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How Elba activates its GTM teams with Cargo

The problem#

Growth team blinded by decentralized data

Elba's revenue generation stack was a mix of data enrichment services, outreach platforms, a CRM, and various integration tools such as Zapier and n8n holding it together.

This stack was only good enough to keep operations going, but as each tool has its own store of data and workflow logic, it was cumbersome to manage even straightforward tasks. The ensuing blind spots slowed down the go-to-market team and forced sales reps to waste time on low-value tasks.

For instance, Karl struggled to create a workflow triggered by number of times a prospect was engaged by their sales reps. This information was scattered across HubSpot, Lemlist, etc., and prevented a unified view of this metric.

As this became a source of friction, the growth team attempted to streamline data fragmentation issues by hiring a freelancer for building workflows in a low-code enviornment, but that approach backfired.

Sales reps bottlenecked by enrichment

On the other side, the sales teams faced a different kind of bottleneck due to an inefficient lead enrichment process.

As capturing intent signals and enriching leads’ contact information was being done sporadically across different 3rd party tools, sales reps kept stumbling upon partially enriched leads or those lacking key intent signal information (such as website visits or recent key hires). As a result, reps resorted to manually enriching leads once they arrived in their CRM, before being able to target them.

This patchwork enrichment method resulted in the inefficient use of enrichment credits on lower-quality leads, as the order and timing of enrichment became completely arbitrary.

The solution#

Use case 1: Routing cold calling leads to marketing sequences

To tackle the challenge of tracking the frequency of contact touch points per lead, Karl uses a Cargo data model to unify Lemlist and HubSpot datasets inside a single ‘model’. There, he is able to calculate a simple metric for the number of touchpoints per leads, and use this ratio to trigger a conditional workflow.

This workflow has a simple logic: If the metric shows that a lead was called less than five times, that lead remains on the call list for further engagement. Else, if that lead had not converted to a meeting, it is transferred to the growth team for a targeted LinkedIn campaign.

This took only a couple of hours to design and implement inside Cargo, but it delivers a strong paradigm shift for the go-to-market team, now they are able to activate these kinds of metrics without needing an army of engineers to build the workflow.

Use case 2: Leveraging intent data for outbound sales

To ensure optimal utilization of sales and enrichment resources, Elba began routing all enrichment flows via Cargo as a central enrichment hub.

This guarantees that all leads arriving in the CRM meet the minimum enrichment requirements decided by the team - sales reps simply have to begin the outreach with the entire lead context at hand.

This workflow is a template that is used to upsert information from any kind of intent signal into a a Cargo data model that accumulates all relevant intent signals such as company funding rounds, new hires, or job changes in one schema. This model, then, feeds leads to subsequent workflows that are responsible for routing leads when a sufficient intent score is detected.

The outcome#

5x more leads generated per month

Cargo’s orchestration module provides Elba's growth team with a rapid experimentation environment to validate new ideas captured from experts within the Cargo ecosystem, such as Guillaume Cabane.

Karl estimates that his reps have five times more leads to work with since he's been able to able to experiment new growth playbooks using Cargo.

60% reduced time-to-meeting booked

Better outreach timing immediately impacted the sales reps. After a few weeks of aggregating intent data inside a Cargo model to streamline leads enrichment, Elba’s team reported doubling the number of meetings booked each week.

Now, leads are assigned at optimal times with Cargo, and sales reps are powered with much better context to lead these meetings, which means that these leads passed much more rapidly through the pipeline.

40% reduction in overhead

Once Elba’s core workflows in Cargo became stable, the go-to-market team noticed a drastic reduction in time spent on operational tasks, from five to just three days a week.