDRs select?

Alex: They select. So, we still put that human action into place because, again, we want the SDRs to confirm that these leads have moved into a new title or position that makes sense for our buyer persona and organization.

And to determine how long they’ve been in the role since they’ve moved. And then put them into the correct sequence based on that. So there’s still that human decision making and touchpoint that happens for follow-up. 

Trinity: Gotcha. That makes sense.

Alex: But they are automatically routed. It’s not just like a free-for-all. They’re assigned leads going to specific reps based on our territories.

Trinity: Makes sense. My last question is with the holidays coming up, and you’re going to be with a lot of family and friends, how would you describe UserGems to your grandma?

Alex: A miracle. I’m just kidding. But honestly, the same way I’ve been talking about it with all of you. You know, if you’ve worked at a couple of different tech companies and you've gone through different seasons of selling, where obviously there's really profitable, and ones that have a lot of prosperity and you don’t have to worry about getting scrappy and creative because things are just flooding in.

And then there are other seasons where you have to be strategic. And you have to leverage all the warm relationships you’ve built and all the interactions you’ve had. And UserGems is such a major bucket for that.

Again, it's people who have intentionally interacted with the product and the brand before. And it's being able to connect directly with them again and continue to try to get new customers aligned with that.  Of course, it makes sense to their business initiatives and priorities.

I find so much value in these leads. I’m mad that I didn’t know y’ll existed before coming here because we were working off of spreadsheets. We were going to cross-functional business partners - CS was trying to keep us updated as champions would leave. And we would have to go and track them.

And it’s inconsistent. And this puts that consistency in place to maintain relationships—bottom line. 

Trinity: This is amazing to hear, Alex. 

Steven: Alex has the best quotes. I was so pumped when you agreed to a case study.

Alex: I want to show you the other thing we did with UserGems. We just wanted to have some fun with it. So we have the UserGems fairy.

Trinity: I heard about the UserGems fairy. This is incredible.

Alex: Every month, we get the documents updated with new leads, and once they’re routed to the SDRs. We do a notification to the team saying, 'Hey, sprinkle sprinkle, UserGems leads are here.'

And everyone gets so excited. We always remind them where to find the leads and the best way to action them. And we share wins. It’s fun. It's a way to break through the noise and the typical norm of how we give updates to the team.

Steven: Love it. I love the little gem icons at the bottom of the fairy.

Trinity: Even the shirt. The Fairy has UG on there too. Thank you so much, Alex.

Alex: You’re so welcome. I want y’ll to know I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t believe in these leads. And we continue to see time and time again how much value there is in the discussions that are taking place. From a closed-won perspective, there’s been a handful of deals. 

NerdWallet definitely being the highest. But with NerdWallet, the amount it closed for has paid for UserGems for the next four years. That’s incredible. That makes it so worth it just right there alone. And even if these aren’t reaching closed won immediately, they’re great conversations we’re having and can keep having.

I’m a big advocate for UserGems.

Trinity: Thank you so much. This is great.

Steven: Thanks so much, Alex. Appreciate you.

Alex: Bye.

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