Overview

Azuga, a Bridgestone Company, partnered with The Kiln to solve a critical operational challenge: automate their lead enrichment process, which was consuming 640+ hours per week across a 16-person manual research team.

What started as a tactical automation engagement evolved into a full-scale systems transformation—streamlining workflows, improving data accuracy, and dramatically accelerating outbound performance. Within months, The Kiln helped Azuga eliminate bottlenecks, clean their Salesforce instance, and launch high-performing enrichment campaigns that fundamentally changed how the business goes to market.

The Challenge: 640 Hours of Slow, Manual Work

Azuga’s sales motion was being throttled by a broken process:
16 team members were spending their time manually researching leads, gathering information from scattered sources, and entering that data into Salesforce.

"Everything was manual. Everything was slow. And we couldn’t even count on the accuracy."
— Harish Bishmale, Director of Revenue and Intelligence

With the rest of the organization looking to automate and scale, Harish was tasked with solving this. The mandate from leadership was clear:
Replace the manual effort. Streamline the systems. Improve the outcomes.

The Kiln’s Approach: Not Just a Replacement—A Reinvention

✅ 1. Automating the Foundation with Clay & Salesforce

• Built automated enrichment workflows that instantly replaced 640+ weekly manual hours of lead research and data entry.

• Integrated with Salesforce, ensuring leads were deduplicated, validated, and properly routed—no more messy, incomplete records.

• Implemented logic to identify company status, role changes, and enrichment depth, delivering clean, enriched leads to sales in real time.

“You understood exactly what we needed and aligned with our requirements from day one. That made all the difference.”

✅ 2. High-Touch, On-Call Support

• The Kiln’s team worked directly with Azuga’s team in real time—no ticketing systems, no delays.

• Complex workflows and blockers were addressed on live calls with immediate solutions.

• Harish noted this was a drastic improvement from every other vendor they had worked with in the past.

“With other vendors, it’s always ‘we’ll check and get back to you.’ With you, we got answers right on the call.”

✅ 3. Scaling From Enrichment to Full Lifecycle Automation

• What began as enrichment automation evolved into a broader systems buildout.

• Together, the teams explored new workflows to validate company health, verify persona status, suppress outdated leads, and route enriched records into various nurture paths.

• Azuga built a true full-funnel enrichment engine—from data acquisition all the way to campaign execution.

“We went from just trying to clean up lead data to building a complete, end-to-end enrichment system.”

The Results: From Bottlenecks to Breakthroughs

The partnership with The Kiln unlocked exponential performance gains for Azuga’s marketing and sales teams:

• 640+ manual hours per week were eliminated through automation.

• Lead connect rates increased from 4–6% to over 8%.

• Over 50% of leads now include validated mobile numbers and direct dials—data that was previously inaccessible.

• Time to launch enrichment workflows dropped from 3 months to under 3 weeks.

• Support from The Kiln was immediate, hands-on, and collaborative—a major departure from the delayed vendor responses they were used to.

“There’s no longer a situation where sales says, ‘We don’t have enough leads.’ That’s a huge shift.”

Azuga didn’t just gain efficiency—they built a scalable, intelligent growth engine.

A Long-Term Partner, Not Just a Vendor

Throughout the engagement, The Kiln didn’t just “do the work.” They trained Azuga’s team, advised on strategy, and uncovered new opportunities to optimize beyond the original project scope.

“Out of the 100+ vendors I’ve worked with in my 18+ year career, The Kiln is one of the best.”

Conclusion: Automation that Drives Real Growth

Azuga set out to reduce the burden of manual work—and ended up rethinking its entire enrichment and outbound infrastructure. With The Kiln’s support, they now operate a high-velocity, high-accuracy data operation that delivers clean, actionable leads to sales faster than ever before.

“You didn’t just solve a problem—you changed the way we operate.”