How Ansarada generated 58 opportunities in 6 months, across new ICPs and regions, with 11x
Meet Ansarada
Ansarada sells software that dealmakers run transactions on, giving them virtual data rooms, and deal management and procurement workflows. They sell to investment banks, law firms, M&A advisors, private equity, and governments across 170 countries.
In the last six months, they have built a mature outbound program to align their lead generation process with three major shifts in their broader business strategy.
The trigger: A business mandate to grow outbound
Historically, Ansarada built pipeline through a digital-first strategy.
“We did very well with inbound,” said Mitch Kenny, GTM operations manager at Ansarada. “We invested a lot in performance on search and social, through a mix of paid digital ads and organic, and those channels delivered well for us.”
Yet about halfway through the year, they decided to build a more mature outbound function, due to three shifts in their business strategy.
First, they needed to reach additional prospect audiences, but realized they were largely maximizing demand from their inbound channels.
“We just wanted to grow beyond inbound and digital ads, and to get more field-led types of activities and opportunities created,”
Second, they were attempting to expand into new geographies that inbound was not succeeding as well within.
“We were working in new growth regions, the big one being Asia, and it had been a challenge to do so with digital inbound only,” said Kenny. “We were getting some leads from these regions, but not enough, and we needed a bigger database of the right people to engage as we typically would.”
Finally, they had recently expanded their target ICP.
“We saw an opportunity to capture the lower-end of the market that was largely untapped by other VDR providers in this space,”said Kenny. “So that shifted us to strategies more appropriate for the mid-to-lower market.”
To make that shift down-market, Ansarada needed higher volume, at a lower cost.
“We needed a smarter way to get to those people, where the numbers would work and do so at scale, and outbound offered just that,” said Kenny.
However, their existing outbound function was not yet ready to support these three shifts in strategy.
The challenge: Outbound was not ready to scale
Years prior, Ansarada had operated a seven-person BDC (Business Development Center) function. Yet they had dissolved that function due to the success of their inbound function, and pushed prospecting back onto their AEs, BDRs, and marketing team.
“This outbound system worked ok, and we did generate results and leads, but we couldn’t scale it well because our campaigns took much effort,” said Kenny.
A big part of the problem was their fragmented tech stack.
“We sourced new records through one tool, then fed those records into our CRM, and then used a third tool to send the emails,” said Kenny. “From there, sales reps handled LinkedIn separately through Sales Navigator.”
This made it hard to track activity and run well-ordered campaigns, and it gave their sales reps and marketing team too much manual admin work.
“Sales reps had to define their ICPs, make and export lists of them, and send those lists to marketing, who then imported those lists into the CRM. Then, marketing and sales needed to go back-and-forth on messaging and copy,”
This resulted in campaigns that took too long to build, and were never as effective as they could be.
“It often took us multiple weeks to go from a campaign idea to sending the first email. And when we did get messages out, they had no personalization or context, they were just generic templates.”
Ansarada knew this tech stack and process needed to improve before they could scale outbound, and make it a cornerstone of how they created new opportunities.
Searching for a new solution: Why they chose 11x
At the start of their search, Ansarada defined criteria for their ideal solution.
“Our biggest priority was getting one tool that could do everything inside of it, that we could just give an ICP and our message, and it would do the rest,” said Kenny.
That meant one tool for:
- Finding intent signals, like raising capital
- Sourcing new leads, especially in growth areas in Asia
- Enriching those leads with email addresses, profiles, and phone numbers
- Researching them, and writing high-context, personalized messages
- Performing the actual multi-channel outreach itself
- Ensuring a clean hand-off to reps, including scoring, routing, and context
In addition, Ansarada needed this tool to be relatively easy to manage.
“We were looking for something that could go in the background,” said Kenny. “We knew we would need to tweak and review it a bit, but we wanted to have confidence it was positioning our reps in the best way to maintain reputations, mostly on its own.”
However, Ansarada had a difficult time finding this tool.
“At first we evaluated around 20 different vendors, and came to believe that no single provider offered a complete solution,” said Kenny. “We went back to our old thinking and assumed we’d still need to use multiple point tools to run our outreach campaigns.”
That changed when they had their first call with 11x, and saw that the tool could provide all of the functionality they were looking for from a single dashboard.
“It was very promising,” said Kenny. “Ultimately, they were the only option that offered everything we were looking for, and could prove that it worked live on a call. That’s why we chose them, and signed the contract.”
The first 90 days: Tackling three challenging regions
Before deploying 11x, Ansarada set clear goals for their first 90 days with the tool.
“The main thing was increasing our top of funnel volume of sales qualified leads, while maintaining our 1% conversion rate from outbound lead contact to demo requested,” said Kenny. “We also wanted to test CTAs for a standard demo request, and for having cold leads come to our website and try out the product on their own.”
Ansarada began these initial tests across three regions.
The first was the U.K., which was one of the biggest regions impacted by Ansarada’s shifting business strategy. Previously they relied on big deals from larger investment banks, and now they needed to entrench themselves with the U.K.’s midmarket segment.
The second and third regions were across Asia and India, where the deal sizes were smaller and they needed to unlock volume at a lower cost of acquisition. They came into this region relatively cold, with little information on who to target, or where.
Yet within the first 90 days of deploying 11x to all three regions, Ansarada was able to source enough records and context to scale outbound, to test both CTAs, and to ultimately outperform their initial goal of maintaining a 1% conversion rate.
“We were able to reach a 1.5 – 2% conversion rate pretty quickly, nearly doubling our past outbound performance and at a much greater scale,” said Kenny. “We also learned a lot that informed our future campaigns. We found that cold audiences responded better to a meeting commitment CTA, while warm follow-ups to content downloads did better at driving traffic directly into the product.”
The engagement: Scaling, while staying strategic
Ansarada took these learnings, and their improved conversion rates, and expanded their cold outbound program to more regions.
They also expanded their deployment into new use cases, and began to use 11x to follow-up with inbound leads.
“The first big one was website retargeting, and the second was content downloads,” said Kenny. “Rather than sending a sales rep to follow up on those, we use 11x to follow up on, say, a checklist download, very quickly. We see how they engaged, look at their industry and job title, and insinuate what they might need it for, and tailor our follow-up to that.”
For example, if someone downloads a due diligence checklist, Ansarada can deduce they have a deal coming up, and send a personalized message based on the problems they likely face, and how Ansarada solves them.
Ansarada maintains this high-context approach for all of their outreach.
“We keep all of our campaigns very granular and targeted,” said Kenny. “We’ve learned that what to say to people differs from region to region, from known accounts to cold accounts, from advisory to corporate segments. We continue to consult with our reps and sales leaders to understand the specific challenges faced by every opportunity, and how to focus our outreach around it.”
This means Ansarada uses 11x to run a different outreach motion than some might assume, when they think about an AI-driven growth motion.
“We don’t use 11x to spray-and-pray. We use it to build very targeted lists and campaigns very quickly,” said Kenny. “Many of our campaigns only have 50 or 60 people in them, and we might run 30 or more at once. We can only do that because we matured our process and made it much more efficient by using 11x.”
Their result: A mature outbound function that delivers deals
Within the first six months of their program, Ansarada generated a wide range of benefits by maturing their outreach motion with 11x. They now:
Generate more opportunities in the background
- $450K AU pipeline influenced
- 58 opportunities sourced
- 9 opportunities closed/won
- 122 total meetings booked, 290 total positive replies
- ~20 meetings and ~8-9 opportunities booked / month
- 2% positive reply rate (375/18,173)
- 0.9% meeting rate (165/18,173)
Build new campaigns, faster and easier
- 110 total campaigns built, up to 31 running at one time
- Send personalized messages instead of generic templates
- Conduct research, and apply context to replies and account records
- ~8 hours/week across two program managers for 29 SDR/AE sending accounts
- Focus reps on qualified leads, not anyone that comes in
Run a cleaner outreach infrastructure
- Consolidated 3+ tools into one solution
- 13.7% overall reply rate
- Strong managed email deliverability, no blacklisting
- Integrations with Salesforce and Slack
- Reduced usage of SalesNavigator among sales team
- Sending from 29 active senders and 60 mailboxes and 25 LinkedIn seats
Focus more on strategy
Kenny manages Ansarada’s 11x deployment with his colleague Christine, who is in SalesOps. Together, they are able to build and run a complex outbound program as just one of their workstreams.
“Christine enables the reps day-to-day in many ways, and I do a lot with our broader tech stack, CRM, marketing automation, and routing,” said Kenny. “There are things in our jobs that are quite labor intensive and manual, but now in outbound we have a bit more balance between being in execution mode and taking a step back to make sure we’re doing the right things.”
In addition, 11x has also given Ansarada a strategic partner to collaborate with.
“We’ve had end-of-month sessions with 11x where it’s been valuable to take a step back and say, ‘Look, this is everything we’ve got running, these are working, these aren’t, these should be paused. Quite often I’m in the headspace of launching new campaigns, so it’s good and helpful to have this retrospective and ‘housekeeping’ to reflect on our performance.”
Ansarada has also gained a broader view on outreach strategy through 11x.
“We can come to the 11x team and say, ‘What can we do differently? How are other clients using this and what’s working for them?’” said Kenny. “Some of the new regions we are targeting are very different compared to the presence we have in the U.K. or Australia, and it’s been helpful in terms of recommendations and insights on what 11x thinks we should be doing in each.”
Ultimately, Kenny sums up his experience with 11x as:
“The big benefit for me is the scale we can do with outbound now, and the efficiency. There has been a big reduction in manual work and the handling of information. We now have an all-in-one system that works in the background to continuously source and capture leads, and that is very valuable to us.”