Sales signal intelligence is most commonly associated with upper funnel activities: Finding new prospects, engaging them, and nudging them further along the sales pipeline via relevant content and insight-driven interactions.
But what a lot of sellers don’t realize is that sales intelligence can make a bigger difference when it comes to existing accounts. With most sellers focused on finding opportunities to sell to new clients, they might fail to notice opportunities to sell to their existing customer base. As existing customers are more likely to purchase again and spend more, missing such sales opportunities can drastically affect your bottom line.
“A vast majority of sellers are just not monitoring their accounts,” says Jamie Shanks, Co-founder of PipelineSignals. “But even the sellers that are monitoring their accounts, they aren’t creating a routine around it. they’re not capturing all the intelligence of their key accounts. And then they’re very fickle or very inconsistent as to when they use intelligence and how they use it.”
“And so, you’ll notice a breakdown in the chain of an individual seller not monitoring all those opportunities. And now when you multiply that by your 50, 500, and 5,000 sellers, you start to recognize the domino effect caused by hundreds of thousands of accounts that are not being properly monitored. You don’t know who’s joining your accounts, who’s leaving them, how you’re interconnected with other customers, how your competitors are getting involved in those accounts—a cascading waterfall of missed opportunity.”
And that’s where we can help you.
At PipelineSignals, we use the term Compelling Events Signals to refer to digital events and insights that can help your team determine areas of opportunity and risk in your Total Addressable Market or TAM. Setting up these Signals on LinkedIn search will allow your revenue team to spend more time on activities that have a higher likelihood of resulting in a won deal.
While Signals can create a difference in pipeline generation, it also functions as a way to keep track of what’s going on with your existing customers. Beyond simple intelligence, the insights delivered by Signals allow you to keep an eye on what’s happening within your accounts so you’re always ready to mitigate potential risks or move in on opportunities to upsell/cross-sell. By using verified data to monitor and protect relationships at scale, your revenue is kept secure and practically insured.
Selling Without Signals: The Opportunities You Could Miss
However, it’s easy to miss these trigger Signals—they don’t exactly come with a label, after all.
That’s why it’s crucial that your revenue team knows what they should be looking for and how they should engage prospects involved in these Signals.
“Remember that people buy from people,” says Shanks. “You’re not selling to a company—you’re selling to a group of people inside a company.”
“When there are people inside those companies that may know you, like you, and have enjoyed your solutions in the past, wouldn’t you want to focus on them first?”
One example would be a person from one of your existing accounts joining a new account. On LinkedIn, it’ll reflect as a run-of-the-mill job transfer announcement. But an astute salesperson would be able to spot an opportunity here.
“If you have a customer that you’ve dealt with, and all of a sudden they’re now in another account, you’ll have a much higher likelihood of generating a relationship there than just randomly calling on other accounts,” says Amar Sheth, Sales for Life’s Partner for Customer Success.
The opportunity becomes greater when a key stakeholder is involved.
“When a decision maker joins an account, the Signal becomes much more powerful because about 70 percent of a decision maker’s budget is generally decided upon within the first six to nine months of them joining,” explains Amar. Finding out when someone joins becomes critical for pipeline success because all budgets are essentially decided, and you just have to convince them to spend it on your product.
The Modern Seller’s Security System
Sheth thinks of Signals as an alarm system for existing accounts, protecting them from risk.
“I have a security system in my house. If something happens, I’ve got a company that’s going to monitor my house, they’re going to call the police and all that. So there’s a level of security there,” he says.
In the same way, Signals provide a level of security for your customers and your pipeline. It’s like an insurance policy for your ROI because it protects and monitors your existing relationships and the revenue you’re getting (or could stand to get) from them.
You should never forget that your competitors are doing sales moves that are similar to yours and that they’re also connecting, scaling, changing, and are probably targeting the same accounts you’re eyeing.
“If, all of a sudden, you find out that someone from a rival company is talking to one of your prospects, that should send alarm bells off,” says Sheth. “Even worse, what if someone from your competitor actually joins your prospect account? They’ll probably be partial to their former company since they’re more familiar with it. Now, which solution do you think they’re going to be more likely to choose, yours or theirs?”
Never Miss, Always On
What sets Signals apart from other sales tools is that it goes beyond offering intelligence that only pertains to people searching for a keyword, visiting a certain website, or doing other actions.
“We’re not just providing sales intelligence,” says Sheth. “We’re also monitoring your existing accounts, so you’ll never miss potential opportunities and potential risks. That’s the value of our intelligence.”
With Signals, you’ll be able to find better opportunities, whether it’s within your existing accounts or involving your potential customers.
You’ll never miss employees joining or leaving your prospective companies, especially during crucial times. You’ll never miss opportunities to engage. And you’ll never miss competitors talking to your accounts and the threats they pose.
You’ll never miss—and that’s powerful.