Challenge

Zendesk is a customer service software company with support and sales products designed to improve customer relationships. As the business grew, so did the complexity of managing an ever-growing sales and marketing database — and the Marketing Ops team was feeling every bit of that complexity. Lists were uploaded and custom requests fulfilled manually, a process that caused consistent delays. Leads were growing cold before sales could follow up because the data onboarding process simply could not keep pace. Account scoring and market prioritization — critical to helping Zendesk's sales teams focus on the right opportunities — had become nearly impossible to manage manually as the database scaled. Four regional sales operations offices were each working with the same underlying data but running entirely different standardization workflows, creating inconsistency and integration overhead. And the Marketing Ops team's operating model was fundamentally reactive: they existed to respond to requests as they came in rather than proactively improving the data quality that the whole GTM motion depended on.

Solution

Zendesk began the journey with Openprise to clean up data — and quickly realized the platform solved far more than that. The first transformation was in list loading and data onboarding. Openprise automated cleansing, enrichment, deduplication, and standardization across the full pipeline, replacing the manual process that had caused delays and cold leads. What had previously required significant manual effort at every step was reduced to checking the file headers and uploading — everything else happened automatically. The team experienced a 25% improvement in data cleansing efficiency almost immediately.

Thinking holistically about Openprise as a platform opened up a second wave of transformation. The Marketing Ops team used Openprise to build account scoring and assign industry and sub-industry values to accounts — enabling sales teams to conduct market analysis and prioritization at a scale that had been close to impossible manually. The regional customization challenge was solved the same way: rather than forcing all four regional offices into a single standardization model that fit no one, Openprise enabled the team to create entirely different automated workflows for each region from a single data source. Each regional office could work with its preferred enrichment vendors without the Marketing Ops team accumulating tech debt from managing multiple separate data integrations.

Since we've automated all the data standardization and list loading processes, there's nothing to do except check the headers and upload the list.

— Roberto Fernández Madero, former Manager of Marketing Operations, Zendesk

Having a platform that's flexible, responsive, scalable, and also repeatable has shifted the dynamic on how we can manage and improve data across the organization.

— Brian Cabreros, former Director of Marketing Operations, Zendesk

Impact

The financial results are clear: $500k+ in savings from team productivity improvements, and $100k+ in revenue gains from improved targeting and conversion. Those numbers reflect a team that stopped spending its time on manual data work and started spending it on the work that actually drives pipeline. A 25% improvement in data cleansing efficiency and 25%+ gains in sales team efficiency are the downstream results of a Marketing Ops function that no longer creates delays between data arrival and sales action.

The deeper impact is in how the team operates. The Marketing Ops team is no longer in the business of cleaning data and answering ad-hoc requests. Ongoing, automatic enrichment and cleanup have replaced the reactive model entirely — freeing the team to actively look for ways to generate better and more actionable data at the source rather than catching up to the backlog. That shift from reactive to proactive is the compounding return that no single metric captures, because a team improving data quality produces better outcomes across every downstream GTM activity that depends on it.

Part of what makes Openprise distinctively valuable at this scale is the ability to run every process within the platform itself — without pushing data back into external systems to see the results. Managing data within Openprise as a sandbox simulation means the team can test, validate, and refine before anything touches production. For a team that had once found it close to impossible to scale their data management initiatives, that capability was the difference between an Ops team that is always catching up and one that is always moving forward.

We're no longer in the business of cleaning data and answering ad-hoc requests. We've added ongoing, automatic enrichment and cleanup to our processes, and we're actively looking for ways to generate better and more actionable data at the source.

— Roberto Fernández Madero, former Manager of Marketing Operations, Zendesk