How Shopmonkey built the data foundations that aligned four teams and accelerated their ABM motion

At a glance

• "Within days, questions about the data stopped. Instantly, there was a different relationship was built."— Erin Towery, RevOps, Shopmonkey
• 4 teams — RevOps, Sales, Marketing, and CS aligned on one foundation
• TAM visibility — clear view of the market, trust restored with Sales
• Self-serve — RevOps can pull new lists for campaigns in a day, not weeks

"Within days, questions about the data stopped. Instantly, there was a different relationship built."
Erin Towery, RevOps, Shopmonkey

Challenge

How do you sell to repair shops with no website or LinkedIn?

Shopmonkey sells software to independent auto repair shops — a market dominated by mom-and-pop businesses with no websites and no LinkedIn presence. The "known" B2B data platforms simply don't have them.

Before DataLane, Shopmonkey's RevOps team had cycled through at least two prior data vendors. Both struggled with local SMB. Phone numbers were wrong, contact data was stale, and the sales team had stopped trusting the lists they were given.

Erin Towery, who runs RevOps at Shopmonkey, needed:

• A real picture of the total addressable market — not the slice the major vendors happened to cover
• Accurate contact data on independent shops
• Industry-specific signals the off-the-shelf tools couldn't provide — specifically dealership status (Shopmonkey can't sell into dealerships) and franchise type, since independently-owned and corporate-owned franchises require different sales motions
• A way out of RevOps as a firefighting function — pulling lists, fielding complaints, and pulling more lists, with no time to be strategic

Without a reliable data foundation, RevOps saw friction with Sales, couldn't move fast, and ran into endless issues trying to ship anything new.

"Once they lose faith in the leads you're giving them, they start to not feel confident with other things. The questions start to come up. It really breaks that bond between RevOps and sales that's so important."

Solution

A foundation four teams build on — and a workflow RevOps can run alone

1. The foundation: deep enrichment plus the custom signals their industry actually runs on.

DataLane built Shopmonkey a foundation of deeply-enriched account data on the auto repair market — including the small independents that had been invisible to every other vendor. Beyond standard firmographics, DataLane delivered custom fields that were critical for Shopmonkey's GTM:

• Dealership flag — surfaces accounts Shopmonkey can't sell into, so reps don't waste cycles
• Franchise type — independent vs. corporate-owned, so accounts route into the right sales motion
• Contact data — decision maker mobile numbers to allow reps to directly call owners
• Primary shop type — used at the close-won handoff to CS, so onboarding starts with accurate context

"You can't find that in other tools. The dealership flag is very specific to us — it's our industry."

2. The workflow: self-serve speed for any RevOps teammate.

DataLane Foundations' UI replaced the need to build and query lists with SQL in Snowflake. Pull a list by criteria, enrich, push to Salesforce — no engineering or vendor handoff.

"The UI is going to save me a ton of time. It also makes me look better to my team because I can create lists faster. Anybody on the RevOps team can use it, you don't need a certain technical skill."

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Results

From firefighting to building

Cross-team alignment. Within days of rolling out DataLane, the sales team's concerns about bad data stopped.

It extended into other teams. Marketing receives clean lists for Facebook, LinkedIn, and direct mail. CS receives accurate primary-shop-type and address fields at close-won. Four teams now operate from the same source.

"Turned on DataLane, got the accounts into Salesforce, and instantly a different relationship was built. Just by the trust of knowing they were going to have the phone numbers, the emails, the right contact."

Speed of access — and RevOps elevation. Erin moved from "send criteria, wait for the list" to a few-click self-serve workflow. Any RevOps teammate can do it; nobody on the team needs to learn SQL.

RevOps stops being the function the rest of the org waits on, and starts being the function that moves at the same speed. Confidence flows both ways — Erin trusts what she's handing off, and Sales and Marketing trust what they're getting.

"It also makes me look better to my team because I can do it faster."

Execution unlocked. With the foundation solid, RevOps stopped firefighting and started shipping:

• First true TAM view of the auto repair market — "We could never fully pull our TAM list. That was the first thing we were actually able to do with DataLane — see what our actual market was."
• Local lists for reps doing in-person on-site visits with address and contact name
• A new ABM motion launching across mid-market and enterprise — RevOps now pulls targeted account lists from DataLane for marketing's direct mail campaigns today. Targeted Facebook ads are up next.
• Selling to new prospects close to existing customers — the same playbook pioneered by Toast where reps share with prospects that "your neighbor uses us"

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Shopmonkey now has a stable data foundation to build on. We're excited to see what they build next.

"Not only is the data great and the products you're building really cool — the team matters also. You can tell how much everybody wants to learn about our business so they can better support us. That's one of the things I love most about working with you."
Erin Towery, RevOps, Shopmonkey