How Exterro identified million-dollar opportunities using Company Surge^®

When it comes to generating marketing qualified leads, Exterro, a leader in the legal software field, excels. The legal governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) platform generates thousands of MQLs on a monthly basis. Its success, however, doesn’t come without concerns. Like many B2B, firms, resources are finite.

Additionally, not all of these MQLs align with Exterro’s three-year average contracts and multi-million dollar deal sizes. Some do—but prioritization on both the marketing engagement and sales outreach sides is crucial for Exterro to identify and focus its efforts on only the most valuable opportunities. Couldn’t Exterro simply move on to the next account if an opportunity accidentally gets lost in the sales cycle? Yes, but in this industry, missing an enterprise account at this stage could result in waiting three years for the opportunity to resurface and over $50 million in lost revenue. Instead, Exterro came to Bombora to address these pain points. Here’s how Exterro used Company Surge® to win big—both in deal size and overall organizational growth.

Approach: Implementation of Company Surge®

In Exterro’s case, prioritization began with a coordinated account-based approach through the Company Surge® growth package with the Salesforce and LinkedIn dual integrations. This strategy required a central source of target information in order to accurately and efficiently identify opportunities: The Salesforce sales intelligence dashboard (which Exterro created in its Salesforce instance) combined Company Surge® and G2 Intent data with website visitor data using Triblio. At the same time, Exterro’s marketing team began to use the LinkedIn integration to build awareness among high intent accounts—for a minimum of two weeks. Without this step, sales couldn’t proceed with outreach.

From there, sales representatives could find out which accounts were in active research mode and interested in Exterro’s products—and to what extent (thanks to the Intent data). Those organizations with high intent, including ones that had visited the Exterro website, became the highest priority for sales outreach.

Results: Identifying Previously Unknown, Valuable Opportunities

Once marketing and sales efforts were underway, Exterro began to take stock of the ensuing activity and engagements. The first realization? Many of the high-intent accounts came as a surprise. “There are these big enterprise companies we had no idea were shopping. When you put in Company Surge®, the lights come on and you find all these opportunities you didn’t know to go after,” said Exterro’s Rob Thomason, Director of Sales Operations.

The next observation had to do with current Exterro customers. Information provided by Company Surge® created ten new opportunities with existing customers that were researching other products in the Exterro portfolio. Thomason explained, “These companies never downloaded a whitepaper or did a webcast with us. They were passive shoppers. If it weren’t for Bombora’s Company Surge®, we would never have had an opportunity at the table.”

Aside from new revenue possibilities, Exterro’s efforts also developed concrete results: Campaigns using Company Surge® for LinkedIn had two to three times higher click-through rates than those that didn’t. Taking these three outcomes into consideration, Exterro knew it had to take Company Surge® Intent data one, or several, steps further.

Next Steps: Expansion of the Intent Data Journey

The value of Intent data is not lost on Exterro. From continuing to identify whitespace sales opportunities to prioritizing the content areas that are most valuable to prospects based on Intent topic interest, the software provider’s stakeholders plan to expand their sales and marketing efforts alongside Company Surge®. Furthermore, Exterro will be able to lean on Company Surge® for efforts with current customers, including finding cross-sell and up-sell moments and reducing churn risk of existing customers researching competitors. The year 2021 and beyond is looking bright, and simplified, for both sales and marketing teams at Exterro.