What Are Compelling Events Signals?
Compelling Events Signals are an invaluable tool for sales teams to determine areas of opportunity and risk. Selling with Signals on your side lets your sellers spend more time on contacts and activities that are most likely to convert into real sales conversations.
Blind selling is no longer an option for the modern seller. Through smart prioritization of target accounts and contacts, sellers have a better chance of getting responses, improving their winning opportunities. You can’t force someone to buy unless they’re ready to buy. This is true.
However, there are “compelling events” that can give you insight into which accounts are more likely to buy than others. We call these compelling event signals, trigger signals, or simply, Signals.
Doing this can revolutionize not just the way your sellers prospect and meet quota from net new sales. It can also change the way your customer success managers (CSMs) keep tabs on customers signaling the potential for cross-sell or upsell, or risks of customer churn.
Of course, there isn’t one right way for pipeline creation and growth. But understanding how to identify and chase after opportunities can significantly improve your numbers.
Here’s our CEO, Jamie Shanks, giving us an overview of Compelling Events Signals compared to Buying Intent Data:
Buying Intent Data
Before we talk about Compelling Events Signals, also commonly known as Trigger Signals, let’s delve into Buying Intent Data.
Intent data, sometimes called buyer/buying data or purchasing intent, refers to the level of inclination that a customer has to buy a product or service in a given period of time.
Marketers and sellers assess buying intent using different tools, such as predictive modeling. They do this to narrow down the chances of future results based on the data they’ve gathered. This gives them the essentials: demographics, website activity, past purchases, behavior toward marketing, and others.
Assessing Intent
Evaluating buying intent involves data gathering through different sources to hone down on which factors have the most actionable impact. The data helps sellers drive their strategies in terms of communications, sales, and marketing.
Intent data gathered by these tools include target accounts’ or contacts’ online activity. These interests can be obtained through their online footprint or caches. Understanding their buyer’s journey can make a contact’s buying intent signal stand out from others with moderate activity. For example, someone downloading case studies and ebooks might be further along the buyer’s journey compared to someone who visited a few of your blogs.
This is why sellers believe it’s the most accurate way to foretell who is in the market for their products. Buying intent can help a sales team’s account-based sales and marketing strategies perform better.
Intent Data for Marketing
The goal of assessing intent is to have a better understanding of how effective their marketing campaigns are. Is the money they’re putting into their marketing activities resulting in a practical ROI? Assessing buying intent is done to primarily analyze data, allowing teams to put out the correct type of messaging to their target audience.
Intent Data for Sales
In addition, teams can also learn when a customer is most inclined to buy from vendors. Lead generation and nurture campaigns, as well as account-based marketing, fall in this category. Applying these strategies properly can improve a company’s conversions, sales, and a stronger link between its sales and marketing departments.
Compelling Events Signals:
Here at PipelineSignals, we specialize in Compelling Event Signals instead of Buying Intent Data. We are the first and only company to do so, and we are beyond confident that understanding Signals and acting on them can give your sales team a significant advantage over your competitors.
Here are the three categories of Compelling Events Signals:
1. Time Signals
Time is a constant. And with it, so is change. These two things happen every second in almost every organization. It is inevitable for people to join and leave companies. Company X just hired a new VP of Sales. Is his vision for the company the same or significantly different than the previous person in the role? As changes like this happen, an organization’s priorities can also change.
These movements are called Time Signals. They allow you to have a clearer, more accurate picture of a target account’s current status. As a result, your sales team can start, modify, or stop sales strategies ahead of time.
2. Relationship Signals
Relationships that you have with your current accounts and contacts are something you should never overlook. Competitors come and go, copying your sales processes and products all the time. Through relationship signals, you can step up and protect your deals or renewals.
Not only that – but you can also ensure that your sellers can constantly open up doors and windows for new opportunities and connections within your network.
There are different ways to go about this. Relationship signals exist within your network: alumni connections, key stakeholders from current accounts that are either leaving to join other (prospect) accounts and more.
These opportunities can be leveraged to be ahead of the game, making it virtually impossible for competitors to catch up to you. More importantly, they can grow your pipeline exponentially. You can use these connections to learn more about where contacts are headed. And if you’ve forged a pleasant relationship with them, you can find yourself in front of windows of opportunities. As such, these signals must be treated with the utmost urgency.
3. Competitive Signals
As the name implies, these Signals help monitor your competitors. Are they present in the same target market that you’re working with? Do they currently have any influence on your prospect accounts? Are your current customers actively talking to your competitors?
Having this data can aid in making better decisions about your sales team’s resource management, prioritization of accounts, and risk assessment.
Putting Compelling Events Signals to Work
Using Trigger Signals as the focus of developing your target account lists includes thinking of your customer successes, relationships, and time events within your total addressable market (TAM). It is a strategic manner that goes outside the usual customer-centric core. More often than not, sellers use subjective biases, like focusing too much on acquiring popular logos or getting too attached to accounts they are working on.
Changing a sales team’s mindset to find these three critical Signals gives them and the entire organization a competitive advantage — something competitors simply can’t replicate or compete against.
Here’s a simplified example: if you’ve got family working in a name corporation (which incidentally makes for an excellent account for your sales team), wouldn’t you use this connection as an advantage to make your way toward that target account?
In the same way, think of this mindset on a bigger scale. How can you identify connections such as this to use as leverage points? Start by identifying client successes. Past or present customers who are already satisfied with your product or service, as well as the people in these happy customers’ networks — these are among the first things you should start thinking about.
This kind of thinking can open up a vast universe of sales possibilities. Plus, it’ll keep expanding as you add more happy clients to your portfolio.