How Newsela Scales K–12 Sales with Pursuit

Challenge

Newsela's revenue operations team wanted to give sellers and CSMs more time for true revenue work, but selling to public K–12 meant drowning in publicly available data. Reps were getting lost in the data, spending cycles on research instead of advancing pipeline.

On top of that, a legacy bi-weekly data provider created CRM bloat—contacts weren't removed as people turned over, leaving multiple outdated entries and forcing manual cleanup. Keeping lists current without creating dupes in Salesforce was a constant drag.

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Solution

Newsela adopted Pursuit to bubble up only the most relevant district signals and people, so reps could locate best-current contacts and push them straight into Salesforce. Pursuit's Radar & Pipeline Mode let RevOps define opportunity profiles by product and pair them with the right personas (e.g., assessment leaders), so AEs/BDRs could see where to focus and use Pursuit-generated, department-specific messaging.

The team also rolled out Salesforce enrichment carefully: dupe-blocking on, an initial matching exercise with Pursuit, and then controlled syncing so reps saw what already existed before adding new contacts.

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Results

With persona-specific signals and reliable contact data at their fingertips, Pursuit delivered impressive results:

• Meeting creation up: Pure meeting volume has been on the rise as Pursuit usage increased, with year-over-year growth in meeting bookings.
• Faster SDR motion: SDRs get outsized value from accurate contact data, move faster, and spend more time sequencing and calling—driving more meetings and pipeline.
• Trusted CRM enrichment: After the staged rollout, Newsela reports no issues from Pursuit's account and contact matching and wouldn't change the approach “because of how well it’s been working.”
• End-to-end motion in minutes: With product- and persona-specific profiles, a workflow that once required manual research is now slimmed down to minutes.

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Testimonial

Danny Clune, Revenue Operations Manager at Newsela, emphasized the importance of Pursuit's solution: "Pure meeting volume has been on the rise as we've seen Pursuit usage pick up. We've seen an increase in our meeting bookings… The SDRs are getting, by far, the most because the contact data is so useful for them."