TrustRadius Insights for CIENCE Sales Development (legacy) are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
High-Quality Work: Many users have praised CIENCE for their high-quality work, noting that the team consistently delivers exceptional results. This demonstrates that CIENCE goes above and beyond to provide top-notch service and meet or exceed clients' expectations.
Prompt Communication: Reviewers frequently mention the lightning-fast communication from CIENCE, highlighting their reliability and responsiveness. Clients appreciate that CIENCE is always available to address any concerns or questions promptly, which fosters a strong working relationship based on effective communication.
Expertise in Lead Generation: Several users have commended CIENCE for their expertise in lead generation, emphasizing their wide sector knowledge and access to high-level management contacts. This indicates that CIENCE excels at identifying and targeting key prospects in various industries, resulting in successful outreach campaigns.
Beware of Scam!I recently engaged CIENCE Lead Generation, paying $10,000 for 250 qualified leads, expecting a professional service and solid prospects. Unfortunately, what I received was far from that. The leads they presented were completely fabricated—none of the individuals or businesses had requested information about my company. In fact, we obtained sworn affidavits from many of these so-called "leads" affirming they had never heard of us or requested any information. This is a blatant scam, and we're now in the process of pursuing legal action against CIENCE to recover our full payment. If you are considering working with them for lead generation, I strongly urge you to reconsider. Their practices are fraudulent, and you risk losing a significant amount of money without getting anything of value in return. We were misled, and now we're facing the consequences of trusting this company. Don’t make the same mistake.
We brought Cience in to help launch a B2B Sales Outreach department for our established traditional ecommerce B2C product. It absolutely took time for the program to build steam, and like others we experienced a good amount of turn over. The PM who lead the way for the first 9 months never faltered in their commitment to our account, and was always proactive about suggesting changes when the opportunity arose. Their cold email open rates were always impressive, and with the right caller we did find success in booking a good amount of appointments. It is important that as the client you provide detailed and honest feedback - without communication and hard work on both ends it simply will not work. The biggest drawback of Cience is the price and ROI. For us, it is not feasible to continue this relationship past the one year mark, however - Cience has given us the tools we needed to continue and has been extremely gracious as we head toward the phase of offboarding.
Pros
Cold email open rates
Detailed and engaging playbook
Making proactive adjustments along the way
Cons
Pricing - Although their pricing just sort of is what it is for a service of this nature, it was not feasible for us
Communication when there was significant turn over within the first 6 months of our partnership was lacking. We expressed our feelings about this, and when their were some additional changes made to our team - we were prepared and told in a way that felt honest and professional.
Likelihood to Recommend
Cience is well suited for providing building blocks when you are starting with very little. They took the time to learn our unique product and weren't hesitant to jump on an account for a less than traditional ICP. If you are looking to outsource sales, just be prepared to be an active voice in the partnership.
I believe that this company oversells its services. The salesperson confidently reassured us with stories of previous supposed successes. But in my opinion, their system is clunky and fixed to their model only. We paid for a rag-tag team of ‘specialists’ who are all over the place. In the first 3 months of our programme, five or six of our dedicated team members turned over, one at a time. In our experience, the handovers were non-existent, and not one of them (on their own admission) took time to really understood what we do. One even admitted to me that their prospect list is unchecked. I believe that they’ll blind you with your performance stats to give you false hope. Suddenly the three months are up and then, in my experience, they’ll try to sell you a follow-on programme. Despite false promises, they secured ONE real meeting for us and one dud one. LinkedIn is on fire with ex-‘cientists’ on the JOB hunt now complaining about their ex-employer. If we had just given the money to a charity, I’d be feeling a lot better right now.
We (Euformatics) hired CIENCE to deliver qualified leads in the area of clinical labs and hospitals in the US for genomic data analysis software. Everything seemed fine in the beginning when ramping up their knowledge about our offering even though the onboarding took longer than we were told during the sales process. Once the actual outreach started we saw very few results, only a few meetings over the course of 4 months, and costs of more than $20k. It was quite frustrating to listen to their explanations every 2 weeks during our calls about how we are just where we should be in terms of metrics (open rate of emails, connection rate on calls, etc.) even though the actual deliverables (qualified meetings) were not produced. During the sales process, their representative talked about getting 10-12 qualified meetings per month. The reality was 0.5 per month. So the gap between promises and reality was just too high.
Pros
Their own internal sales process to close new customers
Cons
Their ability to perform according to expectations and promises during the sales process
Likelihood to Recommend
If you are targeting the healthcare sector with your offering I cannot recommend working with CIENCE based on our experience.
We are launching a new company and product offering free services to build our customer base. Cience was hired to help recruit companies who would like our free service. This was an "easy conversion" according to their team as the initial product offering was FREE. They were to get us leads and appointments so that we could complete the signup.
Pros
They made it to MOST of our regularly scheduled status meetings
Cons
We had ZERO conversions
Three very poor quality meetings. One of which had no idea who we were.
No accountability for the poor performance
No recommendations for how they could improve
Likelihood to Recommend
I would rate zero if possible. We have a very simple, easy-to-understand offering. Nothing complex or nuanced. Free offering to get started. Yet we still got nothing. Hard to imagine a situation more straightforward and simple than ours, so I can't imagine this having a positive rate of return for any situation.
We are a small, but mighty team. We Needed Cience's help in the top-of-the-funnel lead generation/appointment setting with stakeholders who fit our target persona.
Pros
They set a few quality meetings for us
Cons
STEER CLEAR- their company and model are a mess. We had a kickoff call in February with our "team" and by mid-May, none of them were still with the organization. We were never looped in on this turnover and as a result, there was a total diffusion of responsibility. Beware of the "10-20 day onboarding period" ours was more than 30 despite the fact we proactively provided them with a 15+ page playbook detailing everything they needed: 1) Target personas 2) Objections and counters 3) Product info 4) Company history 5) Talk tracks 6) Etc. Every ball that was dropped was on their end and there was a complete lack of ownership and accountability from their leadership team. The only person who took ANY ownership was our CAM, who was let go as part of a massive company-wide layoff. Their whole organization is a mess.
We made numerous coaching asks of their team after hearing in the call recordings that the SDR was deviating from the script completely and had no idea what they were talking about. Their message was, "We help HR leaders retain talent so that they can promote their talent and not lose existing talent"--- the most generic of pitches and not at all related to what we do. They continuously referred to it as a "system" when we are a professional coaching organization. We coached continuously on every biweekly call and gave them suggestions, none of which seemed to get back to the SDR as they continued to repeat the same mistakes and even went far as pushing a prospect to take a meeting when she was in a rush because "I get incentivized from meetings booked over the phone."
Despite our continuous asks, there was no collaboration. Our landing page mockup featured companies that weren't even customers of ours and would've been catastrophic to our brand had it been released. We never saw a mockup of this until the last minute and ended up having to do the entire thing ourselves despite them selling us on the fact that it was something they could handle.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you are an organization that values collaboration, organization, attention to detail, coachability, and willingness to listen and take feedback, Cience is not the "partner" for you. You fork over your entire 3-month payment upfront with no guarantee of return. What ensues is them checking the boxes with no ownership and accountability along the way. Maybe if you're a drastically simple widget, Cience would work, but if you have a professional services product or something that clearly needs its value props well-articulated, steer clear. You will be burned and they will not work with you at all to take corrective measures, only kick the can further down the road without owning their mistakes.
We used CIENCE to help us create an outbound campaign to generate leads for a new product we have just introduced to the market. CIENCE helped us to create the content, process, and identify the right leads for us to pursue. Moreover, they then did the outreach to the identified targets using the materials we had developed.
Pros
Outbound dialing
Demand generation
Analytics
Cons
Not all products are ready for outbound campaigns - it would be great if CIENCE could level set early expectations on what kind of responses we can expect given the maturing of the tool.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you have a product where you understand the Ideal Customer Profile and are looking to bring leads to your sales teams - CIENCE is going to be a great resource for you to use to stimulate demand. If you are less sure of your product-market fit and ideal customer profile, CIENCE could still be a good option - but you should taper your expectations accordingly.
We utilize CIENCE to help us in following up with leads that we do not have the bandwidth to follow up with properly. We work together to develop email cadences based on the target audience and they also make phone calls on our behalf. They help set up appointments and coordinate handoff to our sales team.
Pros
Appointment Setting
Lead Follow Up
Email Messaging
Cons
Ability to reach out on LinkedIn without using a personal profile
Likelihood to Recommend
CIENCE is great for developing successful email and phone call messaging playbooks, properly following up with leads, and setting appointments.
Due to the limited capacity of our internal xDR organization, the objective of the pilot is to work CIENCE, leveraging their outbound SDR services targeting cold contacts in the Enterprise and Corp segments, with a focus on CIAM and Security personas with the goal of activating 4%+ of the contacts targeted in the pilot.
Pros
Provides a strong strategic partnership
Dedication and cooperation with our marketing teams
Provides recurring updates on the progress of our pilot program
Strong collaboration and communication with cross-functional teams
Cons
We are working on a pilot so both our teams are learning together
Likelihood to Recommend
We feel so lucky to have such a strong strategic partnership with CIENCE! We are impressed with the dedication and cooperation of their team and have confidence that they will steer us in the right direction for the success of our cold activation pilot program.
CIENCE is performing several services for us, including contact research, company data enrichment, list scrubbing, ecommerce category classification and other various ad-hoc data research and scrubbing related projects. These services are being used for our sales and business development initiatives. CIENCE's work has allowed us to better understand or addressable market, target our ICP and identify + connect with our target prospects.
Pros
Contact info research
List scrubbing
Ad-hoc data research and enrichment
Cons
Accuracy has been an issue in rare instances
Likelihood to Recommend
CIENCE is well-suited in taking high-level instructions, understanding the goals and completing projects with a high level of accuracy. They are able to work very quickly in most cases. What's been most valuable is their willingness to take on new, ad-hoc projects on the fly and complete them quickly with a high level of accuracy. My favorite part is that the success team is a total pleasure to work with. One minor area for improvement is that occasionally they have made incorrect assumptions instead of asking for clarity on something.
