Company: ClearBlade — IoT, Edge AI, and Digital Twin software for heavy industrial enterprises
Team: 7 sellers | Fully remote
Interviewee: Casey Beauchamp, Executive Director of Cloud Sales
ClearBlade's outbound motion was built on a familiar playbook. The team would pull the top companies in each vertical they'd had success in, grab contacts, and start reaching out. They knew their buyers and they knew their industries, but there was no way to tell whether a company was actually dealing with an IoT challenge right now. Reps reached out based on industry fit and hoped they caught someone at the right time. Most of the time, they didn't.
"We always felt like we knew who we wanted to go after. But we were always either not able to get in contact, or we were just too late. The ship had already sailed."
The top-10 approach had a blind spot the team didn't fully appreciate until later. When you Google or ChatGPT the top companies in a vertical, you get the biggest names. Hundreds of high-fit companies in the $500M to $1B range never surfaced, simply because they weren't famous enough to show up in a list. The team had no way to find accounts ready to buy based on what was actually happening inside those companies.
"There are a lot of companies I don't ever recall looking at, even though they were a top target fit. When you're looking at the top 10, even though number 21 might be the best fit on that list, you just don't get there."
When the renewal notice came in for their existing prospecting tool, Casey looked at the spend against the results and couldn't make the math work. Rather than sign up for another year of the same approach, the team decided to try a different kind of AI sales prospecting tool and commit to six months of doing things differently.
"I looked at the bill and it became really hard to justify spending that money when we just weren't seeing the results. We decided if it's not working, let's turn everything on its head."
With Syft, the team stopped choosing accounts based solely on industry and size and started targeting based on evidence of an active problem. They still organize by vertical, but now every account comes with a real reason to reach out. The shift surfaced companies across adjacent industries and tangential verticals that fit ClearBlade's use cases but had never been on anyone's radar. More than half of their booked meetings came from companies Casey says he never would have put on a list himself.
"If you asked me to sit down and write 10 named accounts for every rep, I don't know that I would have got there organically. But now that I see them, we're modeling more accounts based off of that success."
As a fully remote company with years of accumulated tribal knowledge, onboarding used to be a bottleneck. It took two to three months before a new rep was ready to outbound with any confidence. With Syft, the targeting logic, context, and messaging rationale are embedded in the workflow. New hires started doing real outbound almost immediately, learning the business through the process of prospecting rather than waiting on months of internal knowledge transfer.
"It's not just a tool for finding potential candidates. It's been a training and learning tool, because a lot of the tribal knowledge you'd normally have to learn is already embedded."
In four months, the team went from booking one or two outbound meetings a month to generating 60 positive responses, 23 booked meetings, and 5 to 10 qualified opportunities with real budget and real projects. Three of those have active proposals out the door, which is notable for a company that typically runs a 6 to 12 month enterprise sales cycle. Every rep on the team has built Syft into their daily or weekly prospecting routine, and a healthy competition emerged naturally as reps compared notes on what was working.
"People want to chase Syft deals because they're yielding good conversations. If the quality is great, why would you not go after the Syft lead? It's kind of a self-fulfilling cycle of people leaning in."
"Syft has really helped us maximize what we can get done on a week-to-week basis. It lets the sales rep focus on closing pipeline and moving deals forward, not spending all their time trying to build pipeline. We're maximizing efficiency, but also effectiveness, because the meetings we are booking are qualified and generating good conversations and good results."
ClearBlade is a premier provider of IoT, Edge AI, and connected Digital Twin software, dedicated to making industries more efficient, safer, and sustainable. As a Premier level Partner for Google Cloud, their solutions transform machine data into actionable insights across industries like buildings, transportation, and energy.
Syft is an AI outbound sales tool that finds companies actively struggling with the exact problem your product solves, then tells your sellers exactly who to engage and why. Your team gets a validated reason to reach out to every account, so reps stop guessing and start leading conversations with perspective instead of a pitch. Built for B2B sales teams selling complex solutions where timing, context, and the right conversation matter more than volume.
