Clientell was tired of going to events for no reason.

"We didn't find much utility in events because there's too much noise", says Co-Founder and CEO Saahil Dhaka. "Like, we'd go to an event and talk to 100 people that may or may not be ICP, and you leave feeling like you didn't get anything done"

This time, they wanted to change the narrative they had of events. Dreamforce 2024 was coming up, and for an AI-enabled Salesforce admin company, a conference like this was a huge opportunity to get in front of customers. The goal of this Dreamforce- to talk to potential clients to see what they wanted the most in an AI-enabled Salesforce admin so they could apply it to their own product.

"Customer interviews were actually more valuable than closed deals for us", says Dhaka.

We had been working with Clientell on other projects, and when Saahil and the team reached out to us, we knew it would be a little trickier than a normal outbound campaign.

Here's how we ran the campaign that resulted in 30 positive replies and 3 closed clients from a campaign whose goal was just to interview customers:

1. Sourcing the leads

This component of the campaign was actually the trickiest because, as with most conferences, there isn't a readily available list of Dreamforce 2024 attendees. This made it significantly harder to track down people that were going.

Our solution? Scrape every post mentioning Dreamforce, use AI to determine if the post actually referred to them attending the conference, and if so, finding their contact information. Luckily, we had Ankit Singh, The Kiln's resident scraping expert, to source all of the companies and import them into the table. This got us about 850 people planning to attend the conference, and after a few Clay enrichments, we had all of their LinkedIn information as well.

2. ICP Qualification

After scraping the leads, the next step was to determine whether the person was in Clientell's ICP, both on a company level and on a job title level. The goal was to speak to decision makers in startups with enough funding to test out a less expensive alternative to a Salesforce admin.

To do this, we enriched the profiles of every Dreamforce attendee in Clay for the information necessary to make an informed qualification. Then, we used an OpenAI prompt to intake all of the prospect's details to make an ICP decision for us at scale. Once we had our list, it was time to strategize the copy.

3. Copywriting

Copywriting for this campaign was all about making personalizations sound natural. The copy tempalte itself was quite simple- something along the lines of "Hey {{firstName}}! Saw your post about {{postTopic}}- was wondering if you'd be interested in meeting while there! Let me know what events you're going to and we can meet up.". We added a few follow up messages with personalization, and from there the copy was ready.

4. Clay Buildout

Since we had already imported the leads and qualified them, the only thing left to do was build the personalizations and prep the campaign. It was imperative that the {{postTopic}} personalization flowed smoothly, so we spent the majority of the prompting work there.

After building out all of the personalizations necessary to run the campaign, we found our prospects' work emails, built the campaign in Smartlead, and then started sequencing.

The campaign only ran for three days, as we wanted to get it running as close to the conference start as possible to avoid prospect dropoff. In that three days, the campaign generated 30 positive responses- Saahil and team could only take 15 of the meetings due to time constraints, and in those 15 interviews, they were even able to close a few deals.

Want to work with us on a similar project? Just reach out and let's talk :)