It started with two firsts for Brad Brown. The sales veteran joined Zylo for the challenge of creating a product category and the chance to build a business development team from scratch.

Fast-forward five years and three things have changed:

• Brad now has a broader role in Zylo’s overall go-to-market strategy
• The category now has a name (SaaS Management)
• Zylo is now leading its Magic Quadrant

But one basic paradox remains the same.

“Our greatest attribute is our greatest challenge, in a sense, because any company could be a Zylo customer,” Brad explained. “So a lot of my time goes into thinking about how to condense that infinite opportunity and help our go-to-market teams invest their finite resources in the right places.”

Betting on Customer-Led Growth

The people most likely to buy your product in the future are the ones who bought, used, and enjoyed your product in the past.

It’s the kind of marketing maxim you don’t need an MBA to understand. But it’s also one that’s become increasingly relevant at Zylo.

“We’ve spent much of the last few years building out best-in-class processes and playbooks to ensure our customers consistently realize the value they expect,” Brad noted. “With successful Zylo customers naturally advancing in their own careers, we now have a growing network of allies who can raise awareness for SaaS Management at their next company.”

Translating this obvious opportunity into a practical process hasn’t been easy, however.

Brad’s prior attempts focused on LinkedIn Sales Navigator. But the platform's limitations always made it hard for his teams to build momentum.

“The job change alerts it surfaced were far from real-time, and turning those raw insights into actionable lists was an extremely manual task,” Brad said.

Despite these frustrations, though, his conviction in customer-led tactics never wavered. He knew the opportunity was there waiting to be unlocked.

It just demanded a different set of tools.

Finding a Dependable Partner

The ideal solution for Zylo would have to:

• Supply high-integrity job change data
• Accelerate audience building
• Simplify list management
• Sync with Salesforce

Once Brad began exploring the marketplace in earnest, he was encouraged to see a few specialized options that appeared to meet those initial requirements. Whenever evaluations reached the proof-of-concept stage, though, most vendors struggled to clear the first hurdle.

“I was getting used to seeing at least 10% mismatches or false positives when asking providers to flag former Zylo customers who had moved to new companies,” Brad recalled. “We immediately knew there was something different about Champion when they delivered an accuracy rate above 99%.”

Further exploration of the platform only confirmed the appeal. And a brief pilot program gave Brad all the evidence he needed to present a strong budget proposal to Zylo’s finance team.

“Champion quickly surfaced several opportunities we never would have found otherwise,” Brad confirmed. “Assuming the conversion rate on those opportunities hovered around our historical average, we’d be looking at an exponential return on our investment.”

Creating An Instant Impact

As it turned out, the conversion rate was anything but average.

Leads added to Zylo’s “Champion Former Customer” campaign converted into qualified sales opportunities at a rate 5x above baseline. This ultimately meant a 10% increase in deals accepted into Zylo’s pipeline each month.

In one memorable example, Brad reconnected with a former Zylo power user who had recently settled into a role at a new company.

Their conversation led to the realization that SaaS Management could be a smart topic to socialize internally while C-suite executives were actively discussing company-wide cost-efficiency mandates.

“Within 30 days of joining the new company, our advocate was already showcasing his value by recommending an unexpected path to achieving a C-suite priority,” said Brad. “And from our perspective, I can’t imagine any other way we could have gotten that kind of traction at a 30,000-person enterprise so quickly.”

These early outputs are only more impressive in light of the inputs required.

Zylo tracked job changes and assembled account lists with a fraction of the former manual effort. As a result of this restyled workflow, the team now has more time to personalize its outreach and build authentic connections.

“The confidence that Champion’s got us covered, accurate alerts will arrive in real time, and there’s no other action we’ll need to take — that’s been transformative,” Brad concluded. “We’ve turned our initial customer-led vision into an effortless, always-on motion.”