Signal Intelligence

Integrating Signals into your Sales Workflows

Our Sales Objective:

To integrate the Signal Intelligence alerts into your sales workflows so you can:

  1. Reduce the time sellers spend researching and manipulating sales intelligence
  2. Increase sales utilization
Effective time management is the most important controllable factor that will determine if a sales professional can achieve their quota. That’s why we created Pipeline Signals, a managed service that can buy back your seller’s time.
Give your sellers the gift of reclaimed time so they can do more of what they do best: securing prospects and winning deals.

The Keys to Success

To execute effectively, we recommend you focus on the following Keys to Success:

1. Sales and Marketing Alignment upfront

Many CRMs and sales engagement platforms can only be managed and controlled by a select team tasked with safeguarding this IP asset. Telling these gatekeepers—whether they’re from marketing operations, sales operations, or CRM admin—what to do often falls on deaf ears.
The result: Implementation projects are pushed from days to months, costing your sales team opportunities and exposing them to possible customer churn.

Focus on early and consistent education and collaboration. Strategically help both sales and marketing understand:

  • Why this intelligence is important to the sales team; and
  • How you can easily and effectively present this intelligence in your platform to quickly validate your investment and improve sales utilization.
Our best-in-class customers focus on sales workflow integrations upfront, even before becoming our clients. They know that executing against these Signals inside their existing workflows will improve sales utilization by efficiently providing transparent reports and dashboards.

2. Assign a singular project manager or a small team to collaborate with us

Integrating the Signal Intelligence reports into your sales workflows should be a small project. Don’t overcomplicate it. It only requires two phases:
  1. Upfront alignment of our Signal Intelligence report to sync to your Data Uploader format; and
  2. Weekly or monthly syncing of the Signal Intelligence.

3. Leverage “Out of the Box” first, then expand optionality from there

Time is of the essence. That’s why our best-in-class customers focus on First Principles: Get the Signal Intelligence data into their sales workflows immediately and remove the friction of change.

The average CRM decays at 3% per month. That means 3% of your seller’s market is changing and presenting Signal Intelligence monthly. We’ll customize your Signal Intelligence report so it syncs perfectly with your existing Data Uploader format, allowing the new information to be integrated immediately into your sales workflow of record.

As further outlined in this document, this is typically shown as a Task Alert or an Open Activity. Over time, you can alter the formats, picklists, and other details to improve both Seller Utilization and Reporting capabilities.

4. Focus on effective and consistent communication

Focus on the last mile. Seller Utilization is the ultimate goal. Best-in-class customers take full advantage of our Daily Coaching Hotline, and they share their experiences with us monthly via a Continuous Feedback Loop that fuels product innovation.

Don’t allow your Signal Intelligence to become “shelfware”. Get your sales team engaged with us.

Step #1:

Determine how sellers execute their existing Task Alerts or Open Activity Reminders

For the purposes of this guide, we are going to focus on Salesforce since the majority of our customers are using the Task Alert (Salesforce Lightning) or Open Activity (Salesforce Classic) functions.

It’s important to note that Signal Intelligence is account-related, even though the Signals themselves are most often outlined as a relationship relating to a contact within an account. Our best-in-class customers assign Tasks or Open Activities at the account level.

Focus on the goal.  The goal is to present opportunities or threats in accounts, leveraging the sales workflows that best inform your sellers, allow those sellers to immediately take action, and for your Revenue Operations team to track the global impact these Signals are having on your accounts.  

Our best-in-class customers have the following results.  A Task in Salesforce that provides the following intelligence:

  • Which seller owns this account, and whom else in the sales organization should be notified?
  • Who is the key stakeholder (including LinkedIn profile, current title, past account, past title, time in role, and email address in the account that warrants an alert?
  • What Signal (sales play) has taken place?
  • Where can the sellers go for help to ensure they action this Signal effectively.

Here is an example:

For more information on these sections of Salesforce, you can visit Trailhead here.

Classic View:
Lightning View:

Step #2:

Map the required Data Uploader format to sync into your Sales Workflow

Take a look at the fields that sellers are utilizing in their alerts, as there could be custom fields in your Tasks or Open Activities that can complicate the data mapping process.
If your organization uses Salesforce, here are some resources for efficient data management:

The Salesforce guide to effective data management: Detailed instructions and best practices for importing, exporting, updating, and recovering data.

Trailhead’s Data Management module: A 40-minute Salesforce walkthrough focused on data import and export.

Salesforce’s Field Mapping Guide: An in-depth guide for mapping customer fields.

Here’s an example of how Signals can sync within your existing sales workflow:

When you review a Salesforce Lightning Task, you may have a picklist named “Status”. Our best-in-class customers would leverage that section to assign a Task in the same way they would a project.

This way, a new Signal gets uploaded with the status ‘Not Started,’ and the seller’s actions will change the Signals’ status into ‘In Progress,’ ‘Completed’ or ‘Deferred.’ This customer uses ‘Deferred’ to highlight Signals that are less relevant.

Using this system, we are able to capture data on the percentage of specific Signal sales plays that were Deferred vs. Completed. This helps us focus on the specific Signal sales plays that are most relevant for that customer.

Step #3:

Work with Pipeline Signals to customize your Signal Intelligence Report so it syncs to your Data Uploader process

We mine Signal Intelligence from LinkedIn in a specific format to collect all the pertinent information your sales team would need to make informed decisions. This includes some of the following:

  • The Account
  • The Signal Sales Play that we’ve identified
  • The Key Stakeholder involved
  • Their Email Address
  • Their LinkedIn Profile URL
  • Their Title
  • The Length of Time They Have Spent in Their Role
  • Their Previous Account (If they are new to an account, where did they transfer from?)
  • Their Previous Title (If they are new to an account, what did they do before they joined?)
  • Their Competitive Proximity
All this intelligence helps inform your sellers and allows them to develop stories that are highly contextual to the account.
Every customer of ours has a unique way of organizing their Tasks or Open Activities. Collectively, we will review what their tasks look like, and migrate all our pertinent Signal Intelligence information into a format that matches your Data Uploader.

As an example, our best-in-class customers prefer to have the Subject Line of the Task show the following information:

  • Signal Sales Play name
  • The Length of Time They Have Spent in Their Role
  • Their Previous Account OR Competitive Proximity.

In the Comments section of the Task, our customers would include vital information that will help the sellers action each Signal more effectively. The following are examples that best-in-class customers are seeking to add to each Task Alert:

  • The key stakeholders Email Address
  • The key stakeholders LinkedIn Profile URL
  • A link to Pipeline Signals training videos from our Resource Library
  • A link to Pipeline Signals – Daily Coaching Hotline

Step #4:

Export your desired Accounts for monitoring.

We’ll work with your team to achieve the following:

  1. Capturing your Total Addressable Market effectively during our Onboarding Process. 
    We map your world using the     Signals Onboarding Survey.
  2. We align each account in your Sales Workflow tool to correctly identify the Account and assign it to the correct Seller.

We’ll execute this by mapping your Account IDs (unique identifiers for each Account) and User IDs (unique identifiers for each Seller). Here are examples of the unique identifier numbers for both Accounts and Users:

The most important part of the exporting process is capturing the Account IDs and the User IDs as you export your Account Lists and share them with the Pipeline Signals team.

If you need more assistance, you always can refer to this Salesforce support article.

Step #5:

Import the Signal Intelligence Report using the Data Uploader. Inform the sales team once completed.

NOTE: To minimize errors, test this step first by importing a small batch of data BEFORE the Signal Intelligence report arrives.

Our best-in-class customers align the launch of Signal Intelligence to the sellers with:

  1. A 30-minute sales training session;
  2. The integration of Signal Intelligence within their sales workflow. 

The benefit to this packaged launch is higher seller adoption and utilization. We aim to clarify for each seller:

  • What are Relationship Signals?
  • What value will they extract from these Signals? (WIFM)
  • How can they leverage these Signals to accelerate sales conversions?
  • What is the expected sales workflow to accept, act on, and provide feedback on Signals?

Here’s an example of a sales workflow from one of our customers:

As part of our Signal Intelligence reports, we will provide email verification on each Signal. This will help align each Signal to your CRM Contact ID, and accelerate your time to upload. Some of our best-in-class customers also enrich the Signals further to prepare for an omni-channel prospecting campaign (including phone calls). Our customers will place the Signal Intelligence Report into ZoomInfo, and map each Contact for phone numbers before syncing into their CRM. See images below:

Together, we will design a compelling training session to highlight our collective sales workflow.

Step #6:

Design your reports and dashboard to track seller utilization and results.

Here are some of the reports and dashboards that our best-in-class customers have created to monitor the usage and results of the Signals they receive:

Signals Analytics: A breakdown of Signal sales plays by volume, date, and assignment.

  • # of Signals by Account
  • # of Signals per Signal Type
  • # of Signals by Market
  • # of Signals by Seller
  • # of Signals by Date

Seller Utilization: Tracks sellers accountability to execution.

  • % of Signals Actioned (including breakdowns by Signal Type, Seller, etc.)
  • % of Signal Types Not Actioned or Deferred
  • Average Time to Complete Tasks
  • # of Signals Actioned by a Seller over a given time period (Workload Capacity)

Sales Outcomes: Monitors return on investment.

  • # of opportunities influenced by Signals
  • % of opportunities influenced by Signals, sorted by Sales Play 
  • # of touch-points or actions taken against a Signal to generate a Sales Outcome
  • # of Accounts that progressed to the Sales Stage since Actioning their Signals
  • Total Pipeline Coverage Ratio increase
For more information on building reports and dashboards, you can refer to the following Trailhead articles: