How TurboHire Unlocked Pre-Series A Round With Us

Our initial approach was to figure out nimble, low-cost strategies through which we can test the waters in the global market. We started with google search ads but we made sure we didn’t bid on any bottom-of-the-funnel, transactional & commercial high-intent keywords. The reason was simple – there was already too much competition for those keywords and bigger competitors were already spending millions of dollars per week on those keywords. 

We decided to bid on long-tail keywords that were informational in nature, in order to engage traffic with useful content.

After running several such experiments in the US, Europe, and Middle East regions, we realized that we did not have enough budget to attract traffic of optimal quality, in order to break even. The GTM team responsible for local acquisition also started struggling, because of the split of resources, and the overall performance of the funnel started dipping. Therefore, we proposed the internal team merge both GTM teams, and focus on one territory at a time, sequential targeting, and maximize the return out of that.

After merging both the funnels and picking up a single territory, we audited past and present performance and realized that our lead to SQL rate never achieved more than a 10% rate. While there was some predictability associated with the funnel, the funnel performance was not satisfactory. In order to improve the performance, we incorporated a closed-feedback loop in our process and ensured that the ToF team spoke to SDRs to get feedback on every lead generated every day.  Within a few weeks, we realized that there were certain integrations-led campaigns, build campaigns, and competition campaigns that were not leading to many quality conversations at all, and even if there were any, most of the leads were not buying TurboHire for reasons like pricing issue, persona issue, team size issue, etc. 

Further, we also realized that we had to measure the time to first touch and # of touchpoints per lead. We developed custom tools to build a real-time view of these leading indicators and identified that a few SDRs were overwhelmed with manual tasks, that could be easily automated within the CRM. With this data, we were able to propose changes to SDR workflows, and thus, improve our lead to SQL conversion rate to 25%+.

Over the period of time, we built a tightly knit funnel of relevant keywords, ad copies, and landing pages which made sure the lead quality and conversion rates improved.

This is when TurboHire started getting 40 SQLs per month, but we were not fully satisfied with the results and thus, decided to take one step forward. 

We set up a highly scalable outbound marketing engine where we scoped out TAM (Total Addressable Market) and built segmented lists of prospects. With the help of a variety of outbound tools, our engine could deliver >50K emails per month. We were able to generate as many as 50 product demos per month, and all these experiments and campaigns combined were able to generate impressive bottom-of-the-line business.  TurboHire was eventually able to raise their pre-series A round based on the revenue growth that we were able to get them.