Charm.io: Turning DTC Brand Data into High-Value Leads

July 15, 2025

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:18:13
Unknown
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Transform Sales Podcast Sales Software Review. Today we have the pleasure of having Alex Jensen, CTO of charmed, IO, with us here to talk about lead mining, how you do it, how it's doing great.

00:00:18:13 - 00:00:38:24
Unknown
Tony, thanks for having me on. Thanks for joining us. Now, what I didn't say is we're going to talk about churn over sales prospecting. But today we're going to particularly focus on how agencies can use turmoil to find or build lead lists, for DTC brands that they may want to target for themselves or for their clients, I suppose.

00:00:38:24 - 00:01:17:20
Unknown
Right. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, let's just jump into it with no further ado. As far as Tron io goes, what is charmed? Io. And what are some some some, platforms that, customers that come over to charmed IO are sometimes using before they get on board. Which are that IO. Yeah. Great question. So so charm is a brand discovery and analysis platform where we track and analyze roughly 4 million direct to consumer brands from around the world across every product category, from apparel and accessories to footwear to beauty to toys and games and food and beverage, and to back up.

00:01:17:23 - 00:01:40:03
Unknown
And, you know, what we felt was there was this massive emergence of direct to consumer brands in recent years. We joke that, you know, everyone and their mother or father launched a DTC brand every day. Some of these brands get really big and successful, others wither away and die. And nobody was effectively measuring that whole ecosystem of these new DTC brands that are emerging every day.

00:01:40:05 - 00:02:05:05
Unknown
And so what we've built is this engine that goes out and discovers new brands in real time, using an AI discovery crawler we built and then pulls in all of the associated available performance data on these brands. So things like how quickly are they growing their audience on social platforms like Instagram or TikTok or X? Who's reselling their products outside of their DTC store?

00:02:05:06 - 00:02:36:10
Unknown
What distributors or other online stores are selling their products? How much advertising activity are they doing and where you know, what is their product assortment and pricing look like? We take all this data in, and then we've developed these proprietary machine learning models that actually scored the brands relative to their category, based on their growth and success, to give our customers a singular point of view on how quickly a brand is evolving in terms of growth and how successful it is based on all these different attributes that we're tracking.

00:02:36:12 - 00:03:01:05
Unknown
What we saw historically was that a lot of our customers, specifically for the sales prospecting use case, we're using very kind of, general, although potentially very strong sales intelligence software, right? Things like zoom info or other sales tools that are really robust in terms of coverage. You know, they have maybe 100 million companies and really rich company details.

00:03:01:08 - 00:03:34:14
Unknown
But what those traditional software solutions lacked was a real focus on direct to consumer brands. And so where our niche is and where we see a lot of success in the market is from serving companies and sales teams where their end customer is a DTC brand. So if you're an agency, for example, and you provide, you know, social, social advertising services for DTC brands, you're going to find a lot more relevant data points in charm than you would in some of these traditional sales intelligence platforms.

00:03:34:19 - 00:04:05:05
Unknown
What we really did was kind of reverse engineer the experience based on, first and foremost, what is important in understanding about a DTC brand's performance and then measuring those metrics to report back to our customers. Got it. So when you think about the challenges that folks run into when they're using some of the zoom info, obviously we got the idea that, you know, specialization normally leads to more insight and, and better things, better decisions you can make off of the information.

00:04:05:12 - 00:04:22:29
Unknown
But are there some specific ones that stand out to 2 or 3 specific, challenges when it comes to those data sets that make up, that really make a big difference in this space? When you think about targeting the DTC brands. Yeah, I mean, for sure, like I think if we take a really specific example, it's easiest to run, right?

00:04:22:29 - 00:04:45:16
Unknown
So if you take a social media agency, right, a traditional sales intelligence tool like a zoom info or, an Apollo will be looking at things like, how many employees does the company have? Well, that's not really a good indicator for how successful or not successful they are in their social media activities. Like if I'm an agency, right.

00:04:45:16 - 00:05:09:07
Unknown
If I if I'm running an ad agency that helps brands grow their social media following, then whether they have 50 employees or 150 employees, doesn't really tell me anything about whether they need my service. At the end of the day, what sales really comes down to is identifying customers or prospects earlier in the process, I guess, that have a need or a challenge that that you want to help them solve.

00:05:09:13 - 00:05:34:17
Unknown
And as an agency, that means identifying if you're focused on social media, identifying the brands that are having trouble growing their following. And so when you come to a platform like Cha, where what we're measuring are exactly things like that, right? How quickly are they growing? They're following. Are they doing social advertising today or not? We're giving these types of agencies a much better perspective on who the right customers for them to go after.

00:05:34:17 - 00:05:59:09
Unknown
Are. Makes sense. I can see that. So now we're getting past demographics really down to I don't know, I can't call it psychographic. You know what. Almost like ethnography. It's almost kind of like that transition to getting to what's really going on in the business, which is a different level of insight, which if you're selling to them now, you can find data points that help you position yourself to help that business go to the next level.

00:05:59:12 - 00:06:26:02
Unknown
I would almost I would almost qualify it as identifying the right metrics that our customers have the ability to impact for their customers, right. We want to measure the things about brands that our customers have, the ability to actually have a positive impact on, and something like an employee count doesn't really help you there. If you're a social media agency, would you, what would you say?

00:06:26:18 - 00:06:45:28
Unknown
Among the agencies or among those metrics, that you all deliver tend to be the most and the ones you see folks like in the reason why people come in and join, subscribe to drive io the most. So you mentioned the social, the social part. So I guess metrics related to the social standing must be in there.

00:06:45:28 - 00:07:11:05
Unknown
You mentioned. So yeah. Yeah, that's definitely I'd say the strongest because when you think about what actually drives the success of a direct to consumer brand in today's market, it's very, very largely driven by what's happening in their social audience. You know, so much of e-commerce starts with your social following and the engagement you get there. So we not only track, for example, followers on Instagram, but also things like engagement rate.

00:07:11:09 - 00:07:33:12
Unknown
So is a brand's audience actually commenting and liking on their posts, or are they just following the brand because they have attractive models in their in their post? Right. Which which is a common theme we all know about. And I think that's, that's one angle. Another angle is when we're thinking about agency specifically is the level of thing that they're doing today.

00:07:33:12 - 00:07:55:13
Unknown
So, you know, growing from an organic perspective is one piece. But a lot of these agencies are really focused on helping, activation from a need advertising perspective. And that's another piece we're measuring, too. On the social side is how much advertising activity are these brands doing and how is that evolving over time. And we even get as granular as to say, what markets are they advertising in?

00:07:55:18 - 00:08:18:26
Unknown
Because some of the agencies we work with like to identify opportunities for international geographic expansion as an area for them to focus on and provide value for their customers. Got it. And is there there happen to be one more metric in there? I feel like. And look, Lady Quest, I was kind of digging flowing with you like wonder if influencer marketing comes up in there somewhere too, or does it just lessen the social?

00:08:19:06 - 00:08:38:20
Unknown
I mean, I think that's part of social, right? I think, look, there's a lot of metrics we track. We track things like revenue that we estimate for brands to help you understand how big of a brand this is. Some agencies find their bread and butter is with really small brands and doing, you know, a mass play of working with tons and tons of these small brands.

00:08:38:25 - 00:08:58:18
Unknown
Other agencies want to go after the largest brands in the world and just to work with them. And so we we tend to to think that we have the flavor for kind of everyone's preference. And I think the other piece to this is that we're tracking 4 million of these brands, right? So every brand that exists in the world is in our database.

00:08:58:19 - 00:09:19:02
Unknown
If you sell products direct to consumer, we are covering you and analyzing your your metrics and your performance data. And so we're providing a very robust offering in terms of the breadth of data, not just the depth of data that we provide on these brands. Got it. Well then with no further ado, let's take a look at what that looks like behind the curve.

00:09:19:26 - 00:09:42:21
Unknown
Specifically, we're looking at the social metrics. We're looking at the paid advertising. And we're taking a look at oof, that last one that we just covered kind of just looked at the growth, the revenue growth. Yeah. That looks like let's see. Here we go. Okay. Great. So this is an example of a deep dive report in charm.

00:09:42:22 - 00:10:03:05
Unknown
So we have one of these for all 4 million brands that we track. And the first thing you're going to see when when I look at this brand this is a bathing suit brand out of California called Left on Friday. The first thing you're going to see are these three machine learning based scores that we produce. The first is measuring how quickly left on Friday is growing relative to all the other brands that we track.

00:10:03:07 - 00:10:35:16
Unknown
The second is how successful it is or how big it is based on all the attributes we track. And the third is the sophistication score, which measures how sophisticated they are based on the technology stack that's powering their DTC operation. And on here we can see what's actually driving the growth for this particular brand. And so before we get into any of the different kind of deeper metrics, this view is really meant to give our customers a snapshot of what's happening in this brand's business today, what's driving their growth, and where are their areas that impact their performance.

00:10:35:18 - 00:10:59:24
Unknown
So in this case, we can see that, you know, relative to to other brands in their category, they're growing their audience on, you know, Instagram and the 99th percentile. Right. TikTok 81st website traffic 99, so on and so forth. So you could see things like advertising as well as their online reseller distribution here. Then when we get into the profile tab we actually provide contact details.

00:10:59:24 - 00:11:19:12
Unknown
So if you wanted to get in touch with this brand, you would know who to reach out to. And in some cases it'll be, you know, the co-founder of the brand. And in other cases it'll be someone like a brand manager, right? Or depending on who it is that you're targeting within that brand's organization. On the social side, we're looking at all their different social profiles.

00:11:19:12 - 00:11:46:15
Unknown
So in this case Instagram and Facebook and TikTok. And we're not only looking at the growth of their audience and how that stacks up relative to the other brands we see in their category. But we're also looking at something called their engagement rate. So what percent of their audience liking and commenting on their posts, which is really important when you think about these social platforms of, you know, are they just accumulating a large number of followers, or is it actually an engaged and active audience base?

00:11:46:18 - 00:12:12:26
Unknown
And it looks like there's a little opportunity to increase that engagement, right? So believe it or not, 0.6 is quite strong. Most of the brands in our database have about 0.1 engagement rate. So so point six is on the higher side okay. There's a KPI for you. We I don't have to get into all these now because I know we don't have too much time, but a couple other things as we we do look at the products that the brand offers right.

00:12:12:26 - 00:12:31:19
Unknown
So this really helps our customers understand what type of products this brand is selling. Is this something that's similar to the other brands that they're working with already today? And then once we get into the advertising piece, we're tracking not only the number of ads they're running and how many unique ads at any time, but also what markets they're advertising in.

00:12:31:21 - 00:13:05:12
Unknown
So in this case, you can see that, you know, this brand left on Fridays only advertising today in in in the US and Canada. Right. So if we're talking to an agency customer that's looking for brands that have an opportunity for international expansion, this could be a really interesting one for them to go after. And while you can look up in the world in our database right by just searching it, most of our customer's journey starts in our discovery tool or our prospector, where they'll actually set the criteria for what they're looking for, like what category of product the brand sells.

00:13:05:12 - 00:13:33:00
Unknown
Do they want high growth, moderate growth? Do they want brands that are struggling with advertising or doing a lot of advertising already that have a presence internationally? So they select all this criteria, and then we're going to show them all the brands that match that criteria, that they can then either add to a list to export to a CSV or sink directly to their CRM, whether that's HubSpot or Salesforce and, you know, continue with their prospecting efforts that, well, that's really cool.

00:13:33:00 - 00:14:00:19
Unknown
Then, let me ask you a question here. Would you scroll up a little bit? Yeah. Like actually. So the success score. Yep. Curious about what was that success score comprised of. Yeah. So it's all those metrics that we were looking at before, you know, Instagram following engagement, website traffic, advertising activity. We take all of those. When we create these machine learning based scores we look at two perspectives on it.

00:14:00:19 - 00:14:20:21
Unknown
One is how quickly they're growing their growth score and one is how successful they are. How big are they are the magnitude of their reach across all of those channels that we're measuring. So typically, you know, the customers we're working with are looking for brands that are growing quickly but aren't the biggest brands in the world. Right.

00:14:20:25 - 00:14:40:24
Unknown
It's very hard to win Nike's business if you're an agency, for example, what you want to find is those emerging brands that are at an inflection point in their business that are on an up and up, and that you can help them accelerate their growth. And then these agencies will actually use the data from Charme in their outreach to the brand and say, look, I see you're doing so-and-so.

00:14:40:24 - 00:15:05:24
Unknown
Either you, you know, your advertising activities is doing okay, but we can help them do better. Or your your social following engagement could could be improved. And this is how we help customers with that. Here's a case study like, you know, so that actually use the data in the outreach two, which I think is really powerful. I can only say one thing about this one, Alex, is that we need a charm for several different industries because, I mean, I've heard that before, right?

00:15:05:24 - 00:15:24:28
Unknown
It's just like you could sell smarter. You can sell so much smarter. You can really do something called, planning and go in, like, you actually know a little something about the buyer instead of these lukewarm care to talk discovery? Call messaging is where it's like, no, but how do you even check this out? Do you know anything about me?

00:15:25:00 - 00:15:43:20
Unknown
Yeah. So, definitely kudos for that. Let's get to the next thing that can hold someone back. Someone who is, who buys the product. The thing that could hold anyone back on the platform or software is getting set up in the first place. And I want to I want to frame this a little bit. Right. We've got two parts of the setup.

00:15:43:22 - 00:16:02:08
Unknown
One part is just, oh, test your email, create an account, invite your team members, whatever. But the other part is your process, your mentality. How are you going in knowing what you're looking

00:16:02:24 - 00:16:24:08
Unknown
knowing what you're looking for so you can get the most out of the tool? You know, like a calculator, garbage in, garbage out. So you kind of got to be prepared there.

00:16:24:08 - 00:16:46:12
Unknown
Let take us through a little bit about some of the deliverables or some of that, maybe even some tips, best practices you would have for folks and say, hey, before you get into charm, do this so we can make the onboarding as quick, get you to impact as quickly as possible through onboard. Yeah. So look for first off, on the onboarding side, we invest a lot in our customer success resources.

00:16:46:13 - 00:17:12:26
Unknown
We think it's really important that our customers have, someone along with them on the journey from charge to help them with onboarding, making sure that they're getting the most value, sharing proactive insights and recommendations on how to get the most ROI out of the solution. Is it as it pertains to actually getting set up? I mean, it's really straightforward, right?

00:17:13:01 - 00:17:35:10
Unknown
You you log in, you sync to your CRM if you want to, if you want to actually ingest the lead into your CRM that way, and then you're off to the races or we typically recommend customers do. And you know, one of the the, amazing benefits of having a data analytics platform is that you can actually look up some existing customers of yours that are a great fit and some prospects of yours that were a terrible fit, and see how their data and charm looks.

00:17:35:10 - 00:17:53:06
Unknown
And that gives you a really clear perspective on what you should be looking for from a lookalike perspective. Right? Like, am I looking for brands that are doing really well already? Well, actually all my best customers were ones that were doing really poorly, and so maybe that's who I should be looking for, because that's who I have the biggest opportunity to to, to support and to improve their business performance.

00:17:53:08 - 00:18:15:24
Unknown
Nice. So then, not a lot of tech required. So that's that's a good tip to get started. And there's not a lot of tech support necessary. You don't have to have any special engineers. And no I just special coding to none. Zero. And then as far as time goes then I guess with that tip, the time it takes you to go ahead and get started is just as long as it takes you to make the decision on.

00:18:15:26 - 00:18:39:29
Unknown
These are the attributes that I need to replicate for my look like audience. Yeah. I mean, look, it it really depends on your sales motion. You know, we work with and I think that in general we're seeing the, the market move towards this being a more effective model. But I guess that's up to each company. Right? We work with companies that have a very tailored sales approach, like we want to only focus on the best leads and the highest propensity to convert leads.

00:18:39:29 - 00:19:00:28
Unknown
Right. And those are the ones that are going to spend the time really researching to find the best prospects and charm, setting up the right filter criteria, creating what we call a dynamic list. And that list is going to be automatically updated for them every week, notified in their inbox. They hop back in and they know exactly who they should be reaching out to based on who's newly qualified.

00:19:01:00 - 00:19:22:08
Unknown
There are others that say, look, we want to blast everyone that is even potentially relevant with some messaging, usually pretty generic, right? We're not sure how well that works for them, but God bless them. And and, and and so they take a slightly different approach and they say, look, we want to just take as much data as we can out of your database and blast these folks.

00:19:22:08 - 00:19:40:01
Unknown
And, and, you know, we know we're going to convert at a lower rate, but it's going to be it's going to be better aligned to how they're operating today, which is fine. You know, we work in some cases with, sales ops leader or revenue ops leader in an organization, sometimes directly with the salespeople, sometimes with a CRM or a VP of sales.

00:19:40:07 - 00:20:08:23
Unknown
It really depends on how the organization is structured, but ultimately they tend to deploy it across the sales team or across the business development team. God got it. And last but not least, so we talked about those challenges basically that one would have using a generic, lead intelligence tool like a zoom into and we talked about so we talked about those gaps and the features that you all provide.

00:20:08:23 - 00:20:34:05
Unknown
So when you're thinking about what people should be thinking about when they get the time that I, what KPIs they should look for a list on, what would what what would you recommend there so that they can know that they're getting the impact that they expect. So yeah, beyond the beyond the obvious obviously. Yeah. Yeah. Look I mean look the sales is is a pretty formulaic business, right?

00:20:34:08 - 00:21:09:27
Unknown
I mean, it's at the end of the day, it comes down to qualified leads that you're going after. It goes down to one revenue. At the end of the day, we feel that we win if our customers way we want our customers to close more revenue. You know, one of our, kind of hallmark customers is Hey Social, which is an agency that was really successful using charm and and the stat that they shared with us that we were really excited about was that they booked 50 discovery calls, in the first month after starting to use char, which was about A5X increase over what they were seeing before.

00:21:10:04 - 00:21:34:00
Unknown
And so, you know, I think to me, discovery calls is really the ultimate measure of, the performance of a sales tool because, you know, we can't really control your ability to sell your solution. Unfortunately, if I could, it would be I could probably charge a lot more. But, but but what we can do is we can help get people to the right people at the right companies at the right time.

00:21:34:00 - 00:21:54:05
Unknown
And I think that's what we're trying to do is really connect, you know, our customers to the right potential buyers for their solutions and, and for, for agencies, it specifically, but for all sales teams that all in all, you know, teams prospecting for new customers. That really means getting someone on the phone to have a conversation and do a discovery about their needs.

00:21:54:07 - 00:22:19:04
Unknown
Well, we've got a lot of agencies that are particularly in the business of appointment setting, and that type of lead outbound lead generation. So if you're out there and you're listening to this, if you want to target DTC brands, time is a way that you can start selling smarter and not working so dang hard. I like to run that as it's selling smarter, working harder, but it doesn't.

00:22:19:04 - 00:22:41:16
Unknown
I want it to be. You not have to work, you know you can sell more with less effort. Deliver those results you need to for your clients. Thank you so much, Alex, for being a guest today, sharing this information about Charmed Audio and how people could go ahead and, get more information about DTC brands, information that converts and, look forward to catching you all that are tuning in on the next round.

00:22:41:18 - 00:22:43:00
Unknown
Thanks, Tony.