In a startup, everything changes the moment you find product-market fit. Before, you’re pushing with all your might, trying to get the machine moving; after, you’re sprinting to try to keep up.
When growth arrives, you realize that lots of things that used to be fine – like, say, having your Head of Sales doing lead generation by hand, which isn’t so bad since they weren’t really sure exactly who they were looking for anyway – are now giant obstacles.
Founded in 2016, Agicap, a financial management solution helping businesses to serenely monitor and forecast their cash flows, experienced explosive growth in 2020.
Discover how they automated their lead generation with Captain Data as the sales team was growing exceptionally fast.
The challenges
As expected, growth brought new challenges for Agicap. Within six months, they needed to scale their sales team from two to forty.
As Global Sales and Operations Manager at Agicap, Basile Greiveldinger knew that there were already enough challenges that came with scaling up a team that quickly. Growing a team 20x requires inevitable adjustments, which means everyone needs to be fully focused on value-added tasks.
So it was out of the question to have their new salespeople spending time hunting down leads.
They needed to find the right solution to help them automate their lead generation, and let their salespeople focus on what mattered the most: activating those prospects to push them forward to today, growing the company into Europe’s top cash flow management software.
That’s where Captain Data came in.
With Captain Data, Agicap now delivers up to 40,000 qualified leads per month into the hands of their growing sales teams
When Agicap first began with Captain Data’s Growth plan, they developed three multi-step workflows that efficiently delivered the leads they needed.
“Once you’ve got more than 5 salespeople, doing things by hand just doesn’t work anymore. That’s when we started using Captain Data, to have the right leads from places like Sales Navigator, to be able to actually have our sales teams doing what they do best.”
A workflow at work
Agicap's process
Agicap’s #1 challenge is to automate their lead generation, enabling their salespeople to focus on value-added activities.
They wanted to use Captain Data’s templates without having the need to log-in on the application.
Process overview
Starting from a Slack Command, Agicap’s homemade bot will call upon Captain Data’s API to launch the selected workflow, retrieve the data, and return the results directly in their favorite tools.
Process' results
With 100% of their lead generation automated, Agicap doesn't spend any time on searching manually their lead or log in onto any application.
The next level
As the Agicap team kept growing and they moved up to the Enterprise plan, they decided to use a specific feature in Captain Data’s offer to make things go even faster: developing an internal solution to use Captain Data exclusively via API.
Having that API-based solution lets them now control all of their workflows within their own work environment, without any need to hop over to the Captain Data interface.
“We have a Slackbot now that lets us type in a certain command, for example “data/peoplesearch”, and that automatically launches the workflow and extracts the result into our CRM. Then we can type in another command and have that workflow run on the results that were just given, etc. It’s incredibly simple.”
With everything automated via Slackbot and Captain Data’s API, Agicap found that they weren’t just saving time, but that they had virtually eliminated the time spent on lead generation. There’s no more downloading results and putting them into a new .csv, no more cleaning results from one workflow before launching another…
The result? A virtually unlimited number of leads being generated 24/7, and occupying virtually zero SDR time.
Because their sales teams now have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to lead generation, Agicap has found that their salespeople are able to be more focused, understanding better and better who to target and what arguments to use.
“We can ask our salespeople who they want to target, and the Slackbot will churn out the leads for them. They become experts in certain areas, knowing that they want companies in X industry, with Y number of employees, and boom, here’s the list and information you need. Now it’s always the salesperson driving the lead gen, never the lead gen driving the salesperson.”
The bottom line
Targeted salespeople are productive salespeople, and productive salespeople are happy salespeople. Any sales manager can tell you that having happy salespeople is huge as a business continues to grow. At Agicap, they’ve blown past their original need of scaling from 2 to 40, now counting 60 salespeople working across 7 countries.
Basile sees their experience as a clear signal for other companies looking to scale.
“The work we did with Captain Data to have everything working well via the API is huge, because we’re not the only ones who can eliminate time spent on lead generation like this. There are more and more scaleups like us all around the world, and their sales teams have the same needs. There’s a clear path for them to replicate what we did using Captain Data.”
