Results at a glance

Pipeline: In the first year of partnership, there is ~8.3m of open Starbridge-contributed pipeline and a 450% ROI on investment from closed won ARR. 

Data & coverage

• Consolidated a stack of multiple data providers into a single pane of glass. 65,000 accounts enriched with 47,000 net-new verified contacts at 98% deliverability.
  
• Added $8.2m in new pipeline after one month of prospecting based on a dynamic scoring model, using an ABM campaign in Gong Engage with personalized Starbridge-created emails.
  
• 145% increase in pre-conference meetings booked vs. the prior year with Starbridge conference lead list enrichments.

The company

ClearGov builds the modern budgeting and financial-management platform for local governments and school districts — helping small and mid-sized communities run the entire finance cycle, from long-range planning to public-facing budget books. They sell into one of the country’s most fragmented markets: tens of thousands of cities, counties, special districts, and school districts, each with its own buyers, budget cycle, and procurement path.

Challenge

ClearGov's go-to-market team was sitting on an enormous but unusable TAM. Their CRM held roughly 95,000 accounts, but the data was noisy, contacts were thin and out of date, and there was no reliable way to tell which accounts were worth a rep's time. Territories were built on the full list, stretching a lean team across far more accounts without enough verified contacts to run real outbound in the first place.

The team had invested in several different B2B data providers, but found that they struggled with the nuance of the government market. Email domain patterns that are normal in government were treated as edge cases or dismissed as spam rather than recognized as legitimate by traditional providers—for example, email domains that change, or smaller governments deliberately using role-based emails (which B2B-oriented providers tend to flag as spam). Obvious contacts that were available via public website-based directories were missing, leading to manual research workflows. Industry-specific data points that were important for account scoring, such as budgets, were not available via traditional providers.

And with disparate data providers: each Salesforce sync required a new mapping logic and room for potential errors. 

Solution

Building a strong CRM data foundation. To start, ClearGov wanted to clean up its data and set the foundation to operationalize account scoring and outbound AI plays. Starbridge’s Salesforce integration enriched 65,000 accounts, archived ~300,000 irrelevant contacts, and added 47,000 net-new verified contacts across ClearGov's core and emerging personas, at 98% deliverability.

Starbridge additionally pulled budget data for each buyer to identify which accounts were too small to be a focus, giving 30,000 fewer distractions in Salesforce. 

Account Scoring & ABM on Focus Accounts. Starbridge scored the account base against ClearGov's own rubric, cutting the noise down to the in-market accounts most likely to buy. Utilizing factors such as financial reports, competitor utilization, budget trends, prior Salesforce activity, and more - Starbridge ranked 16,000 top accounts and automated personalized messaging in Gong Flows. This outbound campaign became one of the fastest pipeline generators of the year, creating $7.5m in meetings booked the first month. 

"We were prospecting 60k accounts without enough personalized messaging. Now we can scale highly relevant content to the right personas at the right time in their buying journey."
— Kristin Fretz, GTM Systems Operations Manager, ClearGov

Additionally, Starbridge has also been used to operationalize outbound plays: such as plays that utilize public budget information and pre-conference outreach - resulting in a 107% increase in meetings booked before conferences than the previous year. 

Looking forward

Looking forward, ClearGov is doubling down on the investment in Starbridge given the early ROI with plans to operationalize more plays. The teams operate very closely in a shared slack channel and with frequent catch-ups to discuss the product, roadmap and ClearGov’s revenue operations roadmap.