CIENCE Sales Development (legacy) vs. ResponsePoint

Cience is well suited for providing building blocks when you are starting with very little. They took the time to learn our unique product and weren't hesitant to jump on an account for a less than traditional ICP. If you are looking to outsource sales, just be prepared to be an active voice in the partnership.

ResponsePoint works great when you’re trying to reach senior B2B decision-makers and need more than just basic lead gen. It helped us re-engage cold accounts and improve our pipeline conversion rate. You may have to define your audience or have your strengths and target personas in place when you approach ResponsePoint. In either case, they will help you figure out solutions for you.

• Rapidly created marketing scripts based on the domain knowledge we provided.
• Rapidly identified the key executives and ways to reach them in our target audience.
• Provided well-spoken representatives who were able to get our message across.
• Provided excellent weekly feedback on their 'hit-rate.'

• Identifying serious prospects which saves us a lot of time by helping us focus on the leads that matter most.
• Personalized outreach that really connects and has helped us get in touch with decision-makers who are usually hard to reach and much more likely to respond.
• Reviving cold or lost accounts by re-engaging accounts that had gone cold or been missed earlier and warm up these contacts, turning dormant leads into active conversations and new opportunities for us.

• STEER CLEAR- their company and model are a mess. We had a kickoff call in February with our "team" and by mid-May, none of them were still with the organization. We were never looped in on this turnover and as a result, there was a total diffusion of responsibility. Beware of the "10-20 day onboarding period" ours was more than 30 despite the fact we proactively provided them with a 15+ page playbook detailing everything they needed: 1) Target personas 2) Objections and counters 3) Product info 4) Company history 5) Talk tracks 6) Etc. Every ball that was dropped was on their end and there was a complete lack of ownership and accountability from their leadership team. The only person who took ANY ownership was our CAM, who was let go as part of a massive company-wide layoff. Their whole organization is a mess.
• We made numerous coaching asks of their team after hearing in the call recordings that the SDR was deviating from the script completely and had no idea what they were talking about. Their message was, "We help HR leaders retain talent so that they can promote their talent and not lose existing talent"--- the most generic of pitches and not at all related to what we do. They continuously referred to it as a "system" when we are a professional coaching organization. We coached continuously on every biweekly call and gave them suggestions, none of which seemed to get back to the SDR as they continued to repeat the same mistakes and even went far as pushing a prospect to take a meeting when she was in a rush because "I get incentivized from meetings booked over the phone."
• Despite our continuous asks, there was no collaboration. Our landing page mockup featured companies that weren't even customers of ours and would've been catastrophic to our brand had it been released. We never saw a mockup of this until the last minute and ended up having to do the entire thing ourselves despite them selling us on the fact that it was something they could handle.

• More onboarding tutorials to help new users get comfortable quickly.
• Slightly faster load times in some areas for a smoother experience.
• Additional template options for outreach messages to save time.

They are easy to work with and very organized.

Excellent partners in our demand generation programs and have supported us immensely in our prioritization efforts saving hours of work and $ spent on advertising.

They have a pool of talented teams and being responsible.

The process outlined was exactly what we were looking for (hand holding before, during and ongoing) and was right on in terms of what we needed for implementation. We were successful in identifying the team from CIENCE who would be dedicated to Manifest and were able to have all levels of both companies involved in the implementation process.

We evaluated a handful of other companies in this industry before signing on with CIENCE. After doing the research, we found them to be a far better company with a much more compelling value and cost. I don't even remember the exact names of the other companies we met with, but I do recall how secretive and dubious their competition was about pricing and how the team resourced their time. The other models honestly did not make sense because they were cheaper but claiming that they would produce more for us with fewer resources and less of our support and collaboration. I have a lot of experience working in this industry in my past, and CIENCE was the only vendor our Executive team trusted after discussing potential contracts with at least 3 other vendors. They have since proven themselves even more, and the transparency, clarity, and collaboration that they sold us on originally have only developed more as we continue to work with them.

• Terrible waste of money. Just starting out we want to use our funds the most effective we can. This had ZERO ROI and was a waste of time.
• They ask for a three-month upfront payment and gave us nothing back. While this is the risk we take with no guarantees, you would expect a reputable business to offer something for a performance so poor. A free month to try and make things right by providing a few leads, or some small amount of refund, something. Their response was to tell us they did nothing wrong and they would not even consider anything.
• The good reviews from this company are baffling to me. I reviewed them before starting and felt they must be reputable. The truth is the onboarding process took 30 days even though we provided them with everything before it started. They charge for this ramp-up time even though nothing of substance is happening.
• Within two weeks of the campaign starting our Cience team had lost over half of its original members due to attrition. 3 out of 5 of their members left the company

• In just the first 90 days, we saw a 32% increase in qualified meetings
• Their ABM re-engagement strategy also helped revive several cold accounts one of which is now a $1.2M opportunity in late-stage pipeline.
• On top of that, their dashboards gave our marketing and sales teams a single view, cutting reporting time by over 40%.