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How Ashby Built its TAM Engine on Cargo

The problem#

Long deployment cycles

Before adopting Cargo, Ashby's marketing team faced significant challenges due to a lack of direct access to engineering resources. Building a TAM-driven marketing engine typically required months of development, involving multiple engineering teams to design, build, and maintain data pipelines and API endpoints.

This heavy reliance on technical resources led to every component requiring multiple cycles of design, development, and testing to go live. All this coordination and project management overhead, slowing down the process.

Inflexibility

Without an appropriate front-end interface, making changes to the system was cumbersome; even minor updates needed engineering input, a full review and deployment cycle, making it more difficult to adapt to new marketing scenarios quickly.

The solution#

Use case 1: Funneling signal data into the TAM database

As Ashby adopted Cargo to streamline their TAM system to funnel only the most relevant leads into the CRM, they can now ingest various signals into this TAM system, storing them until they are ready to be pushed to the CRM.

Using Cargo as a pre-CRM tool allows the demand generation team to autonomously manage segments for further prospection, validation, and engagement, without involving any engineering resources.

For example, the team has set up a workflow to store accounts that visit certain pages on their website. If enough information is collected at this stage, the account can be pushed to the prospector workflow for further enrichment.

Use case 2: Prospector workflows for new accounts added

Once accounts show sufficient reason to merit further investment, the prospector workflow uses a waterfall enrichment logic to find the most relevant contacts to engage with.

The second part of this workflow uses the group node in Cargo to handle the array objects containing the list of stakeholders, making sure that each stakeholder has a usable, valid email address and other contacts details necessary for outreach.

This creates new contacts that can be nurtured using an ABM-like approach without requiring any engineering support to make it work.

Use case 3: Validating existing contacts in the CRM

Any contacts that finally make it into the CRM need to be routinely validated to ensure that Ashby has the most up-to-date and valid email addresses. Any lapse in this part of the TAM engine seriously impacts the deliverability of all outbound campaigns.

This workflow cycles through all contacts in the CRM, every few weeks, checking if the email address is still valid, and if not, either a valid email address will be found, or the contact will be removed from the CRM to let higher quality prospects take their place.

In the absence of an orchestration tool like Cargo, most teams are limited to a simple email validation, without adding an extra step to recover catch-all emails that were falsely labeled as invalid. Ashby uses the native Scrubby integration in Cargo to handle this task, which helps recover up to a third of otherwise discarded emails.

The outcome#

TAM delivered in one-third of the time

The entire TAM system was up and running within two months, a third of the time of what we have seen in other companies. This was possible because the marketing team could build and iterate on the system without needing to involve engineering resources for every change.

Doubled pace of new marketing experimentation

Owing to Cargo's no-code front-end interface, new segments can easily be setup without soliciting engineering help. The marketing team uses the runs view in the Cargo workflow editor to spot unintended behaviour and quickly quantify the impacts of any action on the TAM engine's quality.