How Rho conducts customer outreach research 75% faster with Perplexity Enterprise's Crunchbase integration
100%
sales team adoption within 5 days
30%
increase in weekly outreach volume
12.5+
hours saved per week across users
Rho is a purpose-built business banking platform offering corporate cards, expense management, and accounting automation to DTC brands, startups, and publicly traded enterprises. Trusted by Superfiliate, MUD\WTR, Polimorphic, and more, Rho’s solution is the integrated platform their founders “wish they had when they launched the company” — complete with award-winning support.
The Problem
Sharpening Rho’s sales funnel to accelerate personalized outreach
Rho’s founders have one hard and fast rule: never spam customers. That’s why when they decided to scale lead generation and sales outreach, they wanted every message to be personalized.
To first find the right contacts at venture-backed startups, they relied on Crunchbase’s powerful proprietary data. There was just one problem: “Getting the results from Crunchbase into a highly personalized state required intensive technical work,” Tommy McNulty, CRO at Rho, explains. “We identified contacts, but then we’d have to enrich that data with our own research in order to personalize our messaging.”
The integration’s parameters didn’t allow them to refine the search to only list companies in Rho’s ICP. So, if the Rho sales team ran a report for customers in San Francisco who raised more than $3M in the last six months, the results of their search might also include pet food companies that raised private equity money.
To narrow this list to only include qualified leads, each team member spent around 16 hours per week using Google or other publicly available data to refine and supplement their research — leaving little time to craft personalized messages for potential customers.
So, Tommy set out to find a solution that could lighten this outreach burden, focusing on three key areas:
Ease-of-use: Using natural language prompts to search Crunchbase would allow anyone on the sales team to quickly find prospects on their own and begin outreach sooner.
Efficiency: Manually supplementing Crunchbase’s data with other sources ate up the team’s time. They hoped to find an AI solution that would synthesize reams of data from various sources and focus their outreach in a fraction of the time.
Accuracy: With the integration Rho historically used, the team could adjust basic parameters like total funding amounts and the date of the last raise. But, they couldn’t filter the results based on finer details like leadership profiles or market insights. Tommy worried this might lead to missed opportunities with their ideal customers.
When Tommy heard that Perplexity Enterprise offered a Crunchbase integration, he knew he needed to try the AI answer engine. But he questioned whether his team would buy in. “Salespeople are very utilitarian. The solution needs to work the first time, or they won’t use it,” he explains. Thankfully, Rho’s sales team immediately saw Perplexity Enterprise's value.
The Solution
Crafting personalized outreach to engage qualified leads — at scale
Tommy says using Perplexity Enterprise to search Crunchbase is like using a powerful magnet to find a needle in a haystack. Perplexity understands Rho’s queries. So, instead of simply compiling Crunchbase’s data, the team has immediate, concise answers to even the most complex questions about their prospects.
Best of all, “Rolling out Perplexity Enterprise to the sales team was really, really easy,” Tommy reports. “It immediately had high utility,” shortening sales reps’ path between research and outreach.
Identifying warm leads in minutes using natural language search
Perplexity Enterprise reduces how much time the Rho sales team spends researching leads. Today, their sales reps can use straightforward language to ask Perplexity Enterprise questions about a specific lead and get accurate, cited, easy-to-understand answers in seconds.
Even better, the team no longer needs to jump between their CRM, Crunchbase, and the public web to compile these customer profiles. Perplexity directly accesses Crunchbase’s proprietary data, answering the team’s questions with more enriching detail than other research methods. The Rho team can then layer in context from other sources (like the public web) or cross-reference the answer with their internal resources — all without leaving Perplexity.
Now, if a Rho sales rep needs data on all the funding rounds from San Francisco in the last three months, Perplexity Enterprise provides a detailed list of potential customers. This list automatically includes each contact’s LinkedIn profile, company insights, and any relevant news coverage. As a result, the team completes research in a quarter of the time, so they can focus on relationship building.
Personalizing outreach and support with Perplexity Enterprise’s holistic, accurate answers
Rho also uses Perplexity Enterprise’s AI search to surface trends in their customers’ pain points and buying behavior. They check month-over-month and quarterly early-stage startup investing trends. The sales team leans on this “additional color and commentary” to craft the “very best battle cards,” curating them to specific customer personas. They then use these battle cards to prepare for any additional sales conversations downstream.
Similarly, Rho’s support team continues this personalized experience throughout each customer’s relationship — from implementation to ongoing success with the banking solution. They keep Perplexity Enterprise open on their computers whenever they talk to customers to easily search through previous support tickets and interactions.
Introducing Perplexity across the organization to identify future growth strategies
After seeing the sales team’s success, other Rho teams followed their lead, incorporating Perplexity Enterprise into their own daily workflows. For example, Everett Cook, Rho’s Co-Founder and CEO, starts every internet search with Perplexity, saying it’s replaced Google entirely for him.
Everett also mentions that he judges the success of a new tool based on how often he sees it open on team member desktops — and he’s constantly seeing Perplexity Enterprise in use across other Rho teams, including C-suite, Marketing, Sales, Client Support and GTM.
For example, the executive team uses Perplexity Enterprise daily to better understand their customers, the company’s risk-based capital, and the fundraising market in general. Thanks to Perplexity’s thorough, cited picture of the VC landscape, the team knows exactly which venture-backed CEOs are leading the most rounds. And they can use this information to attract customers with the greatest future potential.
The Result
Saving 12.5+ hours per week while scaling outreach by 30%
Within five days of launching Perplexity Enterprise, Tommy saw that 100% of the sales team had made Perplexity central to their workflows. “I can’t vouch for that sort of adoption for anything else except our phone systems,” he says. “For something to become so prevalent and irreplaceable so quickly is a strong signal of how much time and energy it's saved the team.”
Since incorporating Perplexity’s Crunchbase integration into their sales process, Rho has expanded their total number of outreach touchpoints by 30%. Best of all, contacting those new leads takes 75% less time than before. For reference, the sales team now spends just 4.2 hours per week on outreach — compared to 16.7 hours previously.
Now, that reclaimed time is better spent building relationships with CEOs at VC-backed companies and perfecting the personalized, high-end customer service that Rho built its best-in-class reputation on.
