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,” says Marketing Operation 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. Marketo was not an improvement. The UI was clunky. Building emails felt slow. Adjusting workflows meant fighting the interface. Then 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.
Korey started exploring alternatives. A few of the bigger names came up, but the concern was the same: another Marketo.
“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 not just a cleaner interface. It was the AI layer and what it made possible for a single-person ops team.
Scoring that sales trusts
After three failed tools, PDL needed scoring that was transparent and explainable. Conversion’s AI-powered model uses natural-language rules and historical learning to generate scores that sales can look at and understand. No black boxes.
Early on Korey said, “I see myself using Conversion in a way that I am not using our own scoring model right now.”
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. Conversion’s AI generates dynamic content adapted to each recipient’s role, industry, and engagement history at the moment of send.
PDL’s proprietary data inside the platform
PDL builds a proprietary related-titles dataset that maps job titles to related titles, industries, and seniority levels. The team is loading that dataset directly into Conversion’s AI layer so that 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
Conversion’s native ad sync replaced the manual audience pulls entirely. Segments now push directly into Google Ads from Conversion itself.
Building What Was Never Possible Before
Beyond replacing legacy functionality, Korey’s team is building workflows that were not feasible with 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, manual handoffs, and significant engineering effort before. In Conversion, one marketer is building it.
One Person, One Tool, Ten People’s Output
The throughline across all of this is leverage. Korey operates what feels like a full marketing ops team from a single seat. The AI handles the personalization and content generation. The platform handles the orchestration and syncing. The ops person focuses on strategy.
“It’s 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.”
What’s Next
The engineering team is tackling native forms and deeper technical integrations in Q2. PDL’s proprietary datasets are still being loaded into Conversion’s AI layer for more precise personalization.
“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.”