How Ashby built its TAM engine on Cargo and gave back 1,000+ engineering hours

Before Cargo

A TAM engine meant months of engineering

Ashby’s marketing team wanted a TAM-driven engine: every account in the market tracked with its signals, and pushed to the CRM when it was worth a rep’s time. Built the usual way, that takes months. Several engineering teams design, build and maintain the data pipelines and API endpoints, and every component goes through rounds of design, build and test before it ships. Ashby’s marketing team had no direct access to engineering, so the coordination alone slowed everything down.

Every change went through a deploy

Once built, the engine was hard to change. Even a small update needed an engineer, a full review and a deployment, so marketing could not adapt to new scenarios quickly.

What runs on Cargo

Ashby built the TAM engine on Cargo instead of on its own pipelines. Cargo sits in front of the CRM: it stores every account and its signals, decides which ones are ready, prospects into them, and keeps the CRM’s contacts valid. Three plays carry it.

Play 1: Storing signals ahead of the CRM

Signals land in Cargo first, not in the CRM. Accounts are stored there with their signals until they have earned a place in the CRM, so only the most relevant ones get pushed. Demand generation manages those segments for prospecting, validation and engagement without engineering.

For example, one play stores accounts that visit certain pages of Ashby’s website. Once enough is known about an account, it moves on to the prospector play.

Play 2: Prospecting into new accounts

When an account has earned the investment, the prospector play runs a waterfall to find the most relevant contacts. A group node then handles the list of stakeholders, so that each one has a valid email address and the other details needed for outreach.

The result is a set of new contacts ready for an ABM-style nurture, with no engineering involved.

Play 3: Keeping CRM contacts valid

Every contact in the CRM is revalidated every few weeks. A lapse here hurts deliverability for every outbound campaign. The play checks each address. If it is no longer valid, the play either finds a valid one or removes the contact to make room for a better prospect.

Most teams stop at a simple validation. Ashby adds a step that recovers catch-all emails wrongly marked invalid, using Cargo’s native Scrubby integration, and gets back up to a third of the emails it would otherwise discard.

The outcome

A running TAM engine in a third of the time

The whole TAM engine was running within two months, a third of the time Cargo has seen it take at other companies. The marketing team built and changed it without pulling in engineering for every change, and over 1,000 hours of engineering time went elsewhere.

Twice the pace of marketing experiments

A new segment takes about 45 minutes to test. The team watches each play’s runs in Cargo to catch unintended behavior and to measure what any change does to the quality of the TAM engine before it spreads.