How CIENCE Helped Grow Segment's System Integrations

About Segment

Segment provides complete customer data infrastructure. They enable technology companies to collect, unify, and connect their users to over 200 marketing, analytics, and warehouse tools, building a 360-degree view of their customers.

With this data, companies can understand how to best message customers and deliver highly personalized experiences, leading the way in providing the data fueling individualized customer journeys.

Currently, Segment is used globally by more than 19,000 companies across 71 countries. Some of the fastest-growing companies like Atlassian and Bonobos, and some of the world's largest organizations like Intuit, Time, Inc., and Levi's, use the Segment platform to understand better and activate their own data. This data is used to make customer-first decisions and create experiences that engender business-first behaviors.

Segment was founded in September 2011, and recently earned a $175 million investment, led by Maritech Capital Partners, GV, and Accel, during a Series D funding round in April 2019.

Challenges & Scope

In early Q1 2019, Segment needed to scale the number of system integrations in their catalog as a high-level business objective to capitalize on their extraordinary growth in anticipation of their Round D funding.

Segment explored multiple avenues to generate awareness and add software integration partners. Companies who choose to join Segment's platform receive critical growth opportunities:

A listing in the Segment catalog that brings 40,000+ unique visitors each month, promotion in monthly newsletters that are sent to the ever-growing list of Segment users, and other cross-marketing perks. Partnering with Segment offers platform integrators the ability to grow their user base significantly.

Getting the word out individually to entice select partners to take advantage of a Segment partnership would require targeted, focused, and flawless messaging execution.

Julie, the researcher, was really helpful with taking the input and making effective changes in lead generation very quickly.

Why CIENCE

In early March 2019, Segment identified the need to use outbound marketing and sales experts to increase the velocity of its recruitment of companies to build on their platform. Segment saw an opportunity to use highly targeted, prospect-focused email outreach "directly to these tools in the ecosystem and see if they could be made aware of the opportunity to integrate with Segment. Then get them to start the integration process," said Federico Menapace, Head of Technology Partnerships at Segment.

The MarTech 5000 list offered a perfect place to begin identifying their ideal technology partners to add to their ecosystem. Segment needed to attract these companies in a hyperfocused, scalable method to align business development with budget.

Menapace identified outbound marketing and sales as a scalable, efficient, and effective method to strategically target the 5,000 biggest MarTech companies and hired CIENCE to provide a Sales Development Rep Team (SDRT) to execute outbound activities and convert prospects into the early stages of their partnership program. The CIENCE SDRT includes a dedicated SDR, email content writer, strategist, researcher, customer success manager, and a variety of agency specialists to assist with campaign success.

Criteria for success of these campaigns would be judged by the number of integration build sign-ups on a specific Segment landing page. Tactics used here included hyper-targeted, individual emails. The goal of the emails was to convert opens and engagement into clicked links and ultimately new integrations for Segment.

"We engaged with CIENCE to help execute on a specific list:our addressable market which would be the MarTech 5000 list and similar companies:and so CIENCE worked with us to develop the messaging and approach to begin the reach out."

"I spoke with competitors of [CIENCE], but the conversation with CIENCE gave me more peace of mind around people know what they were doing and being more knowledgeable about our space. Another highlight was working with Erin, our SDR. She was very responsive and it was easy to make decisions and implement them."

Results

Before working with CIENCE, Segment had experimented with reaching out to a few companies: "We originally segmented the companies by size." Aware that Segment is a well-known tool, Federico was looking at early-stage companies entering the

space, initially. This suggested that Segment could be a prominent and critical tool to help these companies grow.

CIENCE began outreach in March 2019, and initially focused on companies that had less than 200 employees in highly-specialized sectors like customer data analytics and marketing automation. As the partnership continued, we worked together and decided to expand the Segment Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), resulting in a greater breadth of partner sign-ups.

To accomplish this, CIENCE began targeting larger companies, and increased the volume of send-outs, extending outreach to companies across the U.S. and Europe.

"We worked with the CIENCE team to identify better ways to build lead lists and relax lead constraints. A little bit of lead iteration and finding new approaches to find viable companies helped us to get those 8-10 sign ups per week."

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