Intercom increases sales pipeline with Clearbit Prospector

Intercom gives their sales team fresh, accurate, and highly qualified leads — directly within Salesforce.

Intercom builds messaging products for sales, marketing & customer service. Designed to feel like the messaging apps you use every day, Intercom lets you talk to consumers almost anywhere: inside your app, on your website, across social media and via email. Today more than 20,000 businesses use Intercom to connect with over a billion people worldwide. Based in Dublin, and San Francisco, Intercom’s sales team is focused on serving primarily mid-market and enterprise customers.

Intercom wanted to increase sales leads without wasting rep time on manual prospecting and data cleanup. However, most solutions they evaluated had poor coverage on their target customer segment, and high bounce rates on email delivery.

Here’s how Intercom used the Clearbit Salesforce integration to start generating 2,700 new sales qualified leads each week.

The Challenge

Until recently, Intercom acquired all of those customers through their inbound strategy. But when LB Harvey started as VP of sales, she wanted to ramp up their outbound initiative. To do that, she brought in Arvind Ramesh from Intercom's analytics team to find a solution that would make this ambitious undertaking manageable.

“From the get-go, the Intercom outbound sales project was designed to be scalable,” says Arvind. “We knew we were never going to prospect manually and so we needed the right tool to import new accounts at scale.”

That tool was Clearbit Prospector for Salesforce.

The Solution

The team was already using Clearbit for Salesforce data append and enrichment. However, they wanted an easy way to identify their next prospects, bring them information into Salesforce, and have accurate contact details for the sales team.

“We use Clearbit to support our outbound sales because of the level of detail and accuracy their tools provide,” said Arvind.

Arvind saw that the team had two options:

• Build something in-house and pull developer resources away from existing projects. Even with reliable data from the Clearbit Prospector API, the team would have to write proprietary scripts and a Salesforce plugin to update the contacts and find a way to tie everything together. That seemed less than ideal.
• Outsource to an existing tool. The Intercom team tested a number of prospecting solutions. Arvind was dissatisfied with each of these alternate tools for three main reasons:
  • Level of granularity available: some solutions could get high-level company data, but broke down on contact-level information.
  • Quality of data: There was incorrect labeling in some datasets and low coverage of the B2B SaaS market .
  • Poor built in Salesforce deduplication: It was essential to not reach out to current customers or contacts with an active opportunity.

“The level of detail available through Clearbit Prospector was greater than any of the other tools we considered,” said Arvind. “Qualitatively, Clearbit solved the biggest hurdles around getting the information our sales team needs to do their jobs effectively.”

The Result

LB Harvey saw her idea and Clearbit Prospector implemented across Intercom's entire sales team in a matter of days.

Intercom reps use Clearbit Prospector to discover and connect with the right people at the right companies. Prospective leads are automatically added to Salesforce where they are further enriched with actionable lead intelligence. There were two key results from Intercom using Clearbit Prospector in Salesforce:

• It took just three weeks from the initial decision to a full outbound implementation - actively emailing over 2,700 leads per month.
• Outbound reps experienced their lowest bounce rates to date with their new Clearbit campaigns, driving more sales in a shorter period of time than ever before.