Up-to-date company lists in a few minutes.

No structured way of prospecting

In 2019, when Pernilla Chis joined Exsitec as the company’s first BDR, the sales team used multiple company databases and vendors, and the sales process involved a lot of manual work, from generating lists to researching the companies. “Everybody had their own ways and methods for finding new leads, and there wasn’t a structured way of prospecting. We had Google Drive full of outdated company lists our sales reps could buy whenever they wanted. They rang a few times to these companies, and the lists were of no use after that. You know the drill,” Pernilla recalls. “There were experienced people in the sales team with extensive networks for lead sources. As the team grew, naturally, not all had that kind of a network in place.” As the sales team kept growing, so did the need for one trusted company data vendor and scalable sales processes. Pernilla spearheaded a project to get sales and marketing working together on lead generation, and went looking for the right prospecting tool.

We’ve become substantially more effective in finding and qualifying prospects. Instead of tens of sales reps using a lot of time browsing several websites, we get up-to-date company lists and a good idea about any company’s potential in a few minutes using Vainu.

One prospecting process for 30 reps

Exsitec built a single prospecting process on Vainu, and today it saves 30 sales reps time they put back into customer conversations and meeting preparation. Pernilla keeps Vainu open in Chrome as her go-to place to look up a company, and uses it to qualify inbound leads with a quick check before passing them to a rep. The sales team generates dynamic target groups by industry, size, revenue and technologies in use, then sends those companies to HubSpot CRM with the relevant data points so records stay current. They upload lists of existing clients to find look-alikes and filter out the next best candidates, and they read full company profiles before making contact, including research on companies in Sweden, Norway and Denmark for M&A purposes. For campaigns, the team picks out accounts using a particular technology, such as Mailchimp, a specific CRM or an e-commerce system, sends them to HubSpot and targets them through email sequences. Pernilla also used Vainu to plan an event, checking how the target businesses were spread geographically to choose the location. The key to adoption was involving the new sales trainees in the implementation. Pernilla’s estimate: a minute or two saved at each step of the sales process adds up to hundreds of hours a month in a sales team this size.

After comparing several company data vendors, we chose Vainu because it felt more premium, and the tech side more profound. We always want to work with the best partners and the best tools.

Pernilla Chis, Sales and Marketing Manager in CRM & Ecommerce at Exsitec