From spray and pray to signal-driven selling

Upciti builds privacy-by-design sensors that give city planners real-time intelligence on traffic, parking, and pedestrian activity. 

Sean Grimes joined as Head of Sales to lead the company's US market entry. Before Starbridge, the go-to-market relied on public information and persistence. 

Lots of Googling, cold outreach, and meetings with prospects that were potentially good fits but knowing for sure was difficult. 

The problem was not effort, it was targeting. Upciti's sensors solve multiple problems at once, which means a city with just one of those needs is not really a prospect. The team needed to find cities where parking challenges, economic development pressures, and privacy concerns all overlapped.

Finding that multi-signal overlap manually, across thousands of US cities, was not possible. Starbridge made it possible.

The moment that proved the data was real

When Sean first logged into Starbridge, he tested it against something he already knew well.

"One of the first things I noticed was I used it to look into a specific buyer that I knew really well in the City of Boston. And the data was accurate. Starbridge wasn’t just surfacing data, it was going deep into the thought process of this decision-maker based on detailed conversations. That sold me right away.” 

Sean immediately began thinking about how he could scale data like that across his entire team. 

Building a custom privacy signal unique to Upciti

The most powerful thing Starbridge has done for Upciti is not off-the-shelf. It is a custom account score built specifically around the signal that matters most to their business: whether a city cares about privacy.

Rather than reacting to a single headline, Sean's team now sees a confluence of signals that paint a fuller, more reliable picture of where to focus.

"Instead of my sales team looking at one city and one headline about people being concerned about their privacy being invaded, they’re looking at a confluence of data, giving them a score around: does this city care about privacy or not? And then acting on that quickly.”

Compressing months of ramp time into weeks

For Sean, the benchmark is his own track record. Historically, getting to a clear go-to-market strategy took three to six months of research before teams were ready to move.

With Starbridge, he reached that same milestone in six to eight weeks, with a sales kickoff already planned, a territory strategy mapped, and his team briefed.

"I'm in week six of my job. I usually spend the first three to six months locked-in to just data analysis and trying to understand my market before I even approach it. I'm ready to do that next week."

"No more sitting in a room with spreadsheets trying to figure out what we're going to do. We know what we're going to do."

The result

"I've looked at the other tools out there, and I don't know that any of them could do what Starbridge does."

With Starbridge, Sean has replaced months of fragmented market research with a fast, signal-driven workflow built around the exact use cases Upciti sells. 

The accuracy and depth of the data means the team can walk into every city conversation already knowing the parking priorities, the economic development pressures, and the privacy concerns before the first meeting starts.

"I've been a Starbridge customer for six weeks and it's been amazing."