Customer Story

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How Chargebee grew new pipeline by 300% by getting laser-focused on its ideal customer

Clearbit products used

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Advertising, Alerts, Enrichment, Prospector, Reveal

Use cases

Ad Targeting, Advanced Personalization, Lead Scoring & Routing, Account Prioritization, Visitor Insights

Noise was a big problem for Chargebee

By 2017, Chargebee was already a rising star in the subscription management space, and they had built a successful inbound marketing engine that was generating a lot of traffic and leads. But it became difficult to pinpoint their ideal customer profile (ICP) in a sea of bad-fit clicks and contacts.

Shrimithran, Chargebee’s Sr. Manager, Marketing, and his team knew that in order to unlock the company’s next phase of growth, they needed to minimize inbound noise and identify which leads were their ICP: SaaS and subscription-first companies looking to scale.

As Shrimithran explains, "We used Clearbit to help us move from a 'catch-all, anyone welcome' style of acquisition to a more laser-focused, ICP-first demand marketing strategy."

With a focused funnel they improved pipeline creation by 4x (or 300%) since the beginning of 2020, generated over 10,000 ICP leads, and lowered paid marketing costs. In 2021, Chargebee became a unicorn.

Since getting on board with Clearbit, we’ve improved our net pipeline creation by 4x, quarter over quarter.

Shrimithran
ShrimithranSr. Manager of Marketing, Chargebee

Here are a few ways Chargebee used Clearbit to build a highly efficient demand engine that’s "intent-based, data-driven, and devoid of vanity metrics."

Chargebee founders

Chargebee founders: Rajaraman Santhanam, Saravanan KP, Thiyagarajan T and Krish Subramanian.

How to create an ICP-first demand engine

Turn the light on in the funnel

Shrimithran and his team’s first order of business was to make sense of the mess in their funnel.They needed to know how many ICP leads it had, where they were coming from , and how they were behaving and converting.When they appended company and contact data in HubSpot using Clearbit Enrichment, they could decipher who was in Chargebee’s database and which segments performed best.

They also used Clearbit Reveal to deanonymize their website traffic, then integrated Clearbit data with Google Analytics.This let them see what percentage of their traffic was ICP, and from there, they could understand how to convert ICP visitors better.For example, they created a new metric for ICP-only traffic, MQCs (marketing qualified clicks), so they could cut underperforming keywords and optimize their search engine marketing campaigns for the ICP audience.

Clearbit helps us focus on what actually matters. We believe in running a highly efficient demand engine, which is ICP-first, based on high-intent, data-driven, and completely devoid of vanity metrics. Without Clearbit, this approach would have been just a theory on paper.

Shrimithran
ShrimithranSr. Manager of Marketing, Chargebee

Facebook-driven Event Leads

To drive top-of-funnel (TOFU) and middle-of-funnel (MOFU) acquisition on Facebook, Shrimithran and his team started using Clearbit Advertising.They could launch powerful campaigns that reached all the right people, by creating hyper-targeted audiences based on Chargebee's first-party data and Clearbit’s third-party data. They then seamlessly synced them into Facebook as custom audiences, saving budget and bringing in twice the leads.

Shrimithran reports, With Clearbit Advertising, we are able to bring in ICP leads at about 1/4 of what it would cost on LinkedIn, and probably 2x the volume.”

This new ICP-focused targeting resulted in over 10,000 ICP (top-of-funnel) TOFU prospects attending Chargebee’s industry summits and over 5,000 ICP (middle-of-funnel) MOFU leads participating in product webinars.

Chargebee on Facebook 1
Chargebee on Facebook 2

Full-funnel, intent-based marketing

Next, Shrimithran and his team used the full suite of Clearbit products — a combination of Clearbit Advertising, Clearbit Enrichment, Clearbit Reveal, Clearbit Alerts, and Clearbit Prospector — to power a new full-funnel marketing program that fast-tracks ICP leads, uses intent signals to direct their attention, and bolsters ABM efforts. This new system:

  • Shows on-page, personalized nurture experiences on the Chargebee website.
  • Identifies hot accounts in the inbound funnel to apply a hyper-focus on converting them.
  • Exclusively retargets ICP visitors with Google Ads.
  • Identifies when an ICP account shows intent on the website, then automatically targets multiple contacts at that company with Facebook ads and email sequences to drive awareness.
  • Notifies sales reps when their owned accounts show activity on Chargebee’s website.

Website and Chat Personalization

Shrimithran's team doubled down on personalization by integrating Clearbit Reveal with CustomFit and Drift to customize website and chat experiences for key segments of de-anonymized ICP visitors - without ever needing to collect an email address.

For example, when Chargebee was pursuing a new vertical, Shrimithran explains, "We didn’t want to change the whole website’s messaging to reflect that. With Clearbit Reveal helping us identify traffic from this new industry vertical of e-learning and personalizing the journey for them, we improved the demo conversions for that vertical by about 50%.

Outsized results from improving relevance

Equipped with a deeper understanding of their entire funnel, their best leads, and the data to target and convert them, Shrimithran and his team could create marketing that lived up to Chargebee's core value of customer-centricity. "Our focus on relevance and personalization helps us create those 'wow' moments for current and prospective customers, right from the first touchpoint." explains Shrimithran.

From a conversion point of view, Clearbit helps solve the relevance problem at the source. It helps us prioritize the best kinds of leads, even before lead capture happens, and take them through the best conversion process.

Shrimithran
ShrimithranSr. Manager of Marketing, Chargebee

By using Clearbit to get laser-focused on Chargebee's ICP and create relevant experiences that could wow their most important segments, Shrimithran cut through the inbound noise that obstructed his team.

"Clearbit gives us a competitive advantage by helping us convert our marketing philosophy into reality.... and focus on what actually matters," says Shrimithran.

The results generated by his new approach show the real fruits of that focus. Here they are again:

  • Improved pipeline creation by 300%, while also improving funnel efficiency. MQL to SQL conversion rate has increased from 5% to 22% over the past two years.
  • Decreased paid marketing cost per SQL by 50% while increasing net new paid-generated SQLs by 200%.
  • Generated 10,000+ ICP leads.
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