Temporal is an open-source software (OSS) company that helps organizations build better applications. From Netflix and Datadog to Brex and Vercel, companies of all shapes and sizes use its programming model to simplify code, make applications more reliable, and deliver more features faster.
Breaking down data silos
Temporal’s success is powered by its developer community, where developers come together to share, learn, and socialize. But the company’s sales team also plays a crucial role, from prospecting and qualifying leads to connecting developers to more product value.
Gozie Nwachukwu joined Temporal to expand its sales team and develop new ways to source business. Part of his job is helping the company fuel sales pipeline growth and velocity—a tall order in today’s digital landscape.
“It's 2023 and these spam filters are getting harder and harder to get past,” Gozie said.
Sales teams can now dig into a massive ecosystem of digital channels to find and engage prospects, but that presents problems of its own. Chief among them is the time it takes to develop a strategy for each touchpoint.
“You would really have to go out, build a list of prospects in a respective channel, and then almost build out a workflow from there in terms of reaching out to them and making content that's relevant,” Gozie said.
But the biggest blocker is a lack of visibility. Sales teams can’t see what buyers are saying and doing across many channels. And the signals they do have access to are siloed and chained to individual platforms.
With buyer intent and context hidden in the dark funnel, sales teams miss out on key indicators of where prospects are in the buying journey and the best ways to deliver value to them. This also makes it difficult to identify or prioritize high-intent and high-fit opportunities.
Centralizing sales signals
Temporal was already using Common Room to support its DevRel program.
Common Room’s machine learning-powered identity resolution and profile enrichment help the company understand exactly who’s participating in its owned Slack community and the best ways to empower them.
Temporal’s sales team can use these insights to help OSS users get more value out of the product at different stages of the sales cycle, such as setting up seminars or workshops to help users understand how they can use Temporal to solve specific problems.
But community activity happens across many digital touchpoints—not just on owned channels. With dozens of natively built and fully managed integrations—including Slack, Linkedin, Twitter, Discourse, YouTube, and more—Common Room gives the Temporal sales team a bird’s eye view of dark-funnel activity happening on social media, in online forums, and other relevant channels.
“Where I think Common Room is really a game-changer is in how it aggregates everything into one place,” Gozie said.
With a consolidated view of users who may be interested in its product and where they are in the customer journey, Temporal’s sales team can significantly speed up the prospecting process.
“When building out these prospect lists and meeting prospects where they're at, you would have to build a list off of LinkedIn, off of Slack, off of YouTube, off of an online community forum, but with Common Room, it’s all in the same place,” Gozie said. “That has led to a lot of meetings and opportunities for our team just because you can reach out very quickly and get right in front of them.”
Common Room has become the sales team’s go-to source for discovering buyer intent and context.
“That's the first place I check every single day and it's much easier to reach out to prospects very quickly,” Gozie said. “Using Common Room, I know immediately when someone posts a comment on LinkedIn or a question on a community forum.”
This makes it much easier for Gozie and his team to immediately start adding value.
Personalizing the buyer experience
The Temporal sales team doesn’t just use Common Room to build pipeline faster—it also uses it to make sure it’s higher-quality.
Using Common Room’s customizable filters, the sales team can drill down into different attributes—such as organization size, annual revenue, and ideal customer profile—to make sure prospects are the right fit. Then it can automatically add those buyers to segments to plan and manage outreach at scale.
“You always want to find the leads that you know are really likely to convert, and with Common Room, I can see that literally every day,” Gozie said.
This also makes it easier to personalize engagement. Unlike account-based marketing tools that provide only account-level insights, Common Room helps the Temporal sales team understand the people behind the buying behaviors.
“Common Room gives you very strong directions as far as engaging with prospects,” Gozie said.
Those directions include which channels, such as LinkedIn or Twitter, team members should reach out on—as well as which topics will resonate most with prospects. With insight into the conversations happening across digital channels, Gozie and his team have the context they need to cut through the noise and directly address prospects’ questions, pain points, and goals.
“There are a ton of different data enrichment tools,” Gozie said. “So for a prospect, you can get their LinkedIn, their email, all different types of profiles. With Common Room, you actually figure out where they're being active. You know if they're using Slack or if they're using LinkedIn or if they're using a community forum, and with that, you can make your outreach a lot more personalized.”
Even if cold emails make it past spam filters and get opened, they can feel irritating and impersonal.
“Over email, you have to do it all in one go—introduce yourself, explain the product, explain why it's valuable, and then hope someone commits to a meeting,” Gozie said.
But by meeting prospects where they are, Temporal’s sales team opens the door to more authentic, human conversations.
“You can get all the data through whatever data enrichment tool you want to use, but just because you have all these profiles, it doesn't really mean you're being personalized with the user and speaking to them in the way that they want to be spoken to,” Gozie said. “But if you choose the channels where they're already active, your ability to get a response goes up a lot more.”
Prioritizing sales opportunities
With so much on their plates, sales professionals have to work smarter (not harder) to hit their numbers. That means recognizing which opportunities are worth their time and responding in the right way.
Common Room’s team alerts can automatically notify Temporal’s sales team about relevant account activity. And with automated workflows, the team can easily tag people and organizations for filtering and segmentation.
“Common Room gives me a daily feed of all the prospects I want to engage from multiple channels all in one place,” Gozie said. “It saves me so much time and energy as far as prospecting and organizing my day.”
This helps drive not only more pipeline, but better-performing pipeline.
“Over 50% of my meetings come from Common Room,” Gozie said. “And these tend to be high-quality calls.”
Between the time savings and pipeline growth, Common Room is now a crucial part of Temporal’s sales toolkit.
“Common Room has become an essential tool for us to find strong prospects that turn into fruitful meetings, and thus lead to great opportunities and pipeline,” Gozie said.
Temporal helps its customers create more reliable systems. Common Room helps Temporal create more reliable pipeline.
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