How UserGems helped WeSpire find and scale warm outbound

Watch this video to learn why Adam Shaw, Head of Demand Generation at WeSpire, and the rest of the WeSpire team love UserGems. Or keep reading below for the full story.

Overview

Here’s the TL;DR:

Challenge: The WeSpire Demand Generation team is a small one. And as they started looking to scale their outbound efforts, Adam needed a plug-and-play tool to get warmer outbound leads in.

Solution: By adopting UserGems, the WeSpire sales team cut a multiple-day manual search for contacts who had changed jobs to 2-3 hours of productive search.

Results: Within two months of implementing UserGems, WeSpire saw 10X ROI in directly-influenced pipeline and open rates of 50 - 70% on their email sequences - up from their average of 25% across other pipeline channels.

The problem

“We needed a way to get more warm outbound to go after.”

WeSpire’s outbound efforts had started to pick up. And they wanted to add another tool to get warmer leads into their pipeline.

Adam explains, “Majority of our outbound efforts were cold at this point. But we had started to see some success with the little warm outbound the team was doing. At this point, we weren’t tracking our customers except for the Sales team keeping basic tabs manually on prospects or champions when they changed jobs.”

That’s where UserGems came in.

Why UserGems?

WeSpire’s primary goals for evaluating a pipeline generation tool were to unlock warm outbound. But that wasn’t the only criterion.

It was important for the tool to be easy to use and set up due to WeSpire’s team size.

“We’re a small team. And UserGems was the most automated plug and play solution we evaluated. Plus our UserGems Customer Success Manager was great,” Adam says.

And UserGems fit into WeSpire’s workflow like a glove.

Adam explains, “Our outbound efforts have become much quicker. A majority of our outbound is now UserGems-provided contacts. And we don’t have to send thousands of emails a quarter to get the numbers we need to get.”

“What used to be a multiple-day journey of identifying contacts, to finding their email addresses, to uploading to HubSpot and writing the sequence is now 2-3 hours max of work for the team,” he continues.

Results

Within two months of implementing UserGems, WeSpire has seen the following:

✅ 10X ROI in UserGems influenced pipeline generated

✅ 50 -70% open rates on their email sequences

✅ An opportunity within the first day of launching the UserGems recommended outreach sequence.

Adam’s stress levels are way down.

“It didn’t take long to realize UserGems was worth it. Once we set up the first sequence, we immediately saw how quickly it would benefit us. The amount of time it takes to launch an outbound campaign to 1000 contacts - building from scratch - is normally 3-4 days.With UserGems, we launched our outbound campaign to 1000 contacts in one hour,” Adam says with a wide grin.

What’s next for WeSpire with UserGems?

Though often framed as a “pipeline generation channel,” warm outbound is much more than a one-trick pony.

And the WeSpire team will be exploring other use cases — majorly retention & expansion.

“Whether it’s a former customer going to another customer account or a former prospect who was maybe a champion in the sales process but went to closed lost or was disqualified because they were too small now going to a company that’s currently a client of ours, we add them as a champion,” Adam says.

He continues, “We work with large companies (10K+ is our sweet spot). So, if we’re looking at a company that use 3 out of our 4 modules, and a champion joins the company, that’s an opportunity to expand our footprint in the company.”

Advice for other demand generation leaders looking to bring on UserGems

Prove to leadership that champions want to come back.

“We ran a small sequence with some job changers we manually identified to see what our open/response rates where before seeking budget from leadership,” Adam says.

And for those who already have the budget? Start small.

He explains, “We started with direct champions, closed won opportunities before scaling the program.”

Adam continues, “It’s exciting to reach out to all of them immediately because it can be a lot of contacts. But go slower. Start small so you can see if you need to make revisions to your messaging. I recommend you always use the UserGems suggested messaging.”