How Elephant.ai Jumpstarted Pipeline Growth with 20+ Qualified Calls in 3 Weeks by Targeting the Right Fintech Buyers
BEFORE: Strong AI Infrastructure, But Low GTM Momentum
Elephant.ai offers a powerful AI-driven data infrastructure platform that helps fintech companies securely deploy machine learning in production. Its edge? A seamless, privacy-first approach to data automation, model monitoring, and compliance — all built for highly regulated industries.
Despite its product strength, Elephant.ai faced critical go-to-market hurdles:
- 🧩Complex Buyer Persona: The ideal customer—fintech CTOs, data leads, and ML teams—was niche and hard to reach with generic outbound methods.
- 🕵️♂️Low Awareness: Competing with well-funded MLOps tools, they lacked visibility among decision-makers actively investing in secure data infra.
- 💬Messaging Mismatch: The technical nature of the product made it hard to explain value in a cold email.
- 📉Unpredictable Inbound: Reliance on events or referrals led to dry spells and inconsistent sales motion.
THE TURNING POINT: Pinpointing High-Intent Fintech Prospects & Speaking Their Language
We partnered with Elephant.ai to create a precise outbound system that cut through the noise. Our approach: stop marketing to everyone and start targeting the right fintech companies—those already experiencing the problems Elephant solved.
🎯 Refining the Fintech ICP
- Fintech startups and scaleups in lending, payments, or banking-as-a-service (Series A–C)
- Companies building or scaling AI/ML-driven features (e.g., fraud detection, risk scoring)
- Teams with legacy infra or compliance pain points
- Excluded: firms using closed-loop ML platforms or mature DevOps setups
🔎 Smart Prospecting & Enrichment
- Scraped fintech directories and funding lists like YC, PitchBook, Crunchbase
- Filtered for companies with AI/ML hiring trends
- Used BuiltWith/Clearbit to pull tech stacks and enriched contact data via Clay & Apollo
✉️ Technical Yet Conversational Messaging
- Use-case alignment: ML deployment, observability, compliance
- Hooks like “Still deploying ML in dev environments?”
- CTAs: “Worth 15 mins to show how teams cut infra overhead by 30%?”
⚙️ Execution Infrastructure
- Smartlead.io with warm inboxes and inbox rotation
- Multi-variant sequences with personalized intros
- Live dashboards and Slack alerts on engagement
AFTER: 20+ Qualified Calls Booked in Under a Month
- 📞20+ qualified calls with CTOs, Heads of Data, ML Infra Engineers
- 📈42% open rate and 14% reply rate
- 🧪3 POCs opened with Series B fintech firms
- 🔄Scalable outbound system across verticals
WHAT’S NEXT FOR ELEPHANT.AI?
- Targeting EU fintech adapting to AI compliance laws
- Partnering with consultancies for referrals/co-sell
- Running content-backed nurture sequences
Elephant.ai doesn’t just have a smarter AI platform — they now have a smarter pipeline, too.