Soraya Morales is the head of business development at AIESEC, a youth-led organization that has been creating international exchange opportunities for over 70 years. She spoke to us about why she started using Captain Data and how the platform quickly spread to other sections of the organization.
Given its creation all the way back in 1948, one could think that AIESEC would be set in its ways, reluctant to start using new tools – like data automation on Captain Data!
But as an organization managed by youths, for youths, it’s able to continually refresh its tactics and day-to-day work while always remaining true to its foundational dream of encouraging leadership by building cross-cultural understanding across nations.
The challenge
That capacity for renewal has been particularly important during the past few years, as the COVID crisis upended the kind of cross-border work that AIESEC is built upon. That’s why Soraya Morales had to quickly make moves that could deliver outsized returns across the organization. And importantly, those moves couldn’t come with a huge price tag.
“My role is relatively new, developed after we needed to reorganize following the COVID crisis. One clear restraint was that our budget wasn’t going to let us pay for dozens of software tools; still, we needed to make our operations easier, faster, more automated.”
The need for automation was apparent due to her status as a one-person biz dev team. Without being able to rely on anyone else, her list of tasks was long; what’s more, it was time-intensive, at least if she had to perform it all manually.
“I wasn’t going to increase our internship opportunities or fundraising results by doing everything manually. I need automation, otherwise, my entire week would be spent on tasks with little added value: identifying targets, finding contact info, tracking… In my first months on the job, I could clearly see that we’d never hit our targets unless I found some way to automate all of that.”
The workflow
Thanks to AIESEC’s history and clear positioning, Soraya has a relatively clear view on her targets, both in terms of companies that could sponsor internships and fundraising opportunities.
“I need to find companies that are of a certain size, and then find the HR/talent acquisition managers within those companies. I usually launch my workflow once per week, and that will quickly give me everything I need to get results throughout the week.”
Starting from Sales Navigator, she defines her parameters and then enriches the contact info for the resulting list.
“Our most useful workflow is when we take people from LinkedIn Sales Navigator, where I define everything I’m looking for; that usually gives me about 200-300 people per week. That list gets enriched with contact info, and then I also use Captain Data to help automate my message flow, whether through email or LinkedIn.”
The next level
Successfully deploying Captain Data for business development has also led to benefits in other departments. Based on Soraya’s experience, the marketing and community teams are also now using Captain Data, including for identifying intent data on the web.
“Our marketing head is using it to source leads based on our Instagram posts – basically when people comment or like something we put out there. And my colleague who’s tasked with recruiting the individual students who will take part in our programs is also using it, as it helps him to track participating in our events, Facebook Group memberships, things like that.”
Soraya notes that the team has been pleased with the adaptability of the Captain Data platform, as their needs include both B2B and B2C outreach. And with adaptability comes room for creativity, as well:
“I’ve found the use cases to be very user-friendly, and once I started looking at them, there’s a lot of creativity to be found. I’ll realize, ‘Oh, I can use this workflow to do this new thing!’”
The bottom line
From those first months when she was spending almost all of her time on very basic targeting tasks, Soraya now spends 1-2 hours per week managing her lead generation with Captain Data. Those efforts are more than enough to deliver the 200-300 actionable leads that she then works throughout the week.
“In just a few months, Captain Data really has become our all-in-one solution. It’s not the least expensive on its own, but it lets us avoid needing to subscribe to 10 different SaaS automation tools and make them all work together.”
