Crunchbase increases sales productivity and bookings by integrating email and actionable contacts data

Learn how Crunchbase built a highly engaging, powerful sales solution with the Nylas Email API

Crunchbase is the leading provider of prospecting and research solutions for privately held companies, from high-growth startups to pre-seed funding companies across the globe. Over 70 million users—including salespeople, entrepreneurs, investors, and market researchers—use Crunchbase to prospect for new business opportunities. The platform provides intelligence on investment and funding details, founding members and individuals in leadership positions, mergers and acquisitions, news, and industry trends.

Crunchbase provides  up-to-date data about privately held companies, all powered by a unique community of contributors, partners, and in-house experts. Data is enriched, cleansed, verified, and updated daily to ensure customers have the latest information on private companies. Sales representatives can find and close deals with all-in-one prospecting solutions, discover companies that match ideal target prospects, identify individuals to reach out to with verified contact data, and connect with decision-makers – all within the Crunchbase platform.

Challenges:

Personalized outreach to increase sales meeting velocity

Crunchbase wanted to become an all-in-one solution for improving sales development representatives’ workflows. To achieve this goal, the company needed to make contact data on its platform more actionable. Information like phone numbers, email addresses, and LinkedIn profiles were already being surfaced within the platform, but without an easy way for reps to communicate with prospects all via Crunchbase, putting this data into action was a multi-step process.

“We wanted to help sales users be able to do intelligent outreach at scale, so they could book more meetings all via the Crunchbase interface. Adding bi-directional email sync provides our users with a way to increase their productivity within the Crunchbase platform,” said Monika Abraham, Product Operations Manager at Crunchbase.

Solution:

To do this, the Crunchbase product team built out a feature that allows users to send and receive emails without leaving the platform. Enabling sales users to view and send emails within the platform with near 100% deliverability helped make contact data actionable – leading to personalized outreach and more sales meetings being booked.

Nylas was the only solution that provided full features and customer-friendly pricing at scale

Crunchbase customers use many types of email providers, so users can easily conduct outreach to prospects and send intelligent email templates natively from their email client. The organization knew building Gmail and Microsoft email integrations themselves would involve massive scope and engineering resources.

Initially, Crunchbase used Kloudless to integrate contacts data into its platform, but rising costs and limited functionality led the company to turn to Nylas to address these challenges.

With the Nylas Email API, Crunchbase users can easily connect their email from all service providers and send messages within the Crunchbase platform. Nylas provided a seamless integration with email that was completed by the Crunchbase engineering team in just one month.

Below, you can see how the user can find a contact and make the information actionable by immediately sending an email, directly within the Crunchbase platform:

Results:

Premium email features boosts revenue

This premium set of email features (displayed below) – including the ability for users to email key decision-makers with intelligent email templates – is packaged within the Crunchbase Pro and Enterprise plans. This feature set helps drive more value for individuals and teams, thereby driving additional revenue for Crunchbase, as users upgrade their accounts.

Here is an example of those premium email templates in action:

Crunchbase completes Google OAuth Verification in a fraction of the time with Nylas Express Security Review

A few years ago, Google announced sweeping changes to the way third-party apps can access user data, and companies that work with certain sensitive information must undergo the Google OAuth Verification process. Each year, these companies must complete the review process to ensure their users have control and transparency into what data is being shared.

Since the Crunchbase platform accesses what Google considers “restricted scopes” (or data that requires additional privacy rules and the user’s permission) the team needed to complete not only the standard brand verification but also an independent, third-party security assessment with a Google-approved security assessor. This process can be expensive and time-consuming — potentially costing up to $75,000 or more, and dragging on for several months, depending on the complexity of the application being assessed.

Crunchbase needed a better way to facilitate its yearly Google OAuth Verification and security assessment that wouldn’t tax the resources of its growing team. After undergoing a difficult and lengthy verification process on their own, the team discovered the Nylas Express Security Review (ESR).

“The Google verification and security review process was a major pain point for us, there was a lot of gray area for what was required,” said Abraham.

Nylas’ Express Security Review provides a single dashboard where companies starting their review process can get quotes upfront, check requirements, manage work, and submit their application. Working with Google-certified, third-party security firms, Nylas can offer developers an exclusive path to faster, more affordable Google OAuth verification.

“A big value that Nylas has brought us has been removing the ambiguity with the review process. They helped us navigate exactly how we should approach it and had the answers for all the questions we had. To this day, we’ve passed each of our verification steps. Nylas is a great partner and it’s been a huge benefit that we could feel certain that the process was going to go smoothly,” Abraham concluded.

As Crunchbase looks to the future, its pivot into the sales prospecting space is more instrumental than ever. The company is in full growth mode, as it continues to build a leading and differentiated platform for sales outreach.