Customer Stories

Aqfer cuts account research from 5 hours to 11 minutes, unlocking new GTM agility

With 240-day sales cycles and only 75-100 true ICP accounts, every hour of research matters. Tom's team designed 35+ custom buying signals and compressed research from hours to minutes.

Thomas Burg

SVP Marketing, Aqfer

IndustryData Infrastructure & AI Data Enablement

Company Size18-25 in the U.S., larger team in Chennai

FocusEnterprise ABM with a small, high-fit TAM

GoalCut account research time, disqualify, prioritize and swap-in accounts faster to keep momentum in a top-40 active tier

The challenge

Precious attention spread across 240-day cycles

Aqfer sells a highly complex marketing data platform into enterprise accounts. Sales cycles regularly exceed 200 days, and even small changes inside target organizations can upend the entire deal.

With only about 75-100 true ICPs out of an outer ring of 800 possible firms, the team's attention is precious. Every touchpoint matters, but the manual approach was burning through 4-5 hours of account research per prospect, spread over five or six different tools.

"Our sales cycle is around 240 days on average, and things change constantly. Executives leave, business plans evolve. We have to be on top of what's happening inside every target, or we risk wasting months on deals that go nowhere."Thomas Burg, SVP Marketing

This high-effort research slowed down disqualification, made it harder to pivot when buying signals changed, and forced the team to focus narrowly on no more than 2-3 accounts at a time.

"I used to do these account research projects myself, and by the time you finish, you don't feel like doing another one for months."Thomas Burg, SVP Marketing

The solution

Sales team-led signal design + agentic research

Tom decided not to impose a one-size-fits-all solution. Instead, he asked his own sales team what signals they needed to track to make a real business case and stay ahead of deal changes.

"We canvassed the sales team and said: don't let your imagination be limited at all. What would you want to track if you could? They came back with more than 35 different signals. With Evergrowth, we built almost all of them into our current workflow."Thomas Burg, SVP Marketing

Signal design

Sales team identified 35+ signals: executive moves, org changes, funding clues, new product launches, public appearances by key stakeholders.

Prompt library

Built advanced research questions: "Has the head of data been on any podcasts recently?" "What hiring patterns signal a new initiative?"

Integration

Leads from Sales Navigator seamlessly pushed into HubSpot with Contacts and Research results, turning hours of work into a repeatable, fast process.

Fast pivots

When a deal isn't going anywhere, the team moves on quickly and sets up the next target accounts without losing momentum.

Results

Research compressed, pipeline expanded

Crucially, Evergrowth also allowed the team to disqualify bad-fit prospects much sooner and replace them without losing momentum. The process surfaced more nuanced talking points, since reps could now ask natural-language questions and connect dots that would have taken hours before.

"The real win for us is we can set up the next two target accounts really quickly and run more in parallel. If a deal isn't going anywhere, we don't bang our head against the wall; we just move on and keep the pipeline moving."Thomas Burg, SVP Marketing

4-5hrs → 11min

Research time per strategic account

35+ signals

Active buying signals tracked across all target accounts

Top-40 tier

Accounts supported in parallel, up from 2-3

Faster pivots

Re-prioritize as org charts shift or deals stall

"The breadth of information now is the big win: it allows us to go through accounts faster and say, 'Look, we have an airtight case. Let's move.'"Thomas Burg, SVP Marketing

Team buy-in

Even the skeptics came around

Bringing the team on board took patience. Aqfer's sales team skews seasoned with robust existing processes, so not everyone immediately saw the value in new agentic workflows. Tom's inclusive approach, letting the sellers shape the process, proved critical.

"Getting the sales team to buy in took some patience, but once they saw their requests show up in the workflow, the light bulb went off."Thomas Burg, SVP Marketing

This upskilling led to sharper, more effective outreach, and made the whole team more agile as their buyers and org structures changed mid-cycle.

"Even the skeptics started asking more creative questions and learned how to use prompt-based research."Thomas Burg, SVP Marketing

Looking ahead

From ABM niche to productized scale

Aqfer is now moving toward productized offerings and a larger addressable market, with shorter sales cycles and more outbound GTM. With a new CRO and CEO onboard, Tom expects even more workflows to be automated with the Evergrowth approach.

It used to take four to five hours across five or six tools. Once we locked in our prompts, we got the reports down to 11-12 minutes. That's the kind of compression that changes how you run a pipeline.