Case study · Sales Intelligence
MWDN — RevOps transformation
145,000
records, from mess to structure
25,700
new opportunities found in existing data connections
2 FTE
of manual research freed
Overview
The sales team spent most of the week getting ready to sell.
Opening tabs. Cross-checking a company against three sources. Retyping what one of those sources already knew. Then, with whatever was left, actually selling something.
Nobody plans it that way. It's what happens when the CRM can't answer "who's worth my time today" and a person has to answer it instead, every morning, from scratch.
- Client
What was wrong
What was actually wrong
A CRM is the heart of any serious outbound team. Done right, it gives the work structure, puts the best opportunities in front of the right rep, and points to the next move. It saves people time. And it holds its own shape, so keeping it in order never becomes a second job on top of selling.
This one did the opposite. Years of accounts, contacts and conversations had piled up with nothing holding them together. The same conversation split across three places. People who had left the companies years ago, companies closed or became irrelevant. Nobody could trust what was in front of them, so nobody really leaned on it.
So the reps worked around it. LinkedIn, funding news, job boards, personal spreadsheet - spending its best hours on data research and entry instead of selling.
Nobody could trust what was in front of them, so nobody really leaned on it.
What we built
What CogniDuck built
Eleven connected modules, one go-to-market data layer, built over nine months. The order mattered more than the parts.
First, make the data true.
145,000 records updated, qualified, disqualified, corrected and merged into one source the team can trust. The person opening the lead's profile knows that what they see will be up to date.
Then, make it useful.
Know who's worth the time. ICP validation and enrichment on every account, tiering that ranks them on real data signals instead of gut feel, and ABM analytics showing where the effort will pay off. The target list became a priority order.
Know when to move. Lead enrichment with job-change analysis under it, so a decision-maker's move — or a team starting to lose people — shows up as a signal while it's still worth acting on.
Meet people where they already are. LinkedIn conversations and contacts flow into Zoho and email campaigns are wired in, so what was sent, who opened it and what happened next all sit in one place instead of three.
Learn from every conversation. AI reads each exchange and pulls out what matters — the objection, the intent, the thing that moved the deal — so it doesn't live only in the head of whoever was on the call.
Then, make it keep itself.
Deduplication runs continuously, conversations flowing in. New records are validated on the way in. There is no cleanup project scheduled for next year, because there doesn't need to be one.
What changed
What changed
Roughly a third of the backlog turned out to be real, active opportunity. The rest was ruled out before a rep spent a minute on it.
And ~25,700 new opportunities surfaced from connections already sitting in the data — companies and people the business already had a path to and had never seen. That had been there through all three failed attempts.
Reps now open the CRM to ranked accounts and live signals instead of a blank field and a browser tab. The research that used to eat two full-time people now just runs.
share of the week a sales rep is actually selling now
of new qualified opportunities were sitting in data nobody had time to work through
Nine months in
Nine months in
The systems are still running, and CogniDuck is still extending them rather than maintaining them.
The reps use it because it's faster and easier than the workaround. That's the only adoption strategy that has ever worked.
The outcome
What comes next
There's a bigger win underneath. Clean, structured data isn't just a tidier CRM — it's the base everything else gets built on. The AI worth adding next only works on data it can trust: agents that draft the outreach, act on a signal the moment it lands, and run a play without a person starting it.
Most teams don't have that base. This one now does.
25,700
new opportunities surfaced from data the business already had
Somewhere in the first few months they stopped feeling like an outside team.
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