You've set up an outbound strategy in your company. But you’re wondering when it’s the right time to contact your leads or how you can improve conversion.

Just relying on an outbound strategy segmented on your ICP is not enough. Despite the quality of your firmographic & psychographic segmentation, you’ll end up with a poor contact-to-opportunities conversion rate.

This is where signal-based programs come in.

Often, these sales signal-based strategies (built on buying signals like the job change signal or fundraising signal) offer a higher reply rate and conversion rate as they let you know when your prospect is in need of your product or service and is ready to buy it. In the business world, it all comes down to timing …timing is everything.

Actually, during my time at Spendesk, the timing was among the top lost reasons in our CRM. If you can calibrate the good time to reach an account, you start with an unfair advantage and a better chance to convert your prospect.

The “new hire” buying signal lets you engage with your prospect when they’ve just joined a new company. It’s an interesting momentum to leverage. And the earlier you engage with the prospect, the more you increase the odds of converting them.

Indeed, according to Forrester, being in front of the buyers first increases your chance of closing the deal by 74%.

Talking about statistics, I would like to focus on two other ones before diving into the new hire process.

1. Every year, 30% of people change their jobs.
2. New buyers spend 70% of their budget in the first 100 days.

So, the question now is, why should you pay attention to B2B buying signals?

What are the key benefits of leveraging B2B buying signals?

Beyond the fact that you can tailor a dedicated cadence according to the new hire signal and, by doing so, increase your chances of resonating with your buyer pains & needs. There are other main benefits:

1. ⚙️ Automated way to source new leads

As the logic behind intent is to identify sales-friendly moments to engage with a prospect, it helps you automate demand generation and populate fresh new accounts into your CRM. 

Of course, beyond focusing on tracking the new position of your target persona (the buyer), you also narrow down your ideal account profile (the core firmographic attribute: Post Series A companies, the tech industry, etc.).

2. 🌟 Re-activate closed lost accounts in your CRM

It often happens in B2B sales. You did everything to entice a prospect (great lead research, personalization, a killer sales demo). But finally, it ends up in your CRM with the sad “closed lost” status.

However, as we say, “our close lost opportunities of today are the customers of tomorrow.” A close-lost deal can typically be reactivated 3 months late after your first attempt. As my old friend Einstein would say, “Insanity means doing the same things over and over again and expecting a different result.” 

So here comes the beauty of the new hire buying signal. It gives you a new angle to work on. And a new stakeholder to talk with. An opportunity to engage with your targeted account again.

Remember, persistence often pays off in sales.

3. 📩 Add context & personalization with outreach

I have often been using a Salesloft study on best practices, relying on the analysis of hundreds of millions of interactions to create recommendations based on real data. 

One of them was the fact that 20% personalization could bring up to 2X in reply rate.

And I have been able to observe it on my side as well. However, you don’t want to ask your sales reps to spend too much time doing personalization. The goal is to find the right balance between lead research and ROI.

But here, again, intent gives us the context we can leverage to do personalization at scale using this playbook (courtesy of the team at UserGems):

• For the new hire sales motion, the icebreaker could be, “Hey {{firstname}} - congrats on your new role! I'm sure you'll make waves at {current company} as you did at {previous company}”).

4. ⚡Higher conversion rate & engagement rate

As a consequence of the context & personalization layer we just talked about, intent helps you make a relevant sales pitch before your competitors. This may result in better resonance for your prospects.  And by extension, better engagement & conversion rates. 

It may also speed up the sales cycle.

5. 💰 Predictable revenue

One last thing. After launching some intents workflows, you should be able to evaluate the volume you can expect from each intent, the related conversion rate, and so the number of opportunities you can bring each month.

💡In summary, the goal is to empower Sales by creating an automated engine from lead sourcing to lead allocation. One that offers a predictable lead volume and converts above the average.

Going in-depth on “new hire” buying signal

First, how to POC (Proof of Concept) the "new hire" sales signal

If a company hires a new executive that is your key decision maker (VP or C-level) or at least among the persona you’re selling to, you can interpret it in two ways.

First, the new hire may be looking for ways to make an impact quickly, so they will be more open to new solutions (hint: remember the statistics on new buyers spending their budget in the first 100 days). Here, we play on the motivation of a new hire to make a good impression in the company he joins and on the fact that he will be in an explorative mindset.

Secondly, when a new executive is hired, it may also mean the company is looking to implement major changes. That means budgets are allocated for the new executive to make these changes happen. And happen quickly.

If you reach out to them at the right time with the right message to stay top of mind, they'll be far more inclined to evaluate compared to your average leads.

How to track this signal

If you’re following Paul Graham's mindset and want to “do things that don’t scale,” – at least at first, you could start with a minimal viable test.

Extract your key decision makers from LinkedIn SalesNav that changed jobs in the last 90 days, manually clean & import the file into your outreach tool with a dedicated cadence based on the momentum, and then compare how this cohort performs compared to your classical outreach (Some manual work though).

Typically, you should expect an uplift in conversion rates as a result of a more tailored approach.

Here’s how to use  LinkedIn Premium to see who has changed jobs in the last 90 days. Also, don’t forget to follow your contacts on LinkedIn to check if they’ve moved into new roles.

Once you’ve seen the result of this manual approach, and you want to do this repeatably, and at scale, UserGems is a great option to treat your buyer job changes as an always-on lead generation campaign, generating qualified pipeline in the process. 

💡Working with SMBs as the target, most of the time, I start with a 14 touchpoints cadence based on the classical email, VM, cold call & LinkedIn touchpoint mix. 

For people wondering what was the “give to get” email, I consider that it is better to provide value by giving, for instance, the "The First 90 Day Checklist For {{your KDM}}" or inviting them to our community before being really in prospecting mode. You get what you give 😎

How to scale the “new position” sales motion

But once you have done your ad-hoc campaign and see the results, how can you scale your new position while making sure you exclude the prospects already assigned to a sales rep from your campaign? And also making sure you have great data for your multi-channel outreach. 

Simply put, how can you clean & organize data in a way you could scale this intent?

The idea is to automate the entire process, from sourcing the data to sales allocation. And automatically push them in the appropriate cadence. As well as push the intent into your final outreach tool.

Extract Leads from Source ⇒ Model your data (enrich, clean, synchronize & allocate) ⇒ Engage.

After implementing your first intent, you would like to repeat the process for other business-friendly momentums: employee growth, fundraising, etc. That’s where a tool like Cargo does magic for you, allowing you to define dedicated data models for each intent to ensure consistent datasets across your tech stack and reliable campaign orchestration.

To effectively scale the new position intent, you need to think about sales enablement & data modeling to stay consistent in terms of lead quality & routing.

First, for sales enablement, here are a few things (not exhaustive, it deserves a dedicated focus) you can think about:

1. Dedicated Slack channel per intent with a slack notification (@Max) to the specific sales rep for each new account + alert by email + CRM notification.
2. Implementing a custom object in your CRM to keep track of the different intents that happened for an account.
3. Custom Dashboard in your CRM for the sales to easily monitor & prioritize accounts with intent over the others (as you have better conversion probability on those accounts).
4. Create a specific cadence with dedicated messaging & assets for the intent - Of course, I don’t need to say that it’s much better if you test multiple variants for each step of your cadence as long as you have enough sample size.
5. Have a specific “Origin” attribute in your CRM set (origin = intent) to evaluate the performance of the intent after a few months.

Here, a tool like Cargo allows you to model your data — you can plug your data source, clean & normalize the data at scale, and finally route them according to how you want to engage with the leads.

Ready, Set, Track

With the recent slew of layoffs, budget cuts, and the looming recession, the era of growth at all costs seems to be on its last legs. For now. But aggressive pipeline goals mean it's reasonable to expect sales and marketing teams to keep foraging for new sources of pipeline. 

So, if you’re sleeping on the new hire signal event or unsure of its impact on your bottom line, you’re ignoring its massive potential. Your PPC costs go up as you scale. And your SDRs can only spend so much time personalizing cold outreach.

The "new hire" sales signal guarantees you:

• Ready-made personalization at scale
• An automated source of qualified pipeline
• Predictable revenue
• And higher engagement rates on outbound campaigns

Of course, if implementing this sales motion internally is a bother, you can also work with the experts (UserGems 😉) to automate the buyer movements signal at scale for you.