Bharadwaj Giridhar, Founder at Inbox Pirates, explains how Warmly helped shine a light on their dark funnel and unlock new revenue opportunities from old sales pipeline.
“It's a no-brainer to install Warmly. It's free to get started, and if you have a service business, you can be ROI positive from day 0.”
Inbox Pirates: A unique combination of SaaS and agency
Part agency, part SaaS, Inbox Pirates is in a unique situation.
Not only are they hunting down revenue opportunities for their own companies (two B2B SaaS products and an agency that supports B2B companies with GTM activities like email outreach), but they’re also running sales playbooks on behalf of their agency clients.
“Our sales and marketing team is a team of five, split up into activities like list building, cold calling, handling inbound calls, etc. The marketing side is purely dedicated to content creation.”
Working with a wide variety of enterprise-level SaaS and B2B service companies, Bharadwaj and his team are familiar with a huge range of software solutions.
“We have a very wide tech stack. Partly because we have to stay on top of our game, but also because some of the companies we work with, we consult for, so we need to know how to use the tools they’re already set up with.”
Here’s just a sample of the tech stack Inbox Pirates is running:
- Email: Apollo.io, Lemlist, Smartlead, Instantly
- Analytics: Usermaven, ContentStudio, Splitby, GA4, Plausible Analytics
- Heat mapping: VWO, Clarity
- Link tracking: Switchy
An impressive list, to be sure, but Bharadwaj was still coming up against a couple of big challenges.
Bharadwaj’s dark funnel and attribution challenges
One of the biggest issues Inbox Pirates had was understanding what customers in the dark funnel were engaging with.
Bharadwaj knew that since most of the customers he goes after are in the B2B space, that they’re savvy to modern marketing tactics and try to avoid retargeting funnels.
“Gartner says that 74% of B2B buyers don’t want to talk to a sales rep. It's because they’re afraid of constant follow-ups. They want to know as much as possible about a product before a sales rep gets involved.”
This meant that when Inbox Pirates launched a campaign, those evasive efforts negatively impacted their ability to attribute bumps in traffic to that campaign.
“One time, we ran a campaign where we sent out a bunch of lead magnets to target accounts. That was like 400-500k emails, so we got a huge sudden lift in traffic. But because they’re B2B buyers, they know that if they click the link we send, they’ll get tracked. So, they avoid this by typing in the URL and going direct.
This shows up as direct traffic in Google Analytics, so we can’t attribute it to our outbound campaign.”
Bharadwaj needed a tool like Warmly to deanonymize site traffic and then cross-check that list of identified domains based on the email list he already had so he could improve attribution accuracy.
Poor filtering mechanisms meant Inbox Pirates had inaccurate engagement data
True to form, Bharadwaj tried a number of software solutions before landing on Warmly.
“We’ve used tools like LeadMagic and Albacross. The problem with Albacross was that the filtering mechanism wasn’t that great. It would say that someone from Apple visited our site, but that was just because they’d worked at Apple previously, and it said that on their LinkedIn. It wasn’t accurate enough.”
Filtering the market to find Warmly
Bharadwaj eventually came across Warmly through a comment by our co-founder Alan Zhao on a LinkedIn post.
He installed Warmly on the free plan (which you can set up in minutes without speaking to a sales rep), and the problem was solved.
“Warmly has really great filtering compared to other alternatives. The data is accurate and reliable. Plus, the UI is fantastic, and its really fast, something that we look for when prioritizing tools to add to our stack.”
Get started yourself: Try Warmly for free.
Closing a 4-figure deal in just 2 weeks
From there, setup was as easy as it could be for Bharadwaj:
“I come from a dev background, so it was no issue for me. But to be honest, anyone can do it. It’s just adding a bit of Javascript to your site, and you’re ready to go.”
With such a quick implementation and no dragged-out sales negotiation, Inbox Pirates were seeing ROI within days, with the first 4-figure deal closing within less than two weeks.
“We ran an inbound campaign on social a while back using gated content. We’d post on LinkedIn and ask people to comment if they want us to send an ebook via InMail. With that, we know who downloads it, but these people aren’t always the decision-makers.
We want to use that engagement to go to CXOs and explain that their internal stakeholders have been engaging and getting value out of our content, but we don’t know who they’ve shared those resources with.
We needed more data on job titles and who is actually landing on our website and looking further. With Warmly, we could see who has visited and how many times. That session timing and number of visits gave us the confidence to use that data when we spoke to, say, the CEO.”
The real win for Bharadwaj was being able to use Warmly to reactivate dead pipeline.
“Sometimes you run a campaign like this, but your prospect isn’t ready to buy right now. Because you only have the signal that they downloaded the ebook, you don’t really have any intent data.
But if they come back, say, six months later and start diving deeper into our website, then this could be a good buying signal. Warmly helps us surface those insights, so we can jump on those warm leads.”
Shed light on your dark funnel with Warmly
For Bharadwaj and Inbox Pirates, Warmly was the unlock for a whole lot of revenue potential. And they’re only scratching the surface of what Warmly is capable of.
Here are a few of the unique strengths that make Warmly your secret weapon for GTM success:
- Automatic website deanonymization: Find out who is on your website, when, and what they’re engaging with
- AI-driven chatbot: Engage with website visitors right when they’re on your site, and have your sales team receive Slack notifications when a buyer is hot so they can take over the conversation
- Intent data: Integrated third-party intent data from best-in-class sources to help you understand when prospects are poised to buy
- AI prospector: AI-powered email and LinkedIn automation driven by powerful intent data
- Job change alerts: Leverage the power of warm referrals and perfect timing with instant job change alerts
“It’s honestly a no-brainer to install Warmly. You’ll wish you had the data earlier. Just about any business can be ROI positive within a few weeks. If you have a service business, you can see ROI from day one.”
Ready to join Inbox Pirates and dozens of other ambitious B2B brands turning warm leads into revenue? Chat with our team to learn how Warmly can help you start accelerating sales cycles in days, not months.