How CelerData optimized its GTM motion to drive a 75% increase in signal-sourced pipeline

Background

Customer intelligence doesn’t just power a single business function—it unlocks revenue opportunities across sales, marketing, community, and beyond.

Data-driven organizations like CelerData recognize that access to the right signals—and the ability to connect them to real people and accounts—helps every team go to market intelligently.

Here’s how CelerData used Common Room to:

• Source qualified leads from dark-funnel channels
• Operationalize winning sales plays at scale
• Break down silos between go-to-market teams

Prove community ROI with qualified leads

CelerData is a cloud-managed SQL engine powered by StarRocks, an open-source, high-performance analytical database with an enthusiastic Slack community.

This community is populated by highly experienced data professionals, many of whom work at large enterprise organizations and are searching for alternatives to Snowflake, BigQuery, and other players in the data storage space.

CelerData uses Common Room to monitor this community and spotlight commercial opportunities in real time. The community team can automatically uncover actions and conversations that indicate interest in its paid offering, as well as filter activity based on person- and account-level attributes that align with product and customer fit.

Using Common Room, CelerData combines signals from Slack with data pulled in from other channels its ideal customers frequent—including X (Twitter), LinkedIn, GitHub, Discourse, Stack Overflow, Reddit, YouTube, Medium, and DEV—to get a 360-degree view of activity across digital touchpoints.

“The typical buyer journey isn't linear anymore,” said Albert Wong, Head of Community, Developer Relations, and Technology Partners. “Buyers can come from many different places. And what we're trying to do is get smarter about the way we focus our attention. Instead of just focusing on large accounts or website visits, we look at behaviors that tell us someone is the right type of customer for us to contact at the right time.”

CelerData uses Common Room to automate the discovery and segmentation of high-intent, high-fit people and organizations. Questions and keywords that express intent—combined with internal customer fit criteria—are used to tag individuals as community-qualified leads (CQL) who make sense for follow-up.

According to Senior Marketing Manager Tyler Wishnoff, these CQLs are much more likely to respond to outreach.

“What Common Room really allows us to do is reduce the friction by helping us identify the folks who are happy to hear from us,” Tyler said. “Instead of blindly hitting people up and trying to sell to every single person that comes through our community, Common Room gives us the information we need to make decisions around who we reach out to and when so we can sustainably grow our commercial business and our open-source project at the same time.”

As Albert put it:

“Most tools act like a blunt instrument. There’s only one way to use them. With Common Room, we can customize it to our needs.”

Playbook

Add community-qualified leads (CQLs) to your funnel

Introduce a new source of high-intent leads into the mix.

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Upgrade outbounding with repeatable plays

While Common Room facilitates inbound lead generation via the StarRocks community, CelerData’s sales team also uses it to fuel outbound efforts.

“Common Room is a critical piece of infrastructure for our SDRs,” Tyler said. “We can identify the right people and reach them in a much better way. Common Room gives us the features and capabilities to, for lack of a better word, make sure we're not leaving money on the table.”

Person360™—Common Room’s proprietary identity and enrichment engine—makes it easy for reps to zero in on qualified prospects. Every signal across every connected channel is auto-collected in one place and unified into a single profile for each person and organization. Beyond visibility into recent activities, reps can quickly dig into key demographic and firmographic info, contact details, and more.

Depending on their behaviors and characteristics, individuals and the companies they work for are automatically added to segments set up for different sales plays.

In the case of CelerData, one of the most popular plays is surfacing high-fit leads on different channels, such as GitHub and LinkedIn, sharing a no-pressure invite to the company’s Slack community, and continuing the conversation there.

This particular play has resulted in significantly higher response rates.

“We’ve found that, in terms of engagement on Slack, we get a 30% response rate, which is phenomenal,” Tyler said.

With Common Room’s fully customizable workflows, it’s possible to automate plays like this from end to end.

Caroline Bertinetti, SDR and self-described Common Room power user, said:

“As an SDR, email doesn't get you anything. Calls get you a little bit more. But Common Room is outstanding in terms of the level of engagement it offers someone in my role.”

Playbook

Turn social content engagement into meetings booked

Personalize buyer outreach using recent social interactions.

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Transform digital activity into quality pipeline

With the ability to capture and enrich signals across channels—as well as automate response to those signals—CelerData has significantly increased the amount and quality of its pipeline.

"If you look at just the pipeline contribution of Slack to the business, it's huge for us," Tyler said. "It's now responsible for nearly 25% of total pipeline. Common Room made it much easier to get to that number faster."

Playbook

Instantly uncover new prospects at target accounts

Find the right stakeholders at any org lightning-fast.

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Results

Year over year, CelerData’s signal-sourced pipeline has increased 75%.

“From a marketing and sales perspective, Common Room has been indispensable,” Tyler said. “It's really a critical part of our pipeline.”

But more and better-performing pipeline isn’t the only win. Every customer-facing team at CelerData is now better aligned on GTM strategy.

“Before Common Room, we were not very well aligned at all,” Tyler said. “In fact, I would say that Common Room has helped to break down communication silos across our teams, just because you have a lot of different teams that are getting value out of it. And so we're all kind of working on it together.”

CelerData gives its customers all the performance they need to ditch antiquated tools and processes. Common Room does the same for CelerData.

Empower every part of go-to-market with Common Room

Get started for free or get in touch to see how Common Room can help you transform siloed signals into quality revenue opportunities.