Stories

How Descript 2x'd pipeline from free signups with Cargo

The Problem#

Sales struggled to separate PQAs from the noise

Descript's PLG motion generates tens of thousands of email sign-ups each week. Many are individual users testing the tool, but premium users (often from Fortune 500 companies) hide among these signups - i.e. six-figure enterprise opportunities invisible to the sales team.

The result: Too many high-value leads stayed unusable because Salesforce couldn't link them to real accounts. Sales reps were stuck sifting through thousands of impractical leads every day, despite a powerful demand-generation engine.

Adding hundreds of these orphaned leads to the CRM was impractical. In B2B sales, a lead without company context simply doesn't exist for a rep. At Descript, Salesforce soon overflowed with thousands of orphan leads that reps couldn't act on.

As a consequence, their best opportunities remained hidden as standalone records, and they could only guess which leads were worth engaging.

Lost pipeline due to patchwork systems

Due to rapid growth, marketing operations depended on a patchwork of data vendors and ad-hoc automation for routing and CRM syncs. At some point, this fragile setup became an opaque black box, impossible to scale or maintain without having regular engineering help. When issues arose, the entire team was stuck, waiting to debug or adapt until the resource was available, and then they managed to find a fix.

Due to these delays, by the time the PQAs worked through this fragmented system to reach reps, buying signals had frequently cooled. Such timing delays were driving significant leaks in the sales pipeline each month.

Reps missed quotas due to manual prospect research

Descript's sales reps regularly lost time digging through internal systems and public sources (YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter) to gather essential context—video footprints, funding rounds, and social signals—before they could even begin outreaching an allocated account.

These cumbersome, manual steps in the process prevented reps from engaging in 6-figure deals that they were allotted for, due to a lack of time. It was a source of frustration because crucial preparation work couldn't be automated upstream.

The team needed an orchestration layer like Cargo to escape this productivity drain and start reaching their revenue targets again.

The Solution#

Use Case 1: Push only fully enriched PQA/PQLs to the CRM

Descript treats Salesforce as a curated list of qualified leads—a filtered subset of all signups from product engagement. Using Cargo, they automatically enriched and scored every signup, ensuring that only Product Qualified Accounts (PQAs) and Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) entered their Salesforce, fully enriched with the necessary data points for sales reps to start engaging with them.

As Cargo sits natively on the data warehouse, Descript's GTM team built a clean "users" table that now serves as the single source of truth for all GTM activities.

This table then fed the entire lead treatment process contained in a single Cargo Play. Now, when the system detects new sign-ups, it:

• Enrolls records from the users table in the Play
• Filters out fraudulent emails
• Runs custom waterfall enrichment to find LinkedIn URLs from email signups
• Evaluates the lead's fit with an LLM
• Perform a deduplication check against Salesforce
• Matches PQLs to accounts
• Routes net-new PQAs to reps and matches PQLs to accounts

Finally when an account is routed to a sales rep, an AI research tool built in Cargo ensures that they're fed with account-level context that compiles external signals and product usage in order to facilitate the next step needed to engage that account.

Use Case 2: One unified layer for all Revenue and Marketing workflows

Now, reps are auto-assigned to the most-promising PQAs, complete with real-time product usage, enrichment insights, and intent scores, directly in Salesforce.

Cargo replaced the patchwork of data vendors and tools and now serves as the orchestration layer, unifying data flows between the warehouse, CRM, and engagement systems through change-based syncs.

These real-time syncs eliminate data gaps and tool-hopping, so sales can act immediately on high-intent leads and accelerate pipeline growth.

Use Case 3: Outbound Flywheel on PLG Lookalikes & Champions

Descript extended its PLG engine with an outbound flywheel targeting both top users who switch jobs and lookalike accounts of their best customers.

For job changes, Cargo periodically flags moved contacts and reconnects them to the same rep, securing warm intros at new companies.

For lookalikes, a Cargo Play identifies and qualifies prospects similar to closed-won accounts, then triggers personalized outreach via Reply.io and Octave. Outbound messages reference the use cases that succeeded for champions, and all engagement logs to Salesforce, creating a closed-loop flywheel that continually refines champion signals and lookalike accuracy.

The outcome#

85% Pipeline Growth in 6 Months

Real-time surfacing of top prospects doubled the pipeline from product-led sign-ups. Doubling conversion rates added significant value to the sales pipeline.

70% Lead Data Completeness

Enrichment coverage jumped from 25–30% to over 70% (with high confidence scores). Unlike traditional enrichment waterfalls optimized for volume, this custom waterfall was fine-tuned for accuracy, which makes it much easier to prioritize for the reps.

Improved CRM Hygiene

High enrichment rates and precise lead-to-account matching enabled effective deduplication and accurate contact-account associations, creating a cleaner and more reliable CRM for the sales team.

Decreased meeting prep time from 30 min to ~3 min

Saving prep time through automated research and pre-written outreach, in addition to smarter routing of qualified accounts improved quota attainment rates while cutting non-selling work in half.