How Semgrep warmed up cold outbound to grow pipeline 74% in a single quarter

Summary

Key quotes

Background

Buying intent comes in many forms—not just demo requests. But if you’re blind to the signals, separating in-market accounts from the rest is a manual, time-consuming process. It’s the reason so many sales teams fall back on cold outbound.

That’s why data-driven organizations like Semgrep make sure their sales reps have full visibility into high-fit prospects and companies showing intent across channels—and the tools to take action fast.

Here’s how Semgrep used Common Room to:

• Swap cold outreach for warm outbound
• Automatically surface ready-to-buy prospects and accounts
• Increase qualified pipeline by 74% within three months

Turn cold outbound warm

Semgrep’s sales organization was seeing success on the inbound front, thanks in part to the company’s popular open-source product, Semgrep OSS.

But its outbound motion wasn’t driving the same results.

The company decided to switch up its go-to-market approach. Instead of outbounding any account that matches its ideal customer profile, the SDR team would start focusing on the warmest accounts in its ICP.

“I wanted to fundamentally change our targeting,” said Director of Sales Development Jason Klumpp. “There’s a ton of stuff that happens before a prospect opts in with a form fill. We should be using those signals to see which accounts are interested in us, our offering, or our space.”

The only thing stopping Semgrep from building its warm outbound rhythm? The ability to access and action on buying signals at scale.

Jason and his team set out to find a solution. As they evaluated different vendors, Common Room’s AI-powered customer intelligence platform became the clear standout.

“Common Room’s scope is a competitive differentiator,” Jason said. “It has more integrations, more signals, more ways to see where prospects are engaging with us. I felt like I was buying an AI copilot, enrichment tool, product tracking tool, website tracking tool, social tracking tool, and job-change tracking tool all at the same time.”

Semgrep ultimately ran a sales proof of concept with Common Room and one other vendor.

“Once our reps got their hands on Common Room, the response was unanimous: ‘Buy it, please,’” Jason said. “We started sourcing new opportunities right away based on product data, website visits, GitHub activity—you name it. The results were immediate.”

Playbook

Identify and action on signal-heavy accounts

Prioritize accounts based on buying signals and take action fast.

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Scale high-converting outbound plays

Part of the reason Semgrep’s SDRs love Common Room is how easy it makes it to build, test, and iterate on signal-based sales plays.

“The path to value is a lot faster with Common Room,” Jason said. “We were up and running in a week. So much of what Common Room offers comes right out of the box. It doesn’t require much technical investment to see value.”

Common Room auto-captures signals across all of Semgrep’s connected data sources, including CRM info, product usage, web visits, GitHub activity, X (Twitter) interactions, LinkedIn engagements, and more.

Signals are automatically run through Common Room’s AI-powered identity resolution and waterfall enrichment engine—Person360™—to reveal the people and accounts behind them.

SDRs get access to full profiles for every person and company active across Semgrep’s digital ecosystem.

Names, job titles, work histories, contact information, cross-channel activities, annual revenue, capital raised, tech stack configurations—all demographic, firmographic, and behavioral details are just a click away.

This makes it easy to build targeted lists of prospects and prioritize which accounts to go after.

Jason and his team use Common Room’s intelligent automations to quickly spin up plays built around this info.

Contacts and orgs that take certain actions or match certain attributes get added to segments based on preset filters, like open-source activity, pricing page visits, and economic buying power.

Once segments are created, new contacts and orgs are automatically added as they’re detected over time, turning every segment into an auto-replenishing burndown list for reps to work each day.

Semgrep currently has 16 plays up and running, including plays built around:

• Product-qualified leads using free accounts
• Site visitors viewing high-intent webpages
• GitHub users active in Semgrep’s repository
• ICP-match contacts engaging on social
• Former product users who switched jobs to ICP-match accounts
• Companies with open job listings that mention competitive technologies

Semgrep uses Common Room to templatize these plays, replicate them across the entire SDR team, and customize them based on ownership in Salesforce. This way reps only see prospects in their book of business.

When reps click into a play, they get a holistic view of every person and account assigned to it, from product usage and website activity at the contact level to annual revenue and funding at the org level. Reps can click into any contact or organization to dive deeper into their profile.

Signal-based scoring automatically shows which contacts and accounts are the best fit—and gives the context for why.

SDRs also use Common Room to see which accounts are generating the highest volume of different signals—like the number of open job listings for cybersecurity roles. This makes it easy for reps to prioritize who to go after first.

But Semgrep doesn’t stop at its company-owned surfaces.

Using Common Room’s LinkedIn listening, SDRs can identify prospects engaging with industry thought leaders and competitors across the social network.

SDRs tell Common Room to fetch signals from business-relevant posts—like content related to application security or feature launches from competitors—and enrich the people who reacted to or commented on these posts with the press of a button.

Of course, not every signal comes from a budget holder. This is where Common Room’s Prospector comes in.

SDRs click into companies in Common Room to find decision-makers they may not currently be tracking using custom filtering criteria, like job title, location, and even LinkedIn follower count.

These individuals are then added to Common Room, where new profiles are automatically created and enriched. From here, reps get in touch with high-level stakeholders using messaging based on buying signals from other contacts at the company.

In fact, the entire process can be automated from end to end via Common Room’s workflow builder.

“Prospector is definitely one of our favorite features,” Jason said. “It helps us unify multiple jobs to be done—account research, multithreading—all in one place.”

Playbook

Find and enrich any high-fit company or prospect in a flash

Spotlight ICP-match accounts and ideal personas lightning-quick.

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Apply inbound rigor to outbound sales

Common Room isn’t just helping Semgrep’s SDRs generate more pipeline—it’s changing the way they work.

It used to be standard practice for reps to plan their prospecting in advance, activate sequences early the following week, and execute tasks throughout the rest of the week.

That’s not the case with Common Room.

“Reps treat the signals in Common Room the same way they do inbound leads,” Jason said. “They jump on fresh opportunities right away.”

The team is starting to experiment with real-time alerts in Common Room to further increase speed to lead.

At the same time, Common Room’s integrations with popular CRMs and sales execution platforms make it possible for Semgrep’s SDRs to follow up fast.

SDRs sync contacts with Salesforce and add prospects to personalized outbound sequences in Outreach directly from Common Room—no screen switching required.

And with RoomieAI™, Common Room’s generative AI messaging agent, SDRs can auto-generate highly personalized, highly relevant outbound messaging using the signals captured in Common Room.

“What really blew me away was the adoption,” Jason said. “It’s usually a struggle to get reps to use a new tool day to day. Our SDRs immediately incorporated Common Room into their daily workflows. Now they’re finding high-intent leads they never would have seen otherwise.”

Playbook

Replicate winning sales plays teamwide

Make every rep a top performer.

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Results

From August 2024 to October 2024, Common Room directly contributed to a 74% increase in qualified pipeline.

According to Jason, closed-won deals sourced from Common Room helped Semgrep 2.5x Common Room’s purchase price in under a quarter.

Semgrep gives engineers everything they need to build the optimal AppSec program. Common Room gives Semgrep everything it needs to build the optimal outbound motion.

Warm up cold outbound with Common Room

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