Le Wagon

After launching and growing as a B2C coding school, Le Wagon wanted to expand with a new B2B offer: Le Wagon for Business. 

Naturally, they wanted to leverage one of their biggest competitive advantages: a long list of happy alumni who had participated in Le Wagon personally, and who could now be in a position to recommend or even approve Le Wagon’s B2B offer at their companies.

However because their alumni had taken part in the program using their personal email addresses, Le Wagon couldn’t simply use that data for B2B prospecting:

• It wouldn’t be GDPR-compliant.
• It wouldn’t be particularly effective since it wouldn’t take into account current professional information.
• It simply wouldn’t be respectful of their alumni’s personal time.

So Jean Mennesson, Le Wagon for Business Outbound Growth Manager, had to figure out how to enrich and qualify 20,000+ alumni leads, matching up professional email addresses, job titles, company information and more.

At first, they tried working with their own internal tool, but that meant having someone visit individual LinkedIn pages, running the tool each time.

It was manual and time-consuming, which simply wouldn’t work given the scale of their database. 

So they needed a better way, an automated way… a Captain Data way!

Doing things manually did have one benefit, in that Jean clearly understood the process they needed:

“We wanted to set up a series of steps: connecting the personal email address to its LinkedIn profile, extract an up-to-date professional email address, and enrich our CRM with key information like job title and company size.”

Because ultimately the goal wasn’t simply to re-contact all 20,000+ coding bootcamp participants about the new B2B offer. Jean and his team knew that there was only a small subset of that group that would truly fit their ICP.

“At Le Wagon for Business we’re mostly targeting companies with 10,000+ employees, so we really needed to narrow down our big initial list into a much narrower MQL list.”

But of course, since people change jobs all the time, they wanted a process that could take the whole list into account, providing updates as needed over time.

The workflow

The main Captain Data workflow that Le Wagon uses for this process starts with the Outlook integration, which can connect personal emails to LinkedIn profiles; the workflow then looks for professional emails using specialized data providers, in other words: email finders. Once the key contact information is there, the full LinkedIn profile is extracted, with all of the data flowing into Le Wagon’s CRM. 

Once the clean data is inside the CRM, additional automations are run to dispatch the appropriate leads to the sales team. 

“With the automated workflow set up, it’s much easier to keep things moving, because we can relaunch it manually to make sure we’ve got the most up-to-date info available. So for example, if one of our alumni was at a smaller company before and so we didn’t want to contact them, but they’ve now moved to a bigger one, we’ll get that information and see if it puts them into MQL territory.”

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The results

“Our Outlook workflow might not get us 100% of the LinkedIn profiles we’re looking for, but it’s well above 80%. From our 20,000 alumni, the Captain Data workflow let us pull out the roughly 1500 leads that could fit and then used additional filters to get down to about 200 very strong leads, people we see as “champions”, who we felt were really ready for our sales team to work,” Jean says.

Beyond the sheer numbers, the sales team is pleased to have effective data on hand to boost their daily productivity.

“It’s turned our alumni list into an actual sales tool. Before we really weren’t able to use one of our biggest potential sources of positive leads. Now we actually have the info we need to start effective sales conversations with the right people.”

What’s next

Jean notes that their initial data automation with Captain Data is just the first step of their roadmap.

“We’ve also developed another workflow that is launched whenever we have an MQL, to gather as much web data as possible for the sales team. We also have another project that isn’t completely done yet but that we want to have running in Q1 2024, where we’ll start finding intent data as well.”

Expanding toward intent data – for example, social media activity such as LinkedIn posts by people followed by Le Wagon alumni – will let the B2B team design and launch more outbound campaigns.

It’s all part of building an effective, automated outbound machine: reaching the right people at the right moment with the right message.

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Many thanks to Jean for taking the time to speak with us! If your company could use a similar data automation workflow (or any number of different ones!), reach out to set up your own personalized demo.