How Contractbook doubled outbound response rates with Clearbit

A few years ago, Lukas Lukosevicius, Growth and Marketing Ops at Contractbook, was binge-watching webinars with Guillaume Cabane, Co-Founder and GP at HyperGrowth Partners, when he came across Clearbit. At that point, Contractbook was a seed-stage company focused on building the foundation of their business. It was too early in their journey for all of the growth projects Lukas wanted to run, but as he says, “I always knew we’d get Clearbit at some point.”

Contractbook, a contract management platform, automates the process of high-volume repetitive contracts like NDAs and sales agreements. Contractbook provides rapidly growing startups like Pavilion, Walnut, and Verbit with a way to automate workflows and sync contract data across business systems.

Lukas is on the Growth and Marketing Operations team at Contractbook and is responsible for tracking, analytics, and go-to-market processes like lead scoring and enrichment. His main goals are creating processes that optimize for pipeline, building an efficient acquisition engine, and making sure systems benefit the end users. “I want to make sure that the handoff from marketing to sales to customer success is as smooth as possible,” shares Lukas.

When Lukas noticed that they were seeing diminishing returns on paid ads, he knew they needed to find new ways to fill the top of the funnel. With Contractbook in hyper-growth mode and Clearbit’s release of the Weekly Visitor Report, a free tool that identifies the companies that visit your website most each week, he felt it was the right time to partner with the Clearbit team.

Looking to scale outbound efforts

At the same time that Lukas and his team were seeing diminishing returns on paid ads, the sales team was growing. Contractbook was entering their next stage of growth and needed to ramp up their outbound efforts.

However, their inbound lead volume wasn’t scaling fast enough to support the number of sales reps on the team. As company revenue targets were increasing, Lukas and the team realized they needed to increase the volume of high-quality prospects coming into the funnel. With a focus on efficiency, the Contractbook team also needed to find ways to lower customer acquisition costs.

In an attempt to continue filling the funnel, the sales team initially did basic outbound using LinkedIn automation. They selected good-fit prospects based on firmographic traits and then reached out to as many people as possible. However, this approach wasn’t generating enough qualified opportunities or ultimately driving revenue.

Lukas knew that more could be done and hypothesized that higher-intent prospects were more likely to convert.

Increasing response rates with intent-based outreach

At the same time that Lukas and the team started discussing how to generate more high-quality leads for the sales team, Clearbit released the Weekly Visitor Report, a free weekly dashboard showing companies visiting your website. Lukas had hoped for an opportunity to work with Clearbit and now was the perfect time.

To determine if his hypothesis was true that higher-intent prospects were more likely to convert, Lukas decided to run an experiment with the sales team.

For the evaluation process, the sales team tested an identical outbound sequence on two groups, “ICP cold accounts” (no previous touches, not identified by Clearbit) and “ICP intent accounts” (no previous touches, identified by Clearbit using the Weekly Visitor Report, with high-intent page views on the website).

The results spoke for themselves. The Contractbook team saw a 2x increase in response rates from “ICP Intent Accounts” and a 10% increase in opportunities created.

Intent-based outreach was a success and the results indicated that the team could increase net-new qualified outbound account volume and generate more pipeline from high-intent accounts identified by Clearbit.

Growing their business with Clearbit

While using the Weekly Visitor Report, Lukas and the team were also evaluating other B2B marketing intelligence solutions.

“We were looking at the match rates on the website. With other vendors, that was difficult to evaluate, but with the Weekly Visitor Report, understanding Clearbit’s match rates was straightforward,” says Lukas.

Lukas and the team saw much higher match rates with the Weekly Visitor Report than with other tools they were evaluating. The higher match rates in combination with the uplift in response rates from the outbound experiment helped him make the case to internal stakeholders that they should become paying Clearbit customers.

“The fact that we could already pull up a report and show companies (and impressive logos) visiting our site blew everyone’s mind,” Lukas shares.

In addition to capturing intent for outbound efforts, Lukas also knew that Clearbit would provide him with the tools to stand out in a competitive market. He felt Clearbit was the right partner to help Contractbook get to the next stage of growth.

Upgrading from the Weekly Visitor Report to the Clearbit Data Activation Platform has enabled Contractbook to tackle many more initiatives across go-to-market teams.

Prioritizing accounts based on intent signals

Using Clearbit Reveal, Lukas and his team have built out a more robust process to prioritize and deliver high-quality accounts showing intent to the sales team.

The team has expanded beyond the original outbound test and now have multiple alerts set up to close new customers and expand existing customers. For example, the sales and account management teams at Contractbook use Clearbit to:

• Find closed-lost opportunities that are resurfacing on the website
• Determine the intent level during negotiation by identifying visitors looking at legal notices
• Assess the buying committee size by identifying the number of contacts at an account visiting the website
• Track existing customers visiting product pages to identify possible upsells
• Check website visitor logs before demos to get a better idea of what the prospect is most interested in seeing

The ability to easily create alerts and identify when key audiences are on the website has empowered the sales team to find new ways to grow their business. Lukas works closely with the sales team and shares, “I’ve onboarded quite a few sales reps, and pulling up a list of companies showing intent definitely leads to an ‘aha’ moment, and they love playing around with the filters themselves.”

The Contractbook team also uses Clearbit Enrichment, which helps reps save time, and increases speed to lead. The sales team can now access enriched lead, contact, and account information in HubSpot without any manual research on their end. Prior to using Clearbit, “Most of the lead enrichment was done by the sales team. They would have to manually look up the lead on LinkedIn,” shares Lukas. Now with Clearbit, they can filter lists quickly and easily and spend more time on closing customers.

Driving advanced personalization with better visitor insights

The Contractbook marketing team also utilizes insights from Clearbit to prioritize their efforts and ultimately drive more revenue.

“We needed insights into how landing pages were converting and how campaigns were performing,” says Lukas.

Prior to using Clearbit, the Contractbook marketing team used filters in Google Analytics to try to identify user journeys, but it lacked the granularity they needed to make informed campaign decisions. For example, the content team knew that their blog posts were generating high volumes of traffic and could identify where the traffic was coming from, but they weren’t sure if the visitors were in their target audience.

With Clearbit, the Contractbook team has access to data that powers in-depth analytics, helping them craft better buyer journeys by understanding who is visiting which pages. In Google Analytics, they can now see how many contacts within their ICP visited pages on the website to understand what’s performing well, and what could be improved.

With the insights Clearbit provides, Lukas and the team are able to activate their ICP across the website. They display specific offers and information based on the visitor’s company size. For example, smaller companies are directed to the self-serve flow while visitors at larger companies are prompted to book a demo. To drive more SQLs from larger companies Lukas also tested removing specific pricing information on the pricing page. This experiment resulted in a 679% increase in conversions. The Contractbook team also allows qualified visitors to book a demo directly on a sales rep’s calendar and serves custom chat playbooks for high-fit accounts.

Targeting small tech companies to push them to the self-serve/product-led flow

The Contractbook team changes CTAs based on whether a website visitor is in their ICP. For example, non-ICP visitors are sent to the self-serve flow.

With so many opportunities to iterate and improve across go-to-market teams, Lukas is excited about what the future holds and can’t wait to keep building with Clearbit. He’s already working on launching more targeted ad campaigns to drive lower costs, exploring new use cases for automation, and much more to continue to stand out in a crowded market.

“Traditional sales and marketing activities are necessary to keep the lights on, but just relying on that alone puts us at a pretty level playing field. We need to find ways to differentiate ourselves,” shares Lukas. Clearbit is helping him do just that.