How Asana Fueled 76% of Outbound Pipeline with Pocus

Asana is the leading platform for work management and team collaboration trusted by millions of users  and over 135,000 organizations worldwide. Asana has successfully translated their success with end users into enterprise-wide deployments, but like many teams their wealth of customer and prospect data lived in siloes making it challenging to orchestrate effective signal-driven sales plays. They also faced a familiar challenge for many scaling teams: how do you systematically scale what your top performers are doing while avoiding the chaos of everyone running their own version of outbound?

The answer required more than just giving reps access to data—it demanded intentionality, repeatability, and a complete rethinking of their outbound motion.

How do you take all of the valuable internal and external data about accounts & users, then turn it into scalable pipeline generating playbooks for reps? Asana’s GTM team began working with Pocus in 2023 to centralize data, reduce toggle tax for reps, and help RevOps rapidly experiment with new pipe gen playbooks. 

Recently, we caught up with Kevin Baldacci, Head of Solutions Product Marketing and Maschal Malek, GTM Systems Product Owner, to learn how Asana transformed scattered success into a scalable outbound engine. In FY25 Pocus fueled 76% of Asana’s outbound pipeline. 

TL;DR:

• Asana evolved from fragmented data and "silos of success" to an intentional, repeatable outbound system
• Implemented a strategic reset focusing on top 25 proven plays with aligned messaging and prioritization
• Pocus is now used by Asana’s sales team globally to power new business and expansion playbooks 
• Reps who use Pocus at Asana are closing 3x more revenue
• Pocus powers 76% of Asana’s outbound pipeline 

Finding Needles in the Haystack: Three Core Challenges

Enterprise sales is complex. You need to reach the right buyer at the right time. You need to deeply understand their priorities and multi-thread the right stakeholders. It often takes multiple touches over many months. No wonder so many sales teams struggle.

Asana’s challenges were amplified further, their success means a large footprint of product users and massive amount of valuable data everywhere. It’s a double edged sword that means more data for reps but makes it even harder to spot the best opportunities. 

Asana's GTM team identified three core problems that were limiting their outbound effectiveness:

#1 Fragmented data and manual workflows To get the information they needed, reps were running a tedious, multi-step workflow that would often take 6+ hours per week just compiling the right prospecting lists:

• Reps ran their own data analysis to pull their own lists of accounts or users to engage
• Reps then manually loaded these lists into Salesforce
• Salesforce lists would then sync with Outreach, where reps would enroll their leads into sequences

#2 "Silos of Success" - No democratization of what actually works

"We had lots of silos of success," explains Kevin Baldacci. Some reps were running plays well with the right engagements and actions but others were doing them poorly. There wasn’t any standardization around plays that worked. 

#3  New product launch complexity 

As Asana launched new products like AI Studio, reps had no systematic way to identify which accounts were good candidates for new product offerings. Critical expansion signals were scattered across multiple systems, making it nearly impossible to execute timely, relevant outreach for cross-sell opportunities.

Use case #1: unified platform for prospecting  

The first step in solving Asana’s problems was to bring data together into a single unified prospecting tool. All of the hopping between tools and manual workflow management cost Asana’s sales team significant time. Reps were spending up to six hours each week compiling their lead lists, leaving them little time to run plays outside of traditional outbound, like expansion or winback efforts.

"We had all this valuable data, but our reps were spending up to six hours just compiling lead lists instead of having meaningful conversations with prospects," explains Sam Hanif, Enterprise Technology Product Manager

With end-to-end prospecting playbooks in Pocus, reps are saving 6 hours or more per week. This is all possible because Asana is centralizing all valuable GTM data from internal (product usage, CRM, marketing engagement) and external sources in one place, a powerful data layer that enables sophisticated data-driven sales playbooks. The flexibility of the data layer makes it easier for ops and leadership to spin up new playbooks with ease for the sales team. 

“Having the ability to aggregate all this data into a single place that reps can easily use for prospecting has been a real game-changer." - Kevin Baldacci, Head of Solutions Product Marketing

Use case #2: sales playbook repeatability & optimization

No more Wild West prospecting or lack of visibility into which playbooks are working. Rather than letting each rep create their own approach, Asana has standardized their winning plays across the organization. day. Reps simply login to Pocus daily and are served exactly where to focus across both their strategic high touch accounts and scaled plays

"We measure which playbooks work, we standardize them, and we roll them out to our entire sales team. This approach has been transformational for our results." - Maschal Malek, Product Owner GTM Systems, Asana

"Lightning Plays" for Speed-to-Lead: The team introduced high-priority signals at the top of every rep's inbox that require immediate action:

• New trial signups from manager-level users
• Credit limit hits indicating expansion opportunities
• AI Studio usage spikes showing upsell potential

"When you log into Pocus, the very first thing you do is go through those Lightning Plays and engage with them because speed to lead is really powerful," Kevin explains.

Top 25 Proven Plays: Rather than offering dozens of playbooks, they identified the 25 that consistently drove results and eliminated the rest.

End-to-End Workflow Integration: Each play now includes precise targeting criteria, built-in qualification signals, pre-written tested messaging sequences, and clear prioritization guidelines.

Experimenting and rolling out new plays to the team is made easy through Pocus’ Playbook builder. Asana’s MarTech and Product Marketing teams can spin up any data-driven playbook and launch to the entire team.

Pocus has become such an integral tool to the sales team that GTM Product Owner Maschal Malek has noticed that power users consistently hit their numbers and become a go-to resource for their teammates.

"When new hires start, they typically don't know what Pocus is, but once we show them how to use it – usually just a 10-minute overview – they're amazed by how simple and straightforward it is." - Maschal Malek, GTM Systems Product Owner

Use Case #3 New product launch and expansion motions using real-time usage data

The strategic systematization became even more critical as Asana launched new products like AI Studio. Previously, reps had no systematic way to identify which accounts were good candidates for new product offerings.

"Our AI Studio rollout created a lot of questions for reps about who was hitting feature limits," notes Maschal. "Instead of digging through Snowflake or multiple data sources, Pocus now surfaces that information directly, giving them the insights they need to take action."

Now, all that valuable product usage data is seamlessly surfaced in Pocus. Reps can instantly identify accounts with AI Studio usage patterns and engage them with targeted expansion plays. 

The team built specific plays around AI Studio adoption that surface accounts showing:

• High usage of AI features indicating readiness for paid upgrades
• Users hitting limits on free AI features
• Multiple team members experimenting with AI functionality

This real-time usage data enables reps to have highly relevant conversations with prospects who are already experiencing the value but haven't yet upgraded, significantly improving conversion rates for new product offerings.

How Pocus + Asana partner for continued success

Asana's remarkable results didn't happen by accident. The team has developed a three-pillar framework that ensures consistent execution across their sales organization:

1. Establishing cross-functional buy-in: There was a strong commitment from key team members across various departments (product, marketing, enterprise technology) to work together in implementing Pocus successfully.
2. Standardizing strategy and plays: With Pocus, Asana could standardize and refine their sales strategies and plays, focusing on quality over quantity. 
3. Building a feedback loop: Asana actively solicits feedback from sales reps, allowing them to keep improving their processes and build on past wins.

Pocus partners closely with Asana’s team on refreshing playbooks quarterly (experimenting with new signals) and sharing best practices. 

Asana's approach to using Pocus has matured significantly, evolving from basic data consolidation to sophisticated, systematic outbound execution. Their journey illustrates how successful teams layer complexity over time rather than trying to solve everything at once.

The lesson for other PLG companies making this transition? Success isn't about having more data or more plays—it's about creating intentional, repeatable systems that democratize what your best performers are already doing.

76%+ of outbound pipeline fueled by Pocus

Asana’s consistent adoption of Pocus across their sales team has yielded incredible results:

• 76% of outbound pipeline fueled by Pocus
• 18% of total pipeline and closed-won revenue attributed to Pocus
• Prospecting time reduced from up to 6 hours to mere minutes
• Democratized what top performers were doing across entire sales team
• Accelerated rep onboarding and time to productivity

Beyond metrics, the qualitative feedback tells an equally compelling story. During recent user interviews, Kevin discovered a consistent theme:

"Every single conversation started with 'First of all, I love Pocus because...' That was incredibly validating, to know we’re focusing our energy in the right place."