How Nooks found $20M of pipeline by rebuilding their GTM foundation

The question the CRM couldn't answer

At the start of 2026, Nooks set itself on an ambitious growth track: 3x revenue, hire up to 30 account executives in batches through the year, and give each one a book of accounts good enough to hit their number. The sales hiring plan, quota design, and territories were all downstream of one question - how many good accounts actually exist in Nooks' market?

Michelle Idertogtokh on the Revenue Operations team at Nooks was not confident her existing CRM and data sources could accurately answer it.

Why sales-team counts are existential at Nooks

Nooks sells an AI sales platform: a performant dialing solution for SDRs, and recently an email sequencing product sold to both SDRs and AEs. So Nooks doesn't segment its market on employee count alone, the way most companies do. It segments on the size of the sales team inside each account. Enterprise meant 1,000+ employees and 16+ outbounding sellers. That makes precise SDR and AE count the single most consequential field in their CRM.

Classifying SDR titles across the entire universe of companies is non-trivial. Some companies call them BDRs. Some invent their own labels entirely. Getting this right across tens of millions of distinct titles takes more than a keyword list - which is why most vendors' SDR counts are, underneath the interface, guesses.

3 questions that kept Michelle up at night

Michelle went to market with three problems. She wanted one vendor for all three and couldn't find one - most sold piecemeal solutions “and then charge you an arm and a leg for something extra they don't even specialize in.”

The Microsoft test

The big incumbent gave her flashy TAM numbers on a slide. “It was a very black box number. They're like, trust it, it's correct. We're best in class - trust the data. I couldn't really get behind it.” So she designed her own test: she asked Sumble and another vendor for the full corporate tree of Microsoft, with every child account and domain.

Then she clicked into every single domain. The other vendor's tree had dead domains, redirects, and entities that didn't resolve to real companies. Sumble's tree wasn't perfect, and she says so: “There were still bad domains in there, but it was just way cleaner and that gave me confidence in the data.”

Trying to break the SDR classifier

SDR count accuracy got its own trial. Sumble classifies titles with a model trained on a curated taxonomy - one that separates function from seniority and refuses to guess when it isn't confident - and Michelle set out to break it. After signing, she spent hours hunting for SDR title variants the classification might have missed, every company's homegrown label for the same job. She found a handful, sent them over, and Sumble baked them into the ML-based classification layer - correcting the entire corpus for Nooks and every future customer.

Re-cutting the books without breaking the org

The clean data uncovered a problem Michelle hadn't seen coming: around 1,000 accounts owned by her enterprise reps were wrongly classified on inflated SDR counts. Moving them out of enterprise was the honest answer - and it would have gutted eleven people's books in the middle of a growth year.

The fix came from a field Nooks had never had before: AE counts. Sumble classifies the whole sales function, not just SDRs, and Nooks was now selling its sequencing product to AEs anyway. So Michelle redefined enterprise from “16+ SDRs” to “16+ total sellers.” That brought about 500 of the shifted accounts legitimately back into enterprise, matched the segmentation to what Nooks actually sells today, and minimized how many accounts changed hands.

Getting the org to accept a re-cut is change management, not data work, and Michelle ran it deliberately: she modeled every segmentation variant against fixed constraints - no quota changes, no layoffs, the existing hiring plan - took the least-disruptive option to her sales leaders, and spent weeks answering their questions until the ambiguity was gone. The CRO announced the change to the floor. “It's influence and conviction through a lot of analysis,” she says. “But it's going smooth because we have so much conviction in the data. If we were making these changes and we didn't trust the data, it would be another story.”

$15 million of accounts they didn't know existed

With counts and hierarchies fixed, the third problem was TAM: how big is the market, really? Nooks used Sumble to map the account universe outside its CRM. The team is enriching about 20,000 more accounts than before, and whitespace analysis brought 12,000 net-new accounts into the database. Michelle is deliberately conservative about what counts as good: of those 12,000, about 700 met the bar where she'd build them into a rep's book.

Those 700 accounts represent about $15M in whitespace pipeline ARR surfaced outside the CRM. The same data also opened up whitespace inside existing customers: Nooks now knows the AE count at every account where it sells SDR seats but hasn't sold sequencing - 24,000 AE seats representing about $5M in sequencing pipeline.

An account score reps can trust

When the vendor behind Nooks' previous scoring tool was acquired and shifted its focus, Michelle declined the renewal and rebuilt account scoring on Sumble data instead. “We needed an account score that's not dead. A live account score.” Working closely with Sumble's team, she built a model that decides how books get built, which accounts get assigned first, and which tiers marketing targets.

Her design principle: a score a rep can't verify is a score a rep won't use. So the score travels to downstream systems with accompanying evidence. Reps see it in HubSpot with a link out to the underlying Sumble data, on a simple prospecting page that puts the score next to the account data it's built on, and through a Slack bot Michelle built herself, where any rep can type /account and start asking questions. They can click through and count the sellers themselves. “If a rep's not bought into it, they're not going to work the account,” she says. “All this work that we do doesn't matter if reps aren't working accounts because they don't believe the company actually has these things.”

Results: before and after

With the foundation fixed, the questions for Nooks' RevOps team have gotten strategic. Nooks has now sized its TAM, which means the next planning conversation isn't about cleaning data but about which verticals to expand to next. “Those are the things a RevOps team should be thinking about,” Michelle says. “Before, it was very gray: we think we have this many good accounts. Now we have confidence that we can actually execute the plan we created.”

At the start of the year, reps were filing tickets about the data every day and disqualifying half the accounts it sent them to. That RevOps team is gone. “It's still not lost on me how crazy that is. But it's pretty cool.”

About Sumble

Sumble is the GTM data-foundation you need to crush your pipeline goals in 2026. Use Sumble to get deep account intelligence - we show you exactly who to reach out to and what to say - by revealing the team structures, reporting lines, tech stacks, and active initiatives inside your target accounts.

You can use our Web app today (it's free), or get in touch with us to enrich your entire CRM, help you with account scoring, territory planning and white space mapping.