Cold emails to CTOs who had never heard the name
Replicated’s CRO brought us in while the company was closing its $25M Series B. Replicated makes software that lets vendors ship on-prem versions of their products, and it sells to CTOs and other technical buyers.
To grow, they needed to find and win the right accounts, and they were starting from zero: no account-based strategy and no marketing CRM to run one. The SDRs were emailing CTOs who had never heard of Replicated, with nothing to offer except a request for a demo.
Picking the accounts
We started by deciding who to go after. We built a named list of target accounts, then scored and tiered them so sales and marketing knew which to work first. Along the way we counted the reachable market, which leadership also used to plan rep hiring and territories.
We split the list by industry, such as healthcare and financial services, and wrote messaging for each one. A CTO at a hospital system and a CTO at a bank have different problems, and the campaigns should say so.
Building HubSpot from scratch
We set up HubSpot from scratch as Replicated’s marketing CRM: lead nurture, routing that sent each lead to the right rep, and tracking on the website’s demo request, which we also made easier to find. ZoomInfo and custom data sources filled in account and contact details. Reporting worked at both the account and the contact level, so the team could see what each target account, and each person inside it, had seen from Replicated.
Then we launched campaigns at the target accounts across several channels, including LinkedIn ads and retargeting that kept Replicated in front of them.
A French Bulldog for the CTOs
The SDRs were going to email these CTOs either way. We wanted every CTO on the list to have seen Replicated first, and to trust the name by the time an SDR wrote.
CTOs get buried in vendor jargon, and on-prem deployment is a dry subject. So we made it funny. The campaign was called “On-Prem So Easy, Your Dog Could Do It,” and it starred Lola, a French Bulldog.
AWAITING CASE DETAILS: Lola campaign specifics. What the ads showed, where they ran, and how Lola came to star in them.
The joke carried a real point. With Replicated, a software vendor could build an on-prem version of its product in a day instead of months.
We built all of it: the creative, the landing pages, and the automation behind them. The campaign ran entirely online.
Giving the SDRs something worth sending
We worked with the sales team on how to handle the leads the campaign brought in, and we coached the SDRs on their outreach. Because the campaign ran first, prospects already knew the name when an SDR wrote to them.
We also gave the SDRs better things to send: templates and educational content, so a rep could open with something useful to a CTO.
What Lola brought in
The Lola campaign produced $1.2M in qualified pipeline.
Replicated kept everything we built: HubSpot and its data sources, the target account list, the messaging, the campaign assets, and the SDR training. The next year, Replicated raised a $50M Series C.
