Case study · 03 - Events Platform
Expansion Signals, Acted On the Same Day
$32M ARR events platform · PLG + sales-assist · 18-person pipeline team
An events platform sitting on more buying signal than any data vendor could sell let Pulse combine its own product telemetry with what changed outside each account, and turned both into same-day plays.
Company profile
- Revenue
- $32M ARR
- Employees
- 180
- Motion
- Product-led signups, sales-assist above $12k
- Pipeline team
- 11 SDRs · 7 AEs
- Product volume
- 30k+ customer events hosted per quarter
- Target universe
- 1,400 ICP accounts
HubSpot
Outreach
Gong
Slack
Amplitude
Snowflake
ZoomPulse connected HubSpot and product telemetry through Snowflake first, then Outreach and Gong. Outside monitoring covered funding, hiring, and leadership changes.
The challenge
The product generated more buying signal than any data vendor could sell: registrations, attendance spikes, integrations connected. Outside each account, funding rounds and new offices told the same story. Virtually none of it reached a seller while it was still warm, and the SDR team bought intent data to guess at what their own database already knew.
9 days
median follow-up time on a high-intent signal. The team’s own conversion data showed reply likelihood collapsing after 48 hours.
45 min
of manual research per account before an SDR wrote the first line of outreach.
0.9%
reply rate on event follow-up, one generic sequence applied to every attendee regardless of who they were or what they did.
Quarterly
refresh cadence on the ICP scoring spreadsheet that territories and target lists were built from.
The signal was free. It was already in their own product. It just never made it to the person carrying the number.
The Revenue Change Audit
- Accounts
- 1,400 ICP accounts and 380 customers
- Systems
- HubSpot, product telemetry via Snowflake, Outreach, read-only
- Window
- Baseline, then 30 days of observation
- Outside
- Funding, hiring, leadership changes
Pulse connected read-only to HubSpot and the product telemetry, built a baseline for every account, and backfilled two quarters of product activity. It then watched inside and outside each account for 30 days while the pipeline team rated every high-priority event.
- 1
14 high-intent moments existed in the product lifecycle, like a first paid event above an attendee threshold or a new integration connected. None were instrumented for go-to-market; Context turned each into a tracked signal.
- 2
About 300 of the 1,400 ICP accounts had fired a high-intent product signal in the prior quarter that no seller ever saw. The backfill surfaced them on day two.
- 3
Combinations mattered more than any single signal: a funding round plus a jump in hosted events converted at 6x the rate of either on its own.
- 4
In 30 days Pulse raised 88 high-priority events. The team rated 61 useful, and 46 both useful and new to them.
What Pulse surfaced
Four of the events that came up in the audit review:
Expansion window after a Series B
Funding announced, hosted events up 3x in six weeks, attendee cap hit twice
$64,000 expansion
New to the teamChampion moved to a target account
Power user now Head of Events at an account on the 1,400 list
$52,000 new logo
New to the teamNew office, new buyer
Second office opened, 12 event-ops roles posted, new VP Marketing
$48,000 new logo
New to the teamUsage cliff after a flagship event
Registrations down 70% after the annual conference, no renewal conversation logged
$38,500 ARR
Team already knew88
high-priority events in 30 days
69%
rated useful
52%
useful and non-obvious
What FDEs built on top
FDEs connected Pulse’s events to the team’s outbound motion and wrote the top SDR’s playbook into custom Revenue Events. A human stays on every send.
Expansion Play Agent
Turns expansion and new-logo events into account-specific plays in Outreach: contacts, sequence, and copy grounded in what the account actually did. SDRs review and send.
Account Brief Agent
Builds the brief before the SDR opens a single tab: the account’s event-usage story, what changed outside it, and a recommended angle.
Event Invitation Agent
Picks the right contacts at target accounts for the company’s own field events, drafts personal invitations, and routes replies through HubSpot and Outreach.
Signal pack
The top SDR’s notebook, written down: 38 trigger rules running as custom Revenue Events across product and outside signals.
AEs open the account’s Pulse timeline before every call, the same Context the agents write their plays from.
The rollout
Days 1-2
Connect & baseline
HubSpot, Outreach, and product telemetry via Snowflake connected read-only. Baseline built for 1,780 accounts.
Days 3-4
Backfill
Two quarters of product activity replayed. About 300 accounts with unseen high-intent signals surfaced to the team in Slack.
Weeks 2-5
Observe and rate
30 days of observation inside and outside each account, with the pipeline team rating 88 high-priority events.
Month 2
FDE agents live
Expansion plays and account briefs in production. 71% of drafted plays sent with light edits.
Results
Same-day
signal follow-up
median, down from 9 days, inside the 48-hour window that converts
+38%
meetings booked
from Pulse-sourced outreach in the first full quarter
4.7%
event follow-up reply rate
up from 0.9% on the generic sequence
52%
useful + non-obvious
of high-priority events, rated by the pipeline team
Value delivered
$1.1M-$1.7M year-one value
$850k-$1.3M
Pulse-sourced pipeline
Opportunities created from Pulse events, credited at the team’s standard stage-weighted win rates and discounted to 65% for overlap with the existing motion.
~5,600 hrs/yr
SDR research time returned
39 minutes saved per researched account at observed volume, valued at loaded cost.
Retired
Third-party intent spend
The external intent-data contract was not renewed. First-party product signal, combined with outside events, outperformed it on every measured cohort.
All estimates discounted for year-one realization. No credit taken for second-order effects.
Beyond the revenue org
The event feed now serves teams beyond pipeline:
Marketing builds ABM audiences from the same Revenue Events instead of a quarterly spreadsheet.
CS receives expansion and usage-cliff events on customer accounts through the same rules.
Neither effect is included in the value figures above.