Find lookalike accounts for every new closed-won deal

Overview#

Sales reps have the most success with leads that resemble closely those they have already closed in the past. Previously, finding companies similar to earlier sales wins was a highly manual process as there are many factors to consider to come to a qualitative decision. Combining Ocean.io and Cargo allows growth teams to systematically generate lists of new lookalike leads.

This template will explain how to set up a workflow that triggers from a new closed-won account account detected in the CRM, searches for lookalikes based on domain and specific keywords in Ocean.io, and enriches and integrates these accounts into your CRM.

Find and engage lookalike accounts using a Cargo workflow#

Step 1 - Set variables#

Set up your input variables to the workflow

Inputs used in the workflow are set up in the variables node at the beginning of the workflow. This node is used to define the parameters that will be passed through the rest of workflow as inputs to the rest of the nodes.

To power this workflow, the following variables are needed:

• domain: The domain of a closed-won account in the CRM
• jobTitle: Target job titles for stakeholders working at lookalike accounts

Step 2 - Receive domains#

Detect new closed-won accounts from the CRM

To begin, create a new workflow on a CRM-based data model, on the companies or accounts object,
where a column can be used to identify if the company has successfully been closed-won or not. Alternatively, you can also send an event payloads via webhooks to a dedicated Cargo data model when a new account is marked as closed-won, see here for details on how this can work in Hubspot.

Step 3 - Search lookalikes#

Search for lookalike companies

As the Ocean.io algorithm performs best when provided with as much relevant data as possible to determine how closely a company resembles your existing clients.

Inside the workflow, website domains can be passed to the Ocean.io enrich action to retrieve firmogprahic data to refine the lookalike search in the following action. The most decisive attribute in this case is the keywords field (which describes how accounts describe themselves on their webpage). This has a big impact on the pertinence of any lookalike suggestions by Ocean.io

Feel free to use other data from the CRM to supplement the Ocean.io search action, such as geography and company size, etc.

Step 4 - Stakeholders search#

Search for stakeholders

Use the website domains provided by Ocean.io with your preferred enrichment node to find stakeholders with relevant job titles (e.g., PeopleDataLabs, Waterfall.io, available with Cargo credits).

Each enrichment provider also allows you to specify additional filters (e.g., location, seniority) to refine the search, ensuring that only the right contact persona is returned.

We have seen Cargo users most successfully use a combination of Cargo's Sales Navigator integration alongside classic enrichment providers to maximize the chances of successfully finding the relevant stakeholders at this step. Advanced Cargo users will concatenate the outputs of any successful stakeholder enrichment into a combined array of contacts that can subsequently be pushed to a sales sequence or the CRM.

Step 5 - Upsert accounts to CRM#

Push new lookalike contacts to the CRM

Update your CRM with the contacts found in Step 4 for the lookalike accounts from Step 3. Ensure each contact is populated with the necessary fields (e.g., first name, last name, email, job title, etc.).

It's also recommended to quickly check against existing contacts in the CRM and create a new one if absent to avoid duplicate outreach.

At this step, use a .map() method inside a Cargo expression to map any additional data to every contact retrieved by an enrichment provider such as the original client who inspired the lookalike retrieval. This is often useful to populate in the CRM to keep track of new contacts added.

Step 6 - Upsert contacts to sequence#

Push new contacts to a sales sequence

With the stakeholders' emails from the previous step, Cargo allows you to take individual actions for each contact. Users often reach out using their preferred email marketing tool integrated with Cargo (e.g., Instantly, Outreach, Salesloft, Apollo, Smartlead).

Optionally, trigger a Slack alert for high-priority records to an Account Executive to expedite a touchpoint.