Beyond spray-and-pray: The rise of signal-driven sales

Outbound prospecting has been facing increasing headwinds. With the tightened economy, potential buyers have become more cautious about exploring new solutions, instead prioritizing pressing short-term needs. 

This forces sales teams to significantly refine their targeting beyond broadly defined ideal customer profiles (ICPs). Success requires surgical focus on the 3-5% subset which, at any given moment, is actively exploring solutions to address a business challenge you can solve. Sales organizations are embracing a signal-driven approach, replacing spray-and-pray outreach. 

Let’s examine contact centers. Transition to the cloud is on everyone's roadmap but doesn't compel action. Two events trigger most cloud migration projects:

1. The 7-10 year legacy systems renewal cycle

2. The prior CRM shift to the cloud sparks contact center modernization

Knowing the tenure of current on-premise systems or being aware of a recent CRM cloud deployment greatly improves your chances when engaging potential buyers.

Unfortunately, signals have entered the buzzword zone - slapped on by many sales intelligence vendors. Segmentation and ICP attributes now get rebranded as signals, creating confusion on two fronts. First, it muddies your exploration of technology options to get relevant signals. Second, it leads to the loosening of ICP criteria. The sharp definition of your ICP remains critical. It defines which companies to target, guides the creation of relevant content, and provides business context for engagement.

Signals fall into multiple categories:

• Intent data tells you which topics are being actively explored by companies. It can be uncovered from content consumed in web properties tracked by solutions like Bombora or TechTarget or higher-than-usual clicked ads detected by solutions like 6sense or Demandbase.

• Job postings and job descriptions provide meaningful insights.

• Tracking job changes of past customers can unearth new potential opportunities

• Review sites such as G2 or TrustRadius can tell you if companies are actively exploring a given category or your competitors

• Company news includes information such as leadership changes, launches, or funding events and contains a wealth of business information

• Website engagement surfaces companies visiting your website anonymously through techniques such as reverse IP lookup.

New solutions have emerged that can monitor the activity of potential buyers in social networks, communities, and other places of the so-called dark funnel.

Interpreting signals poses challenges, as false positives abound. The solution? Correlate multiple signals from different sources. This is also why, staying anchored to a rock-solid ICP remains critical. 

The next frontier in technology consists of combining different types of signals from various sources. It's driving the emergence of a new breed of data aggregation platform that aggregates signals and applies AI to make sense of them.

More to come in my next industry landscape.