Brandwatch is the most robust social media and digital listening tool to help brands monitor and engage with what people are saying about them across 10 million of the most common websites and social forums across the internet.

Brandwatch has a big team of Sales Development Representatives, (SDRs) and keeping them busy means constantly ‘burning through’ accounts. “It feels like we can never have enough accounts in any of the regions we’re in - but especially in Central Europe and the Nordics,” said Josh Pudnos, Director of Commercial Operations at Brandwatch.

They knew there were a lot more accounts in the market than they had access to from their existing data providers.

“Through our analysis and the quality of inbounds we were receiving from companies in these countries, we knew our database was falling short,” Pudnos said. “But our existing data source was not strong enough to find those accounts, no matter how we searched it. There was always a huge chunk of the Total Addressable Market missing.”

Today we can more confidently say we're reaching out to all the companies that could potentially buy from us.”

Josh Pudnos

Director of Commercial Operations, Brandwatch

This made it difficult to enable the sales teams in these regions to the same high degree as the other regional teams — sometimes leaving them to ‘scrape the bottom of the barrel,’ reusing accounts with ever-increasing regularity, and doing a lot more self-prospecting than was optimal.

“For a while, we weren't even adding any accounts to those markets because the data we had was so poor that it took an enormous amount of work to find a comparatively small number of new accounts,” said Pudnos. “It was more effective to just focus on countries with better coverage, instead.”

Brandwatch needed a more effective way of uncovering the full Total Addressable Market (TAM) in these hard-to-reach regions.

Brandwatch turned to Ocean.io to fill in those data gaps in the market.

“When I heard about how Ocean.io works, it really stood out to me,” Pudnos said. “No other data platform talks about looking at all the customers in our database and grouping them by who’s paying the most, etc.”

Ocean.io can also help them uncover pools of untapped prospects, thanks to the way it integrates with their CRM. “Ocean.io takes it a step further and compares that customer list to Ocean.io’s giant database to show us where we’re only scratching the surface, before subtracting the customers we already have and giving us a list of the top accounts we should be going after,” said Pudnos.

Brandwatch decided to put Ocean.io’s data to the test to see if it really held up to the promise. “We ran some tests comparing Ocean.io against the other data source, and when we did our analysis, they were better than the other data providers in the markets that we needed to see growth,” Pudnos said.

“We saw a significant increase in the total number of accounts we were able to find in each region, as well as a higher success rate in finding good-fit accounts compared to our other data sources.”

Ocean.io has enabled Brandwatch to uncover vital new accounts across Europe, and ‘keep the beast fed’ with fresh new data.

“Since implementing Ocean.io, we’re able to keep our data fresher and provide much more help to the SDRs working in what were previously our trouble regions: Central and Northern Europe,” Said Pudnos. “We now have a regular cadence of reviewing and adding to those accounts that just wasn’t plausible before.

Ocean.io really stood out to me.”

Josh Pudnos

Director of Commercial Operations, Brandwatch

All in all, today we’re more confident in saying that we’re aware of and reaching out to every company who could potentially buy from us - and that's a big change.”