We can’t overstate the importance of buying signals in modern sales strategies. It’s no secret that cold outbound traditionally results in low  response rates. These days it’s even less effective. Your prospects are inundated with spam messages and they just don’t convert. 

Don’t be the person sending irrelevant emails. 🤦‍♀️

Instead, use buying signals to inform who you spend time outbounding to. This allows you to prioritize the contacts most likely to convert, tailor your outreach, and reach out at the best time in the buyer’s journey. All of this helps you get more meetings booked.

Buying signals on their own can be a powerful tool, but you improve your chances by stacking them,making cold outreach warm!

Introducing Customer Competitors - UserGems' New Buyer Signal 

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UserGems’ new Customer Competitors signal is an account-level signal that helps you win more by selling to the competitors of your top accounts. It enables you to accelerate the sales cycle by surfacing and prioritizing these accounts for you. Then it automates the outreach process so you can easily target the companies that are most likely to buy.

The best sales reps are already doing this on an account-by-account basis. Now with UserGem’s Customer Competitors signal, they can scale this strategy.

Why Customer Competitors Matter in Outbound Strategy

When you’re looking for new accounts to target, your customers’ competitors are a great place to start. This is because they have similar pain points and therefore your offering is likely a good fit.

In fact, reaching out to customer competitors results in 2.5x higher conversion rates.

There is also the power of FOMO.

Everyone has a fear of falling behind their competitors. Lean on that fear in your outreach to help improve your conversion rates. 

Staying ahead of the curve is such a powerful motivator that mentioning your existing customer in your outreach email results in 3x conversion rates!

The Power of Stacking Buying Signals

Think of buying signals as puzzle pieces. Each one has a little bit of information. The more puzzle pieces you can fit together, the easier it will be to understand the full opportunity.

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Combining signals helps you craft better, more aligned messaging because you are pulling context from multiple data sets. Increasing your chances of engaging buyers. It can also help you reach out at the best time (a few weeks after a new hire comes on board, for example.) 

3 Ways to Stack Buying Signals from Easiest → Hardest

Stacking additional signals onto your customer competitors' signal results in more compelling outreach that converts. Here are three examples of how combining multiple UserGems signals can significantly improve outreach success.

Easy Example

Customer Competitors + New Hire

After you set up and configure your customer competitors signal based on your own parameters, it’s easy to add a person-level buying signal on top of it. This will alert you any time a new hire matching your buyer persona joins a customer competitor. 

Intermediate Example

Customer Competitor + New Hire + Multi-thread

Once you’ve set up your stacked customer competitor + new hire signal, you can add an additional layer to target additional members of the buying committee at the organization.

Multi-threading is the idea of targeting multiple people at an account. Nurturing multiple champions ensures you always have the entire buying committee covered as more and more buyers are involved in evaluations.

With this stacked signal, any time there is a new hire at a customer competitor, you can quickly start targeting their entire buying committee with a relevant outbounding motion.

Advanced Example

Customer Competitor + Intent + New Hire + Multi Thread

The last example is the most advanced and will help you identify companies when they are looking to purchase a solution. Once you have your customer competitor + new hire + multi-thread signal set up, you can further prioritize the best targets by incorporating intent data.

Intent signals are clues that tell you a potential customer is interested in what you have to offer. These signals can come from various sources and indicate that a prospect is thinking about making a purchase.

You can integrate your intent data with UserGems to stack onto other buying signals. This way, you can sort your opportunities based on intent and go after the ones that are most likely to convert first!

How UserGems uses the Customer Competitor signal

Just like with our other signals, we use the customer competitor signal ourselves. If we have a Past Champion at a customer competitor account, we make sure to swarm the account every time! 🐝

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If there is a new hire or promotion, we make sure to loop that past champion into the discussion. And of course, we hit the entire buying committee as part of our multi-threading strategy.

Take it up a notch by introducing automation

Once you’ve identified all of these great opportunities using different combinations of stacked signals, it can be hard to know what to do with them.

Attaching an automated action to your buying signals is the key to scalability. Simply detecting signals isn’t enough, you have to action them. And figuring out what to do one at a time is a drain on your sales teams.

By integrating UserGems with your sales engagement platform, you can trigger outreach when certain signal combinations are detected. For example, UserGems might trigger an automatic email when it detects a Customer Competitor + Intent + New Hire signal. Then a Slack notification containing all pertinent information and recommended next steps is sent to the right rep. This way the rep knows what they need to do next.

Stacking Buying Signals in UserGems

Stacking buying signals is a game-changing way to turn your cold outbounding warm. A single buying signal is a great place to start, and it’s certainly better than the old “spray-and-pray” outreach of the past. However, fitting all of the puzzle pieces together to paint a more complete picture of your targets will help you connect with them more easily. Stacking buying signals will help you put more of the puzzle together.

To recap, here are the main benefits:

• Increased conversion rates: Data shows that customer competitors are 2.5x more likely to convert than a regular account. This jumps to 3x as likely if you name drop their competition in your outreach! 
• Target your best prospects first: Prioritize prospects who are most likely to convert by combining account-level and person-level signals.
• Craft better messaging: Understand the current challenges the target account is facing and connect with them about relevant info like new hires and their competitors buying your product.
• Time your outreach better: Get in front of the right people at the right time in their buyer’s journey.
• Scale with automation: Start scaling your outbound motion with automation that adds actions onto your buying signals.

Start integrating and automating buying signals in your outbound strategy to start seeing tangible results.

And remember; one signal might be noise, but multiple signals form a symphony of opportunity! 🎵