"We start every Monday morning with Civic IQ. I pull the leads I want, feed them into our email engine, and we're off. Our response rate runs between 15 and 20% because we're not blasting everything. We carefully curate the leads based on all the contextual insights that Civic IQ presents. In the last month alone, we've closed close to 10 deals sourced directly from the platform. These are small deals, but they're profitable and they're fast. Civic IQ has become a core part of how we build the top of our funnel."
About Azora
Short-term rental compliance software built for local governments
Azora Software builds short-term rental (STR) compliance software for local governments, helping cities discover, permit, tax, and enforce STR activity at scale. The platform aggregates listings from 75+ sources, cross-references parcel and property records, and gives code enforcement teams a single system to manage compliance from discovery through enforcement.
Founded in Austin, TX in November 2023, Azora operates with a 2-person commercial team running a founder-led, signal-driven outbound motion. Their buyers are cities, towns, and counties across the SLED market.
Challenge
A small team can't win SLED on volume, and most GTM tooling assumes you can
The standard B2B outbound playbook, buy a list, blast a sequence, hire SDRs to scale it, quietly breaks when the buyer is a city. Cities don't behave like B2B prospects. They evaluate software during specific, narrow windows: when a council member raises a complaint, when staff are tasked with drafting an STR ordinance, when budget season surfaces enforcement gaps, or when an incumbent contract is up for renewal. Outside those windows, the best-written cold email goes nowhere.
For a 2-person commercial team, that reality is doubly painful. You can't out-volume bigger competitors. You can't afford to spend hours every morning manually researching council agendas. And you can't afford to burn your sender reputation on outreach that misses the buying window.
Azora was running into three problems any small B2G team will recognize:
Manual signal research that didn't scale to one rep, let alone two
The signals that actually mattered, council agendas, planning commission minutes, ordinance drafts, code enforcement budget items, were scattered across thousands of individual city websites. Finding one was a 30-minute exercise. Doing it nationally wasn't a job. It was a black hole.
Generic, title-based outreach that landed flat
Cold emails to city managers and code enforcement directors based on title and population alone produced the response rates you'd expect: low single digits. Without a specific reason for the message, every vendor email looks like every other vendor email. City staff have inboxes full of them.
A short, invisible buying window per city
Once a city quietly starts evaluating STR enforcement, the window to be considered is short. By the time an RFP hits a procurement portal, the shortlist is already informally set. Azora needed to be in the conversation 6 to 18 months earlier, but had no systematic way to know when that conversation had started, in which town, or around which specific issue.
"We knew the cities were out there. The hard part was figuring out which ones were actually thinking about STR enforcement this quarter, and what specifically was driving the conversation."
Solution
Replace volume with signals and run the whole motion in a single Monday cadence
After evaluating Civic IQ, John brought it in as the top-of-funnel engine for Azora's outbound motion. The unlock was simple: instead of guessing which cities were in market, Civic IQ's signal feed told him, with the meeting, the agenda item, the staff comment, and the contact context attached.
That changed what the job was. The work stopped being "find more cities to email" and became "pick the right ten signals this week, send a sharp email, move on." That's a job a 2-person team can actually do.
A weekly Monday-morning pull, not a daily prospecting grind
Each week starts the same way: John pulls a fresh batch of STR-related signals from Civic IQ's board meeting monitoring, council discussions on rental ordinances, planning commission STR debates, code enforcement budget items, complaints surfacing in committee, reviews them, and selects the leads worth pursuing. The whole top-of-funnel motion runs in a single block of time, once a week.
Curated, not blasted
Rather than pushing every signal into outreach, the team filters down to the ones with the strongest contextual hook. That curation is the reason for the response rate: every email sequence references something specific that's actually happening inside the city, not a generic "thought you'd be interested" template.
Context baked directly into every email
Each outreach references the specific meeting, discussion, or ordinance that triggered the lead. The recipient immediately knows this isn't a vendor blast. It's someone who watched the same meeting they sat in last Tuesday. The contextual layer Civic IQ provides on each signal becomes the personalization that makes the message land.
"We're not blasting everything. We carefully curate the leads based on all the contextual insights that Civic IQ presents."
Outcome
A 2-person team putting up numbers that look like a 10-person sales org
In two months, Civic IQ became the primary top-of-funnel source for Azora's outbound motion. The results made it clear that in SLED, signal quality beats team size.
"These are small deals, but they're profitable and they're fast."
Looking Forward
Expanding the signal playbook across Azora's compliance roadmap
With the weekly cadence established, John is layering more signal types into the same Monday workflow: budget signals to catch cities funding new compliance programs, vendor spend signals to identify cities with incumbents up for renewal, and broader code enforcement discussions to expand beyond pure STR mentions. Contacts for each new signal batch are pulled directly via the Agency Profile and List Builder.
The goal is to turn the Civic IQ pull from a single STR playbook into the engine for a multi-product expansion across Azora's compliance roadmap, without adding headcount.
Recommendation for Others
Stop treating outbound like a numbers game. Start treating it like a timing game.
For founders selling to SLED, John's takeaway is direct: most B2G GTM advice still assumes you need to scale headcount to scale pipeline. Azora's experience says the opposite. With the right signals, a 2-person team running a focused Monday cadence can outperform a much bigger sales org running on stale lists and population filters.
The constraint isn't reps. The constraint is knowing which cities are actually in market this week, and most teams have no way to see that. See how founders selling to SLED use Civic IQ to run a lean GTM.
"Civic IQ has become a core part of how we build the top of our funnel. If you're selling to cities and you don't have a way to see what they're actually talking about in their meetings, you're guessing. We stopped guessing."