About Trustdock
Trustdock is a leading KYC identity verification company in Japan with over 1.3 million downloads of their mobile app. The company caters to online marketplaces and fintech service providers, solving the ID verification challenge for dozens of enterprises’ millions of customers across Asia.
Headquarters
Tokyo/Singapore
Industry
Cybersecurity, KYC solutions
Used Klear for
GTM strategy, ABM campaigns, content
Founded
2017
Trustdock, a Series A Japanese KYC cybersecurity company, dominated their home market but struggled to gain traction in the hyper-competitive APAC identity verification space. Their traditional approach of leveraging network connections and cold outbound, which had worked wonders in Japan, fell flat in new territories.
The Challenge: Cold Outreach = Crickets
Trustdock’s initial APAC expansion strategy was not working. Their sales team was drowning in a sea of cold outreach, sending a staggering 5,000 messages to yield just one sales-qualified lead. This scattergun approach was not only ineffective but also demoralizing for the team and inevitably hurt the brand.
Global Markets Lead Jeff Bates started a strategic shift, which is when a partner of the company introduced him to Klear.
Enter Klear: Precision over Volume
Klear, a GTM execution agency, stepped in to overhaul Trustdock’s approach. We quickly agreed with Jeff that the spray-and-pray strategy has to be ditched in favor of a laser-focused account-based marketing (ABM) strategy.
Here’s how we flipped the script:
- Narrowed Focus: Zeroed in on a single ideal customer profile (ICP) to sharpen messaging and boost relevance.
- Qualitative Market Research: Launched a primary research initiative that not only provided market insights but also rekindled a previously lost deal and led to more demos.
- Messaging Makeover: Revamped sales and marketing collateral to resonate with the target audience.
- High-Value Events: Organized live events that delivered genuine value to attendees, attracting both organic and paid traffic.
Narrowing our focus on a tighter set of accounts… and creating targeted campaigns was a game changer for us. Klear led the way, helped us execute the process and managed change. It was a great experience.
Results That Speak Volumes
The transformation was dramatic:
- From a 0.02% success rate (1 demo per 5,000 contacts) to a 15.7% engagement-to-demo conversion rate in one of the pilot campaigns.
- 3 out of 19 targeted companies were converted to a demo call in another pilot ABM campaign.
- Found a process to successfully re-engage previously closed lost or stalled deals.
Key Takeaways
- Mass outreach without marketing aircover is dead. It yields diminishing returns in sophisticated markets, hurts brand and team morale.
- Value-First Approach: High-quality, targeted content and events drive meaningful engagement.
- Strategic Reorientation: Shifting from lead generation to account-based marketing can dramatically improve results.
- Scalable Success: The event-led ABM motion implemented by Klear provided a solid foundation for Trustdock’s skilled internal team to optimize and scale.
- By pivoting to a strategic, account-based GTM approach, Trustdock not only cracked the APAC market but also established a repeatable, scalable process for continued growth.
