Zipstack · Customer Discovery Case Study 54% advanced to second meetings.
- Industry
- Data & Analytics
- Engagement
- Customer Discovery
Zipstack takes a zero-ETL and zero-Data Ops approach to enable data teams to manage their data sources in a centralized view using just SQL, allowing tasks that typically take weeks to be completed in minutes. The founders of Zipstack knew that hiring a commercial sales team before initiating outbound in North America would be risky and elongate the process of validating the market. Instead, Zipstack approached JJELLYFISH to laser in on who their best customers are within mid-market U.S. organizations, and establish an outbound messaging motion to engage in meaningful sales conversations with prospects.
The Challenge
The Zipstack team had a general idea of who their target customer is but needed help to define the titles in their ICP further, establish who within a Data team owns the problems their product solves for, and develop a plan for cold outreach. Because Zipstack can be used by multiple functions within an organization (Data Engineering, Analytics, Business Operations, etc.), it was difficult for them to know which functions to start with and identify the optimal injection point in the North American market.
Messaging was also a core challenge for Zipstack, not knowing the appropriate level of detail to go into and which value propositions to lean on when engaging prospective buyers. Honing in on one particular pain point and value proposition was difficult simply because Zipstack’s solution can impact so many different areas within a business.
The Zipstack founders set out to learn which titles in their ICP were feeling the pains at the highest degree related to their solution, knowing they would later pass the learnings to their sales team to begin scaling and executing.
The Solution
JJELLYFISH deployed their team for 90 days as an extension of the Zipstack team based in North America. During this time, JJELLYFISH developed and executed a repeatable, outbound strategy proven to generate meetings with mid-level members of Data Engineering teams.
The Results
The results were not immediate and required experimenting with several different titles and messaging variants. Data Engineering Managers were validated as the core problem owners, and the neighboring data functions (Data Analytics/Ops/Infrastructure) were invalidated as reliable entry points.
JJELLYFISH deployed a discovery call framework to uncover the most pressing unmet needs in data stack management and in doing so, helped Zipstack attach the right value proposition to the right problem owners. This 90-day engagement served as a precursor to Zipstack bringing on three full-time sales hires in the U.S. and gave them the data and insights to hit the ground running.
Shuveb Hussain, Co-founder & CEOWe needed to move as fast as possible to validate/invalidate our ICP and Unmet Needs. JJELLYFISH was fast to pivot, easy to work with, and learned our technology really fast. It was critical to get our assumptions invalidated so we don't waste our time.
