About People Data Labs
People Data Labs (PDL) builds datasets and APIs that help businesses enrich, resolve, and act on people and company data. One buyer might be a growth marketer at a Series B startup. The next might be a data engineer at a Fortune 500 building an ML pipeline.
“The types of customers that we service are wildly different. Their use case for data could be anything. That has made marketing, just in general, kind of challenging because we could talk to almost anybody.”
Marketing Operations Manager Korey Beaver
Korey runs day-to-day marketing operations at PDL: the workflows, the scoring, the email builds, the Salesforce sync.
Years of Tool Fatigue
PDL started on Pardot, then switched to Marketo about a year in. While Marketo was an improvement from Pardot, the UI was clunky, building emails felt slow, and adjusting workflows meant fighting the interface. To top it off, their dedicated Marketo CSM got laid off, so the one person helping them navigate the platform’s complexity was gone.
Lead scoring was worse. Korey’s team tried 6sense, RollWorks, and Marketo’s native scoring. Three different tools, three different attempts. None of them earned sales buy-in. The models were black boxes that produced scores SDRs did not trust and did not act on.
“We’ve never been able to really get our sales folks to buy in on the past versions of the scoring models we’ve had, no matter what tool.”
On the paid side, the team was manually pulling audience lists for Google Ads with no automation between their marketing data and ad platforms. Even syncing lists over required paying for a Marketo add-on.
Korey started exploring alternatives. He originally went in looking for a better Marketo, same capabilities, better UI, better pricing. But the concern with most of what he saw was the same: another legacy platform with incremental improvements.
“I don’t know if I want another Marketo. I want a tool that I feel like is built for me and the kind of MOps person that I am at PDL.”
Finding Conversion
PDL chose Conversion to replace Marketo. PDL’s dedicated deployment strategy team mapped out a three-to-four-week migration. Korey got early access to start building emails and workflows while Marketo kept running in parallel. When the engineering team was ready to handle forms and technical integrations in Q1, the core platform was already live.
AI That Actually Changes the Work
What drew Korey to Conversion was the platform itself: the interface, the email-first design, the workflow builder. The AI layer is what made him stay. Once living in the platform day-to-day, it became the thing that turned a single-person ops team into a force multiplier.
Scoring that sales trusts
After three failed tools, PDL needed scoring that was transparent and explainable. As a DaaS company, the traditional scoring models and signals that work for standard B2B just don’t apply.
“I see myself using Conversion in a way that I am not using our own scoring model right now.”
Conversion’s 1:1 sync with Salesforce and the ability to build on custom objects means PDL can build a scoring system tailored to how their buyers actually behave.
Dynamic email personalization at send time
With buyers ranging from startup marketers to enterprise data engineers, PDL cannot rely on manually building dozens of email variants. Setting all of it up as tokens was a pain for a one-person email marketing and mops team, and trying to talk through your work or visualize it to someone else just wasn’t feasible. Conversion’s AI generates dynamic content adapted to each recipient’s role, industry, and engagement history at the moment of send, and the logic is visible, not buried in token configurations.
PDL’s proprietary data inside the platform
PDL enriches its own CRM records using its own APIs. Because their Salesforce data is already enriched across the board, that data flows into Conversion pre-enriched, or gets enriched in Salesforce and Conversion picks up the update. Either way, outbound emails, scoring, and workflow branching all leverage PDL’s own enrichment intelligence. Nobody else has this data. It turns Conversion into an extension of their product.
Automated ad audiences
Prior to Conversion, the team had built very targeted ad audiences using Marketo’s filters. Now, Conversion’s native ad sync takes that further. Segments push directly into Google Ads from Conversion, no manual list pulls, no paid add-ons.
Building What Was Never Possible Before
Beyond replacing legacy functionality, Korey’s team is building workflows that were never realistic to pull off in previous tools.
The latest: a closed-loss recovery program. The workflow pulls Salesforce deal data and Gong call transcripts into Conversion. The AI layer then generates marketing email copy tailored to the specific objection that killed each deal, all automated.
“We’re actually setting it up now. A closed-loss nurture that takes our Salesforce data, our Gong transcripts, puts those together in Conversion, and then Conversion is generating copy for marketing emails.”
This is the type of workflow that would have required multiple tools before. In Conversion, one marketer is building it.
One Person, One Tool, Ten People’s Output
The throughline across all of this is leverage. Build a list, design an email, test it, review it, send it, all in one tool.
“Conversion is going to allow me to focus on the thing that I love about marketing, but not at the expense of being able to run what feels like a team of ten ops people, but really just from one person using one tool.”
Conversion attacks the fundamentals of email marketing while delivering the ops functionality you’d expect from an enterprise platform, plus AI-native features that future-proof the stack. Korey operates what feels like a full marketing ops team from a single seat. The ops person focuses on strategy.
What’s Next
PDL’s proprietary datasets are still being loaded into Conversion’s AI layer for more precise personalization. Native forms and deeper technical integrations are scoped to happen soon, but the plan is to build them in Conversion before flipping the switch, so the cutover from Marketo’s remaining pieces is clean and instant.
“We’re moving into the era where you want to switch to the one tool that can do mostly everything. And for us, that is Conversion.”