Background

When Stefano Jacobson joined Affiniti, the growth team was just him. One person, tasked with cracking exponential growth for a startup with very ambitious revenue targets.

Customers loved Affiniti's product. And Stefano had a lot of ideas for growth experiments. The problem was just their data.

Affiniti wanted to scale as fast as possible, but Stefano couldn't find enough small business owners in typical prospecting databases. And all other paths for getting SMB owner contact info were very time-consuming.

Fiverr, Apollo, ZoomInfo, and Clay

Before Orbital, Stefano tried everything.

He started with Fiverr contractors, putting them on a war path to find more leads.

"Contractors just were never consistent. They took too long. The data was kind of missing half the time."

Then he moved to Apollo and ZoomInfo.

"Those tools were quite limited. They didn't work for us because we operate in a lot of different verticals, especially in the SMB realm."

Then he tried Clay.

"The problem with Clay is that it's very hands-on. You have to put a lot of time and effort into building these library tables and these agents and enrichments and waterfalls to get decent quality data."

Choosing Orbital

Then Stefano got a cold call from Orbital.

He was excited about Orbital's focus on small business data and liked how they already had deep expertise in Affiniti's key verticals like HVAC. So he signed a contract with Orbital and kicked things off.

Running Three Channels on Orbital Data

After getting Orbital, Stefano built out their whole TAMs for their first target verticals: HVAC and med spas.

He then used account tiering to figure out how each lead should be handled across their top three channels: all businesses get an email, most businesses get a mailer, and the best businesses get a phone call.

Affiniti quickly saw success with Orbital in their first two verticals and started scaling to more verticals.

Proving Out New Verticals

In theory, Affiniti can sell their SMB credit card into almost any vertical. The challenge is figuring out which ones are actually worth their time.

Stefano found that with Orbital he can quickly experiment on new verticals: they will pull 10% of a TAM, run a campaign across email, calling, and mail. And if the vertical shows early signs of success, they will pull the whole TAM and scale their outreach.

6 months ago, Affiniti was only focused on 2-3 verticals. Today, they've scaled to 6 verticals with Orbital and have 10 more on the way.

Speed and Data Quality is Everything

What matters to Stefano is speed. A fast-growing team can't spend days trying to build out a list.

"The scale and quality and the pace I can get TAMs through Orbital is really crucial for us to grow fast. If we had to do this in Clay on our own, it would take us 4x the amount of time."

Stefano also views high-quality data as a competitive advantage for an SMB growth motion.

"Every minute that our reps are calling bad numbers or inaccurate data is wasted time and wasted money. So getting quality phone numbers, people who are actually in business, people who aren't retired, and reaching the owner directly…all these things are critical to growth."

$100M+ in Credit Limits, Almost 2x ARR in 6 Months

In the six months since signing with Orbital, Affiniti doubled ARR.

"Orbital has helped us secure almost $100 million dollars worth of approved credit limits. And many of our biggest customers have come from Orbital data."

Some of those customers are HVAC contractors doing $350M to $400M in annual revenue, reached through Orbital-sourced email and closed.

Looking ahead, Stefano is planning to use Orbital to open up more verticals and launch additional channels like paid ads.

"We're only scratching the surface of what we can do with Orbital. The data itself is great, and then what we do with it is the sky is the limit."

Advice for other GTM Leaders

When asked what he'd tell a growth leader weighing the investment, Stefano kept coming back to the same gap in the market.

"Go-to-market people are all busy as hell. The other sales tools aren't built for SMB data. And the rest require a lot of labor. Not a lot of people understand this space. If you want to move faster and get the best small business data…Orbital is your partner."

Want to scale outbound across SMB verticals on data that other tools miss? Book a demo with Orbital.