How iMerit put 9 enterprise reps in front of big tech's AI buyers for 3 years
"I told all of the sales reps, I like Uptown. If you guys haven't had them in your LinkedIn, I recommend it."
Challenge
iMerit's next deals lived inside the biggest tech companies on earth - behind buyers no phone call, email, or CRM could find.
iMerit is an AI data services company: the annotation, model evaluation, and human-in-the-loop pipelines behind medical imaging AI, autonomous vehicles, and generative AI programs at some of the world's largest companies. The board's mandate was bigger still - multimillion-dollar deals that only the largest AI budgets in tech could sign.
Those buyers are among the most pitched-at people in software. They sit dispersed across giant organizations, they treat their AI projects as too sensitive to discuss, and they had heard the legacy pitch before - one mega-account had said flatly, many times, that it was not interested in talking about labeling and annotation. After a year and a half of conventional pursuit, one enterprise rep had exactly one RFI to show for it. And the reps were not going to cold-call their way in.
iMerit needed its sellers in front of the right names inside those walls, at a scale no rep could sustain, without hiring an outbound team to do it.
"These guys are hard to find. Especially the enterprise tech companies... this guy wasn't in our Salesforce. We did not have this contact identified. It's just needle in a haystack on these guys."
Solution
Uptown ran each rep's own LinkedIn profile against a named list of giant accounts - and rebuilt the pitch from live response data.
Two or three profiles were live at any given time, each running the same playbook: target 20 to 50 of the largest tech companies, focus on director-level and above AI and data leaders titles, and send outreach directly from the rep’s own LinkedIn profile.
Uptown managed each profile by hand during the pilot, handling every connection request, reply, and follow-up, while surfacing only the technical conversations that needed the rep’s attention. As the market changed, the messaging changed with it. The legacy data-annotation pitch was replaced across every profile with messaging centered on generative AI, which had become the hot topic across the industry. On one account, simply swapping in two more recognizable case-study names transformed the quality of the inbox almost overnight.
In every campaign, Uptown worked with each rep to:
- Build a focused named-account list of 20 to 50 major target companies, reaching director-level and above AI and data leaders
- Refine the messaging based on live response data, including shifting the pitch as buyer interest moved toward generative AI
- Protect active enterprise opportunities with clear account-level guardrails, removing contacts from outreach as soon as a deal moved into procurement
- Keep outreach running through team changes, getting each new rep live within days of a handoff across nine reps over three years
"I feel good about this cadence coming out under my name. And I appreciate you guys taking the time to work through it with me."
Results
Three years of doors opening inside accounts iMerit had spent years trying to crack.
The proof came as needles pulled from haystacks. After one targeting refinement, three meetings booked themselves in a matter of days, at three of the largest technology companies in the world, from buyers who never even replied first. One of them ran AI data operations at an account iMerit had worked for five years - and he was nowhere in a CRM holding tens of thousands of contacts. Word spread on their sales floor and the program grew seat by seat as new reps wanted in.
Over three years:
- 9 reps ran campaigns across the medical imaging, autonomous vehicles, and generative AI industries
- Meetings booked with AI and data leaders inside the world's largest technology companies, including NASA
- 30,000+ first-degree connections and 8,000+ highly qualified conversations
iMerit's Salesforce tells it best. The buyers it couldn't find for five years are in there now - all logged under the same campaign name: Uptown.
"We've got three calls that are scheduled for the next two weeks. And they're all good."
