How Coolset’s qualified inbound pipeline grew >95% QOQ for 3 quarters

New legislation will require companies to report CO2 emissions 

From 2025, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) will require large EU companies to start publishing annual sustainability reports. These reports will essentially show a company’s overall impact on people and the environment, including things like double materiality assessment, energy use and total carbon emissions. 

And this reporting requirement will expand to smaller companies, and even some non-EU companies, in future years.  

While some companies already report on their sustainability impact, CSRD requires a more extensive and standardized approach to measuring and sharing data. Hiring a consultant or in-house manager to handle this alone with Excel spreadsheets will no longer suffice. 

A smart, scalable solution was needed to help companies report on their own carbon emissions data and also transparently share data with their clients in a standardized format.

From individual spreadsheets to an easy-to-use integrated sustainability management platform

Meet Coolset – the perfect platform to streamline your sustainability reporting and get CSRD compliant. 

Coolset’s platform was developed by a small group of sustainability consultants who have extensive knowledge of sustainability and environmental legislation. The Coolset experts work closely with their clients to ensure the smooth implementation and running of the platform, including regular workshops to ensure it’s meeting their clients’ evolving needs. 

Spreadsheets to collate and report on sustainability data can now become a thing of the past! 

In fact, Coolset has reduced the amount of time it takes to produce sustainability reports and ensure compliance with regulation by up to 90%. This not only reduces the time burden for internal teams but also delivers significant savings compared to hiring a consultant to do this work. 

“Unmuted helped us to build a strong marketing foundation at Coolset and to avoid prematurely investing in specialist roles in-house.” - Konstantinos Kouzelis, Founder, Coolset

Refining the product-market fit in the domestic market 

We decided to start by building momentum for the Coolset platform in domestic markets (the Netherlands and Belgium). For the go-to-market (GTM) strategy, we focused on using LinkedIn for demand creation and then also capturing signals (e.g. ICPs engaging with LinkedIn content) to share with Coolset’s outbound Sales team.

We also used Google Ads and improved SEO on Coolset’s website with a focus on strong buyer intent keywords (e.g. sustainability management platform).

More and more companies started using Coolset’s platform and the list of satisfied customers was growing. 

We continued to experiment with different messaging strategies and expanded the marketing tactics we were using to LinkedIn Ads, SEA via Google and Microsoft, and Meta Ads for retargeting. We also developed and launched a new SEO content strategy. 

It didn't take long before we saw impressive sales growth in the Netherlands and Belgium. Growing conversion rates from outbound marketing efforts, increases in qualified inbound requests and a strong pipeline with high win rates confirmed that the product-market fit was right and that the GTM strategy was working. 

Since the start of our collaboration, we saw market demand for Coolset’s platform increase by at least 95% quarter on quarter, and >480% year on year (Q1 2024 vs Q1 2023), quantified by growth of the inbound qualified pipeline. 

Playbooks and best practices

LinkedIn Ads DBA

Using our DBA (Demand-Brand-Acquisition) playbook, we set up an extensive LinkedIn Ads strategy based on cold targeting a list of accounts that fit the ICP, eye-catching ad visuals, and a 30/90/180 day retargeting setup.

We monitored users that engaged with the LinkedIn Ads and shared lists of users who fit the ICP with Coolset’s Sales team to help drive outbound sales. We also noticed a continuous stream of demo requests that were directly attributable to these LinkedIn ads.

Accelerated Founder Brand

To make the LinkedIn Ads account as effective as possible, we decided to utilize the Thought Leadership Ad feature (released in 2023) for all of Konstantinos' content that performed well organically and was specifically related to Coolset’s platform. 

This allowed us to fill retargeting buckets extremely quickly and delivered engagement rates of >5% or 10x the initial benchmark, building strong brand awareness among the target group of relevant job titles within ICP-fit companies.

Capture & Convert

To ensure that decision-makers at ICP-fit companies in the market for a CSRD reporting solution find Coolset, we identified and created ad campaigns for high-intent keywords on both Google and Bing.

We focused on as few high-intent keywords as possible so that we could write very specific ad copy and allocate the full campaign budget to these keywords. We purposely ignored additional keywords that Google suggested for this campaign. 

BOFU SEO coverage

In addition to the high-intent keywords we targeted with the Capture & Convert playbook, we also wanted to focus on SEO, particularly with bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) content. 

The majority of this SEO effort was writing engaging articles that could help the target audience to answer their main questions. Think of articles like “How to get audit-ready for CSRD (in 7 simple steps)” or “Top 14+ carbon accounting software tools in 2024”. 

By targeting prospective customers in the bottom of the funnel, Coolset could convert a lot of existing demand into actual qualified demo requests and also increase brand awareness among leads who fit the ICP but may not be in the market just yet.

Collaborative Content

Creating content is not just about increasing the findability of your website in search engines. 

We also focused on developing collaborative content with experts from the target audience to strengthen Coolset’s reputation as a trusted source. For example, we worked on round-up articles where sustainability experts (who were also potential customers) were asked to share their expertise. 

Coolset also launched ‘Future 15’ to recognize the most promising sustainability experts of 2024. In the first edition, 4 jury members selected 15 leading sustainability professionals from across Europe and the US to be featured in an extensive round-up article.

What’s next?

Coolset has had a strong product-market fit since the end of last year, with a fast-growing pipeline and a 100% renewal rate. That’s why we’ve now been helping them to reach new audiences and create engaging video content throughout 2024. 

We’re already seeing the first signs of traction from these efforts, with qualified inbound deals of >€20k ACV (annual contract value).

“With the video team we were able to launch content campaigns in just a few days, which is usually only possible for larger organizations.” - Konstantinos Kouzelis, Founder

This success signals a strong appetite for Coolset’s platform, and opens the opportunity to scale up with more dedicated sales reps, higher media budgets, and localized marketing campaigns.