CriticalArc Case Study: Reducing Market Research from Four Months to One Day

We sat down with Jennifer Gebetsberger, Administration Manager at CriticalArc, to discuss how SalesIntel has benefitted her company. Through data enrichment, quality customer service, and ease of use, SalesIntel has taken market research that previously took months and helped her get it done within a single day.

Introducing CriticalArc

CriticalArc wants to help you keep your people safe. CriticalArc’s SafeZone is the unified safety, security, and emergency management solution that provides Safety Everywhere™ for your people, wherever you have duty of care. Through Real-Time Coordination and Response, organizations are empowered to respond faster and more effectively to incidents of any scale. SafeZone’s Operational Insights streamlines day-to-day operations and enables post-incident learnings to improve team performance and optimize future response continuously. 

CriticalArc’s leading client industries are higher education and healthcare institutions, worldwide. Their goal is to guarantee a secure and safe environment for students and healthcare professionals.

The Market Research Challenge

“I’m the Administration Manager of a small company which basically means I do a little bit of  everything ,” Gebetsberger said. Market research became one of her many tasks as her role expanded.

“Our Marketing Director would assign a task to research a specific market, he would outline ‘I need every University in the state of California with at least 5,000 full time student enrollments and I need these specific personas researched and uploaded into HubSpot.’

“I would then manually go to each individual University website and search for each person’s contact information needed. I’ll give you an example. This exact request came for the state of Texas in September 2019. That project took me from September 2019 to the middle of January 2020 to complete utilizing manual search tools. 190 universities fit our target parameters in Texas alone. That’s just one market out of about 12 that needs constant attention. I had 10 stakeholders that needed to be researched for each University. Once the research was completed, I would then load the contacts into HubSpot.

“Guess what happened to the data over those four months? It decayed. I would complete all of the research, upload it into HubSpot then utilize the data in a very targeted campaign, and because of the passage of time, it had a 30% bounce rate! The way we were gathering data was time consuming and archaic. Other data sets were even worse. If we have 200 people in a targeted campaign and then have a high bounce rate the campaign is a complete failure and valuable time was wasted.”

Gebetsberger ran the numbers on how much the time spent on market research cost the company and made a successful proposal to invest in a B2B contact solution. However, the first couple of attempts to find a data provider were duds. High bounce rates were still a serious problem.

“We tried other subscription data services. They were not user-friendly. They were not up to date. We had a marginally better result when I’d run data enrichment of my existing list, but the outcome was not much better than if I just did it myself.”

CriticalArc needed a solution tailored to them.

Download Case Study (2.61MB)

Why CriticalArc Chose SalesIntel Over its Competitors

Gebetsberger was initially impressed with the attentiveness of the SalesIntel sales representative and the flexibility to pay for only what they needed.

“The sales representative was very professional and attentive. He listened. He said, ‘You’ve got these concerns. We can fix it this way’” Gebetsberger said.

“The product pricing was also very flexible. We were able to scale down parts of the product we didn’t need to fit the size of the company that we are. Ultimately that saved cost in conjunction with having the exact number of licenses we needed. In addition, we asked if we could utilize a payment model better fit for our cash flow at the time.

“The sales process was very relaxed, not high pressure. You welcomed us with open arms. That was a help in making the choice to utilize SalesIntel. The demo process also went really well.”

The previously tested platforms had dropped their product into Gebetsberger’s lap without any additional help, questions answered, or teaching materials. But SalesIntel was a different story.

“[With SalesIntel] we were quickly introduced to a dedicated Customer Success team.  If I had questions I got an immediate response. The onboarding process was great because the SalesIntel team was consistently reaching out, and using the product was seamless for me. I had the platform in my hands, and I was up and running and using it within a couple of days, which was not the case with the other two that I tried.

“In one instance the sales representative asked if we were struggling with anything. I responded, ‘Listen this isn’t like the old platform. In the prior platform I only needed a Company name to run a search query but, in your platform it requires the URL for a company search .’ I was worried that I would have to revert back to a manual search. [Our rep] said, ‘No, you don’t have to do that. Let me show you an easier way utilizing our platform.’ He made an instructional video, sent it to me within 15 minutes and that streamlined the process.”

Benefits of Quality Data Enrichment

Gebetsberger’s most frequent usage of SalesIntel has been for data enrichment. She is constantly getting updated contacts.

“Data enrichment is why I love the SalesIntel platform. I get emails daily with the updated contacts! I just upload them into HubSpot, and then my lists are all up to date.

“If the Director of Mental Health and Wellbeing at XYZ University leaves I get an email saying, oh, here’s their replacement  – then that new contact replacement is automatically plugged into the marketing campaign. The up to date contact is what really affects the campaign success.”

SalesIntel has helped CriticalArc contact people they never would have been able to reach otherwise. There was a Chief Security Officer who was also head of a major college security organization.

“We’ve been trying to get his eye for a long time. This might sound too small scale, but our sales rep was calling and calling and calling and getting voicemail. I plugged the contact into SalesIntel, used data enrichment, got his mobile number added to the contact, and we got him on the phone!”

Another positive experience with SalesIntel has been contacting a board of trustees involved with security for several schools.

“I got the names of all the Trustees, ran them through SalesIntel, and was able to get email addresses. Our Sales Director in that region then drafted an email to each of the Trustees that I ran through HubSpot and sent the letters personally from the Sales Director. 

“I know there are a lot of organizations that probably throw 10,000 names in your platform. We use it in a much more focused and direct way. We likely don’t use all our [contact] credits, but that doesn’t reflect the importance of the platform to us because we use it in such a direct, precise way. We are intentional. We don’t blast every University in Texas to market dump information. That’s why having email addresses for these 12 trustees was important.”

SalesIntel provides the exact details needed for each CriticalArc campaign and enables highly targeted, personal outreach campaigns.

“The value of the data is huge to us.”

Continued Responsive Customer Service

No contact database is perfect. There are rare gaps in SalesIntel’s data or CriticalArc would request contact data for their UK or Australia branches. Both regions have been a lower focus for SalesIntel’s data verification, so there is less data immediately available. When Gebetsberger couldn’t find what she needed on her own, she would reach out to her Customer Success rep, Praveena . 

“Praveena  would just go get the contacts we needed. I don’t know how she did it. She waved her magic Customer Success wand and she was able to get it. If I said, ‘There’s nothing that came back on these 40 Universities.’ She’d say, ‘I’m on it,’ and would get at least 80% of what we needed.

“For example, I have a  Customer Success Director on our team that is based in Australia. He’d explained that he attended a conference recently and there was a specific group of people that attended the conference from these organizations. Can you go chase emails so that we can follow up? The list we received does not include emails.” . 

“I’d put the list into SalesIntel, and I’d get 10 out of 100…. I’d send it to Praveena , and she’d get 70-80 of the 100 requested. Again, I don’t know how she accomplished it but she did. It’s examples like these that make it easy to choose SalesIntel over it’s competitiors.  It makes my life easy. I don’t have to go back to my colleagues in the UK or Australia empty-handed, I can share 80% of the data requested. They’re excited because that’s more than we had at all. They’re always impressed!”

No matter the data request, SalesIntel (and Praveena!) would always make sure that Gebetsberger had the data she needed.

Jen’s Nurture Workflow

The final piece of SalesIntel Gebetsberger loves and the aspect that ties it all together is the easy use of the platform. 

“In conclusion, I love the streamlined setup, and how you plug in data. I can take a copy and paste a bulk of websites and copy-paste a bulk of personas that I want and click search, and then boom, it’s there.”

“Another aspect of the product that I love is when a search comes back with a large number of machine-verified contacts the process to have them human verified is simple.  I just check the box next to the contact, click one button for Research on Demand and within 24 hours it’s turned around and in my hands ready to use. If I am looking for 100 Universities and 10 Executive personas I simply plug the request into the Research on Demand function in the portal and not only is the data available, but it’s also efficient. The information comes back quickly.”

SalesIntel has helped Gebetsberger create a workflow to find all the contacts she needed with high accuracy. There are no more taking months to build a list and being distressed by high bounce rates.

“In order to get accurate information I go to [a higher ed database] and I insert a specific region  that I need University names of that fit our search criteria. I research the number of students at the school that I want and then it kicks out the list of schools from largest to smallest. I take the list, and I convert it into Excel. I run that through SalesIntel which then generates what I need. If any contacts are missing then I get them from Research on Demand.

I find all the personas I need at each school. I hit search and then boom, [SalesIntel] kicks out the list. We are 100% planned out for next quarter’s campaigns. Any contact changes are automatically updated by your data enrichment. Before [SalesIntel] this would have been a huge project for me that would have taken months. 

With SalesIntel’s automatic data enrichment, customer service, Research on Demand, and easy-to-use platform, CriticalArc successfully runs its outreach campaigns at a faster pace and with higher accuracy than ever before.