BlueWhale Research | Case Study

Challenge

BlueWhale Research is responsible for driving net-new revenue growth for its clients and ultimately produces hundreds of thousands of qualified leads every year for industry leaders like IBM, Oracle, Salesforce, NetSuite, Citrix, and more.

“Our job is to get our clients into advantageous conversations with their target accounts,” says Chris Isham, Chief Revenue Officer and Co-Founder of BlueWhale.

To stand out in the highly-competitive B2B lead generation space, BlueWhale focuses on transparency and uses a consultative approach that enhances its customers’ sales development processes.

“In our space on the lead generation side, one challenge is that it’s easy to set yourself up as an order taker where the customer says ‘here are the job titles, the industries, and the company sizes that we want to target,’ ” says Isham. “But we take a very different approach, a consultative approach where we use data to educate our customers on new ways to penetrate their target accounts.”

It is a major hurdle for BlueWhale to convince its clients’ marketers to branch out from their established ideal customer profiles, especially to target less senior employees in the buying committee.

“We encourage our clients to use data to target the people who are actually doing the research. Usually, that’s not the VP’s or the C-Suite, they’ve delegated those activities,” states Isham. “So, we’re training our customers how to use a contact point we achieved with a manager who expressed interest and parlay that into conversations with the higher-ups in the selection committee.”

“Starting with a pristine database like ZoomInfo is crucial. Because we know that we have direct-dial phone numbers, that’s a game-changer across the board. Making sure email addresses are valid and that prospects still work at the companies we’re targeting. The database that you’re using for that information is paramount.”

Chris Isham

Chief Revenue Officer and Co-Founder of BlueWhale

Solution

BlueWhale uses Intent data coupled with ZoomInfo’s company and contact database to deliver leads that are in-market, on-message, on-target, on-time, and engagement ready.

“Using Intent data is a no-brainer,” says Isham. “The analogy that I use is you always should start and go fishing where the fish are. There’s no reason to not have intent data baked into your strategy in this day and age.”

“The Intent piece is really cool too because it can expose industries that our customers ought to be prospecting into but they’re not because it’s not in their established ideal customer profile,” says Isham. “It can uncover some unrealized demand in industries that they may not have played in previously.”

However, Intent data alone is not a silver bullet.

“There’s an alarming statistic that 99% of people who agree to receive content don’t read it by the time an SDR follows up with them,” explains Isham. “That’s a big problem if you’re a marketer sending leads directly to SDR team because it’s going to largely devalue the follow-up process.”

With ZoomInfo’s B2B intelligence platform, BlueWhale is able to cross-reference over 300 attributes with professional and company profiles to facilitate meaningful conversations for its clients.

Isham comments, “we’ve learned that if you can identify additional down-funnel information, it’s a huge opportunity-cost decreaser for the inside salesperson and for the marketer. Because they can bypass that ‘hey, did you download my whitepaper content’ conversation and get into the meat and potatoes conversation and objection handling with the prospect.”

“Starting with a pristine database like ZoomInfo is crucial,” says Isham. “Because we know that we have direct-dial phone numbers, that’s a game-changer across the board. Making sure email addresses are valid and that prospects still work at the companies we’re targeting. The database that you’re using for that information is paramount, especially in call lead generation campaigns which is what we tend to specialize in.”

The Results

BlueWhale Research is utilizing ZoomInfo’s intent and B2B contact data to deliver over 45,000 leads per month for its customers and has been recognized as one of America’s fastest-growing private companies on the Inc. 5000 list.

Not only is BlueWhale delivering a high quantity of leads, but it’s also delivering exceptionally high-quality leads.

“The industry standard for lead rejection rate on 3rd party lead gen programs is between 15-20 percent,” explains Isham. “BlueWhale’s lead rejection rate over the last 5 years is less than 1 percent. That means our clients have sent less than 1 percent of all the leads we have generated over the last 5 years back to us as bad leads.”

BlueWhale’s lofty quality standards are reflected in its customer satisfaction and retention statistics.

“Our overall customer retention rate hovers between 85% and 88%, so it’s pretty high. The revenue renewal rate is even better, it’s into the three figures,” remarks Isham.

“When you start the conversation in a customer’s initial buying cycle you increase the likelihood of being in the selection committee conversation,” says Isham. “Partnering with ZoomInfo helps us achieve that for our clients.”