Gladly

Growth Today built a geography-scoped prospecting system that mapped CX decision-makers around Salt Lake City and personalized each invitation with the invitee's own travel time to the restaurant.

Impact TL;DR

• 65% open rate and a 5% reply rate on the invitation sequence
• Senior CX leaders confirmed within one week, including a VP of CX at a property management software company
• Travel time calculated per invitee and written into the invitation
• A location rule that only mentions travel time when the invitee is outside the city
• TAM expanded beyond the event, with AEs working net new contacts at key accounts they had not mapped
• Sending infrastructure built first, with secondary domains, mailbox warm-up and address validation before launch

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An event that only works if the guest list is geographically real

Gladly wanted to host an intimate CX dinner in Salt Lake City with around twelve senior guests. The constraint is unusual for outbound: the invitation is worthless to someone who cannot get to the restaurant, and the guest list has to be senior enough that other seniors want the seat.

Gladly's existing target account lists were built on company fit, not on where individual CX leaders sat. Filtering by company headquarters would have missed leaders working out of a regional office, and included companies whose CX team sits elsewhere. When candidate names came in from the Gladly side, several were in Santa Barbara, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh, with one in Park City.

There was a second problem underneath the event. Gladly's AEs were working key accounts with only the contacts they already had. The CX organizations inside those accounts contained decision makers nobody had mapped.

Key challenges were:

• Company-level location data was too coarse to know whether a specific CX leader could attend
• Candidate invitees spanned the country, including people who could not realistically travel
• Seniority had to be verified per person, otherwise other executives do not see the value in joining the conversation
• Key accounts were under-mapped, with AEs working a fraction of the relevant CX contacts
• Sending infrastructure did not exist, and bounce rates were threatening inbox placement

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Growth Today built the guest list from the person outward rather than from the account inward

Instead of filtering target accounts by headquarters, we built lists around where the people are:

• Individual CX leaders are located, not just their employers
• Seniority and function are verified per person before an invitation goes out
• The invitation references the invitee's own role and company specifically
• Travel time to the venue is calculated per person and stated plainly
• Invitees already in the city are not told how long their own commute is
• The contacts surfaced for the event stay useful to the AE team afterwards

None of this was going to work without sending infrastructure that could reach an executive inbox. So the build started with secondary domains, mailbox warm-up and email address validation before the first invitation went out.

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Mapping CX decision makers by where the person actually is

What we did: We scraped profiles of ICP contacts, VPs and key opinion leaders in the CX function around Salt Lake City, working from individual locations rather than company headquarters. Titles were reviewed to exclude people whose seniority or function did not fit the room.

The outcome: A guest list of CX leaders who could genuinely attend, at the seniority the event needed. The same scoping logic was then run wider, building a larger list of contacts at companies matching Gladly's ICP industries across the US and Canada, which outlasted the event.

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Writing the travel time into the invitation

Each invitation was personalized on five inputs:

1. Role and responsibility. The opening line referenced what the invitee manages at their company, read from their profile rather than inferred from their title
2. Company specificity. The company was named, along with where it sits, so the note read as written for one person
3. Named peers already attending. The invitation cited other CX leaders confirmed for the dinner, which is what makes a senior guest want the seat
4. Travel time. We calculated the drive from the invitee's location to the venue and stated it in the email, banded into ranges rather than given as a false-precision figure
5. A location exception. Invitees already in Salt Lake City were told the venue was within a short drive, without a specific commute estimate, since telling a local how long their own commute is reads badly

The travel-time detail did the work that a generic event invitation cannot: it answered the objection the invitee was about to raise, in the email that raised the ask.

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Building the sending infrastructure the campaign needed

What we did: We set up secondary domains and secondary sending addresses, ran warm-up before launch, and validated every address on the list. Early sends showed a bounce rate high enough to threaten inbox placement, so validation and warm-up were tightened.

The outcome: The invitation sequence reached executive inboxes at a 65% open rate. Deliverability work is unglamorous next to the campaign concept, and the campaign concept does not survive without it.

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Turning event prospecting into account coverage

What we did: The contacts mapped for the dinner were not treated as an event list. We ran enrichment across Gladly's ICP accounts, scoped for around 1,000 accounts and the CX contacts inside them, and handed the results to the AE team.

The outcome: Gladly's AEs began working net new contacts at key accounts they were already assigned, including decision makers they had not previously identified. The event campaign expanded the mapped surface area of accounts the team already owned.

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Why Gladly Chose Growth Today

A team that would build the infrastructure and the campaign concept together

Gladly's ask was a three-month engagement covering several distinct plays: net new outbound, a website visitor sequence, closed-lost re-engagement, and TAM enrichment with scoring. The dinner was the first, chosen because it was concrete and because it would surface whether the infrastructure held up.

The engagement was structured around a small number of substantial builds per month, agreed as a roadmap at the start, so the three-month mark landed on work Gladly's team had prioritized themselves.

• Person-level prospecting. Locating individual decision makers rather than filtering companies by headquarters
• Infrastructure first. Domains, warm-up and validation built before the first campaign
• Reusable output. The contacts mapped for one dinner stayed useful to the AE team afterwards

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Results & Impact

RevOps Impact

• CX decision makers mapped by individual location, not company headquarters
• Around 1,000 ICP accounts scoped for CX contact enrichment beyond the event
• Secondary domains, warm-up and address validation built before launch
• Travel time calculated per invitee as a reusable personalization input

Sales Impact

• 65% open rate and 5% reply rate on the invitation sequence
• Dinner filled within one week with senior CX leaders
• AEs working net new contacts at key accounts they already owned
• A VP of CX confirmed from a property management software company, sourced entirely from the campaign

Leadership Impact

• A repeatable event motion. The same geography-scoped logic runs for any city Gladly wants to host in
• Account coverage expanded without adding new target accounts

By locating the buyer instead of the account, Gladly turned a dinner invitation into a prospecting system its AEs kept using after the event.

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