Case Study Overview
The customer
Seattle-based research firm, PitchBook, provides access to comprehensive data and insights on the evolving financial markets.
The challenge
In early 2020, the company set aggressive sales and revenue goals — objectives that translated into a need for the marketing team to generate substantially more pipeline.
The payoff
In three months, PitchBook saw:
170% increase in opportunities
79% increase in website visits by target accounts
220% increase in accounts engaging with their brand
Read the full story >The customer
Seattle-based research firm, PitchBook, provides access to comprehensive data and insights on the evolving financial markets. More than 45,0000 customers worldwide rely on PitchBook for its central, easy to use platform that provides access to the broadest and more powerful collection of data and insights on venture capital, private equity, M&A and public equity markets.
The challenge
In early 2020, the company set aggressive sales and revenue goals—objectives that translated into a need for the marketing team to generate substantially more leads. The sales team was also required to accelerate activity, with reps now expected to take a more account-based approach to their prospecting.
On top of it all, the global pandemic and its economic effects meant that the list of companies fitting PitchBook’s ideal customer profile (ICP) was evolving quickly, making it hard to keep up with who they should be targeting. Buyers have also been distracted in 2020 (no surprise) so the team was dealing with extended sales cycles that required more touchpoints to generate opportunities.
But PitchBook VP of Marketing, Steve Bendt, has long believed that with challenge comes opportunity. In times of change, his m.o. is to gather talented brains in one room where the mandate is to figure ‘how we do this’ not dwell on ‘why we can’t’. This can-do attitude resulted in a more advanced ABM strategy at PitchBook that helped the team measurably generate more opportunities, even amidst some of the most challenging circumstances they’ve faced.
The payoff
The new strategy aligned marketing programs with sales priorities by syncing laser-targeted marketing air cover with the accounts prioritized for outreach by the sales team. And the PitchBook team was actually able to directly measure how much this paid off. With a data-driven mindset, they decided to test delivering targeted, account-based ads alongside the sales outreach.
The results were clear: after 3 months they’d seen a 170% increase in opportunities generated from accounts that got air cover ads through RollWorks. They also recorded a 79% increase in website visits by target accounts and a 220% increase in accounts actively engaging with their brand.
The "how"
So how did they do it? PitchBook’s success was based on a few tried and true account-based marketing strategies, as well as some newer approaches.
First, they layered RollWorks’s account scoring on top of their ever-changing ICP to prioritize marketing and sales resources. PitchBook used our machine learning technology to build a custom predictive model which scored a list of 2,000 accounts based on ICP fit. The result was a 300-account list of higher probability prospects on which they focused their spend.
And here’s where they took it one step further than most companies do -- because of their unique position as a data provider, PitchBook was able to use their own platform alongside RollWorks to identify ICP accounts in near real time, by factoring in rapidly changing technographic dynamics like new funding and financial results.
They also integrated RollWorks with Salesforce so they could deploy programs specific to the account’s stage in the funnel. This was critical to ensuring they were delivering the right message to the right account at the right time, in sync with their sales team’s outreach efforts. And they ran their account-based campaigns across the web and LinkedIn, to maximize reach.
With the combination of RollWorks, Salesforce, LinkedIn, and their own data, the PitchBook team can target a dynamically synced list of accounts from Salesforce, or find and engage additional best-fit accounts using RollWorks’s database, then automate the activation of these newly discovered high-priority accounts on LinkedIn.
Given the strong results they’ve seen this year, the PitchBook team will continue to invest in ABM and further optimize their account-based investments across channels in the coming year.
