How Planhat uses Vainu to find ICP companies and keep its CRM data accurate

Key takeaways

• Planhat is a customer management platform founded in 2014 in Stockholm, Sweden, which now has a global presence.
• Because it operates in a horizontal market, it was difficult for Planhat to define its Total Addressable Market (TAM).
• With help from Vainu's similarity feature, Planhat was able to implement a systematic approach to defining its TAM.
• Vainu saves Planhat, specifically Alexander, time by automatically keeping the data in its CRM up to date and accurate.

The company

Planhat is a customer success software business that was founded in 2014 in  Stockholm, Sweden in response to the rise to a recurring revenue economy. Since then, Planhat has grown to have a worldwide presence, with its team being spread across Europe, North America, South America, and Asia-Pacific. Today, their SaaS platform enables more than 400 customers to more effectively manage their customers by generating actionable customer insights. 

The challenge

Alexander Ehrensvard is the main user of Vainu at Planhat, and in his role as Head of Business Development, his main concern is the company's pre-sales pipeline. That means he's focused on ensuring that Planhat has a good flow of inbound leads and enabling the sales teams to be successful in their outbound efforts. 

So, what challenge could Vainu help Planhat deal with? Well, according to Alexander, as you're scaling a company or a team, you'll want to have a very clear understanding of what your Total Addressable Market (TAM) is, and in Alexander's own words, "defining the TAM for a very horizontal product is a very difficult thing because you will find fits in various different industries and industry verticals."

Thankfully, Vainu could help Planhat find their TAM—as well as some other things.

The use cases

Finding their Total Addressable Market (TAM)

As Alexander explained, a company needs to find its TAM, but unfortunately, it is not always easy to sell a horizontal product. Unlike companies offering solutions to a specific vertical, for companies whose offering meets the needs of buyers across different sectors, "you may get a customer in one vertical, but that doesn't mean that entire vertical is now your TAM," Alexander explains.

Because of this, Planhat and other companies whose offerings are not vertical-specific need a different way to define their TAM. For Planhat, Vainu's similarity score provided a solution.

As Alexander explains, "A key feature that we use in Vainu is similarity scoring because sometimes the use cases are similar in very different industries, and then it might make more sense to look at a distance score metric between two different companies and use that to define your TAM by [selecting a good-fit company] and then setting a threshold for how far away companies can be from that company."

This meant that Alexander and his team could find one company that they knew fitted into their TAM and then use Vainu's similarity scores to find the companies that were the most similar to that company.

When asked what his favorite feature in Vainu is, Alexander replied, "The similarity feature is definitely a favorite...It just makes a lot of sense... to work with your TAM this way. It's dynamic, it's exponential... A rep selects one company they like, and then you get ten. And then you take those ten, validate four of those companies, send them back, and get forty more companies... It's such a good way to work with market mapping." 

Alexander especially likes the similarity feature because it will always be much more specific, unlike traditional industry codes or even Vainu Custom Industries.      "[Using industry codes is] never going to be as good as "It needs to be similar to this exact company." [With industry codes], you're still trying to box in a bunch of companies and say, "ok, this is good enough." But if you have a very high degree of confidence in certain companies that you know are good to prospect, I think building similarity audiences based on those is a good idea," Alexander explains.

Achieving good data hygiene in their CRM

Planhat uses HubSpot as their CRM, and as people who use HubSpot will know, HubSpot can provide good coverage for a range of data points about the companies in your CRM. One (potential) issue is that HubSpot pulls from various data providers, which may use different formats when structuring their data. For example, some data providers may refer to America as the "US," while others may refer to it as "The United States of America," which can make segmenting a "horror show," according to Alexander.

So, it's important to know which data provider you're using, how they structure their data, and then use them for the specific thing that they're good at, "it makes a lot of sense to know what data provider you're working with, so you can use them for what they are the best at," Alexander explains. 

So, to help Planhat achieve good data hygiene in their CRM, they partnered with Vainu. In Alexander's words, "Vainu is an important partner for us to make sure that we have good data hygiene in our CRM."

The benefit

Saving time

When we asked Alexander what the benefits of Vainu were, he told us about a meeting he'd had with a customer a few weeks earlier, who told him, "The ultimate purpose of a software is to save time... and that has other effects downstream." 

So, unsurprisingly, that's also the main benefit for Alexander. He says, "Vainu saves me a lot of time...and it solves the thing I want to solve. I have automatic enrichment of data coming in, so I don't have to worry about that, and I can trust the data quality, so I don't have to go around and worry about that. And if there are problems, then I know there is a team [at Vainu] that I can work with... It comes down to having a data partner that you trust." 

It's always nice to hear that we're a data partner that a customer trusts.