How Le Village by CA doubled interested email replies and halved its sales cycle

Le Village by CA is the network of startup accelerators backed by Crédit Agricole. The Paris Village sells memberships and support programs to founders and C-level leaders of young startups, and opens doors to the large corporate partners behind the network.

Before Tamtam, a growth agency handled all of the sourcing. Pauline Guégan, who ran sales, had “no visibility into the stack, the tools, or the funnel, and no control over any of it.” Leads arrived, but nobody inside the Village could see why those companies, or change who came next.

What she wanted instead was three things at once: “human support, regular automated batches of quality leads, and on top of that a SaaS tool you can dig into yourself.”

• 80-90% of sourced leads come from Tamtam. “The goal is for pretty much all of our outbound to be sourced through Tamtam going forward,” Pauline said.
• 2x interested email replies. “We're getting an 8% interested reply rate on email. We used to be around 4%, so we've doubled the number of interested replies we get by email.”
• 2x faster sales cycle. “On speed, we've basically cut our average sales cycle in half.”

The gain came from aim, not volume. “The goal of using Tamtam isn't to chase volume, it's to focus on quality,” Pauline said. “The whole idea behind Tamtam's signals is to reach people at exactly the right moment. And that's what pushes performance up.”

The team started with two or three signals, mainly hiring, then added fundraising and companies opening up their capital: the moments when a young startup is most likely to want an accelerator. “With Tamtam you can track pretty much any signal,” Pauline said. “That's what makes it powerful, but it's also why the human support matters.”

Tamtam's AI assistant widened the range further. “We worked a lot with Tamtam's AI assistant, and it helped us widen the range of signals.” It also gives her a conversational layer for getting more out of the signals she already runs, and for custom lead research on very specific requests.

Tamtam is now the first tool in the chain: “for all the sourcing, lead qualification and segmentation through signals,” with leads synced natively into HubSpot. Compared with a general-purpose AI, the difference is the data: “It's built specifically for sourcing, so when it comes to qualifying leads, the data is far more reliable. With Tamtam, there's real work that's already gone into the tool beforehand.”