Customer Story

Deep Instinct Dives Deep Into the Data and Sees Exponential Growth

The Head Scratcher

Deep Instinct is on the cutting edge of cybersecurity, providing anti-malware and protection from unknown, “zero day” threats aimed at endpoint devices and business critical applications. While other providers can protect against known viruses, Deep Instinct is unique in being able to detect and stop threats before they’re on anyone’s radar. As Theresa Woodiel, Director ABM & Integrated Marketing at Deep Instinct put it, “Once a virus launches, it’s already too late.” Deep Instinct uses deep learning to keep that from happening.

When Theresa and her colleague, Bryant Pulecio, Director Web & Digital Strategy, joined Deep Instinct, the marketing team was rebuilding under the leadership of a new VP who was as forward thinking about their approach to marketing as the company was about their products. He challenged the lean team to use tools, technology, and intent data to take a targeted approach to the accounts they go after.

Industry
Technology — Security Software

Company Size
300 employees

Location
New York, NY

Solution
Demandbase One: ABX with Orchestration, Advertising, Sales Intelligence & Data Integrity

333%

Raised SDR calls-to-conversations ratio 333%

269%

Boosted conversations-to-meetings by 269%

900%

Pipeline soared more than 900% year over year

We were looking for the best and the brightest and we found that with Demandbase."

Theresa Woodiel Director ABM & Integrated Marketing

What’d They Do?

Bryant and Theresa started by evaluating the tools in their tech stack, asking what’s the right tool for each need? They decided to keep Salesforce and Hubspot, but the rest was a clean slate. As they began looking at tools to support account-based marketing (ABM), their penchant for data turned their focus on analytics, attribution, and a way to put data into action. They wanted to be able to map leads to accounts, identify anonymous web visitors, and tap into intent data, not only native within the ABM platform, but from a variety of sources across the buyer’s journey. The more they looked, the more things pointed to Demandbase, especially with the relatively recent acquisition of Engagio, which Bryant and Theresa had used in a previous job.

Today, Demandbase is central to Deep Instinct’s marketing efforts and the source of truth their sales and marketing teams rally around. Marketing uses the platform to build highly targeted account lists. Their performance marketing agency, Kahena Digital, uses it to automate and orchestrate cross-channel campaigns. Their SDRs use the data and intelligence to analyze their accounts, so they know which to prioritize and how to personalize their outreach. And sales taps into the insights around recent activity, journey stage, competitive intent keywords, and more to inform their strategies and pinpoint their hottest opps — insights the marketing team automatically pushes into Salesforce, where their sellers live every day.

Why Demandbase?

As part of their tech stack analysis, Bryant and Theresa did a rigorous competitive analysis between Demandbase and another prominent player in the ABM space, focusing on three core criteria. In their words, they wanted:

Low friction. “If you have to move too many things from one system to another, it’s just way too much friction. We’re a small team and we don’t have time for it.”
Integrations. “We use intent data from a lot of sources and we’re holding a lot of complexity. Being able to work with one vendor that could handle all that was crucial.”
No “black box.” “We wanted core logic with flexibility. The other vendor was a black box. We didn’t want to be locked into using logic we couldn’t see, understand, or modify. We knew we were going to learn things and wanted the agility to apply our own correlations to our closed-won business.”

Another key differentiator turned out to be Demandbase’s ability to automatically synchronize audiences to LinkedIn. And the icing on the cake was the trust Theresa and Bryant quickly established with Demandbase.

“We were looking for the best and the brightest and we found that with Demandbase,” shared Theresa. “Our experience, all along the way, from Vin, Jeff…all the folks we worked with, to Audra, Jenny, Omo, and Caitlin, they’re all outstanding, really outstanding. They challenge us and we challenge them. We get better together…and that’s a good thing! I am truly so grateful we did not choose the other vendor, every single day.”

It unlocked a number of different metrics and performance insights we couldn’t see before."

Bryant Pulecio Director Web & Digital Strategy

How’d They Do?

Centered around Demandbase One, Deep Instinct built a data-driven, action-oriented marketing tech stack that’s generated results like these:

Switched from traditional marketing to a modern account-based approach and watched their pipeline shoot through the roof
Where Deep Instinct used to be about pushing as many leads as possible into the top of the funnel, with the expectation that more would result in more sales, they now work shoulder to shoulder with sales, being intentional about who they target and how they prioritize accounts. As a result, marketing’s contribution to pipeline went from several hundreds of thousands of dollars in one quarter to just shy of $6 million the next. The following quarter saw another spike to $8.4 million and it has since leveled off, still in the millions.In one example of using data to be intentional, they rolled out a new product specifically for protecting web applications, and other enterprise workflows, from malicious file uploads. It’s not for everyone and they didn’t want to waste resources chasing accounts that wouldn’t be a good fit. They turned to their Demandbase data to find accounts in key niche industries, then looked at the engagement data to home in on the ripest prospects and inform their outreach strategies.

SDRs see as much as 333% improvement in conversions and 900% pipeline growth
Prior to implementing their ABM program and Demandbase One, Deep Instinct’s SDRs were measured on activity — number of calls, emails sent, and so forth. Now, they’re measured on connections, meetings, and pipeline generation, which means it pays to learn about each account, focus on their best prospects, and take a more personalized approach, all of which is fueled by Demandbase Account Intelligence. The results have been truly exceptional. In their first quarter, after a short five-week deployment, they saw a 164% increase in pipeline generation over the previous quarter. In the next three quarters, they grew again, 38%, 83%, and 37% respectively, quarter-over-quarter, for a total of 900% growth in pipeline in the first year. SDR conversion rates also exploded more than 200% and 300%. (See below)

Cold Outbound

ABM Intent Outbound

ABM Impact

Calls

2800

1262

55% fewer calls

Calls-to-Conversations Ratio

80:1

24:1

333% improvement

Convos-to-Meetings Ratio

35:1

13:1

269% improvement

Reaching the right accounts and right people with a tailored message
One of the things Bryant loves about Demandbase is the integration with LinkedIn. They like to customize their ads based on where an account is in the buyer journey. With the daily audience sync from Demandbase to LinkedIn, they’re now able to run ads based on journey stage on both platforms, and then use LinkedIn personas to zero in on the right people, as well.
Built trust with sales
Theresa trusts the data from Demandbase, because it’s not an opaque black box. She knows what’s feeding into it and how the insights are derived. And because she has confidence in it, that translates over to her sales colleagues. Sellers don’t want to chase accounts that are going to waste their time, so when she’s able to show them not only who they should target, but why, when, and how she got that data, they appreciate it, and have grown to trust her and the data, as well.
Mastered the analytics and unlocked new insights
Working with Demandbase and their performance marketing agency, Kahena Digital Marketing — with special shout out to Shaun Friedlander, Director of Performance Marketing at Kahena — Bryant and his team extracted fresh insights from the collection of tools they use. In one example, they pushed Demandbase identified web traffic data over to Google Analytics, and when they threw in journey stage data, “It unlocked a number of different metrics and performance insights we couldn’t see before,” said Bryant. They’re now able to see exactly which channels are driving traffic at each journey stage and what the average cost per engagement minute is from different channels. Similarly, they’ve discovered that engagement minute spikes in early-stage opportunities is a leading indicator of closed won opportunities.

Without Demandbase?

When asked what they would do if someone took away Demandbase tomorrow, Theresa said, “ We’d go back to bits and pieces — go to this system and grab this, go to that system and grab that. It’s just not scalable. We’re simply smarter, better, people because of Demandbase. And when you think about the efficiency and effectiveness, it was shocking the amount of people resources, time, and money spent before we plugged in Demandbase. We’d lose all that. ”

Bryant put it this way, “We’d take a step back in our motion. We’d become data wranglers and that would become a big chunk of our jobs. We’d have less time to execute on the stuff that actually helps the business.”

About Deep Instinct

Deep Instinct takes a prevention-first approach to stopping ransomware and other malware using the world’s first and only purpose-built, deep learning cybersecurity framework. We predict and prevent known, unknown, and zero-day threats in <20 milliseconds, 750X faster than the fastest ransomware can encrypt. Deep Instinct has >99% zero-day accuracy and promises a <0.1% false positive rate. The Deep Instinct Prevention Platform is an essential addition to every security stack—providing complete, multi-layered protection against threats across hybrid environments. For more, visit www.deepinstinct.com.

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