This is part 2 of 5 in our Definitive Cybersecurity Champion Tracking Guide. You can find parts 1-5 here.

So you're ready to stop tracking champions manually and start using a dedicated solution. Good decision! Adding a champion tracking solution to your stack will save time for your team, keep your CRM better updated, and prevent countless headaches from performing tedious tasks over and over again.

But how can you know you're picking the right one? Based on conversations with our current and past customers, chats with prospects, and listening to the word-on-the-street (a.k.a. communities), you’ll need to consider these big questions when looking to onboard a champion tracking solution:

1. Who do you want to track for job changes? (Inputs)
2. How do you filter for the most relevant job changes? (Output filters)
3. How accurate is the job-change data?
4. What automations and integrations are available?
5. How secure and compliant is your job change vendor?
6. What level of support can you expect?
7. And what types of reporting does the tool provide you?

Let’s explore each of these questions individually so you can make an informed decision!

1. Who do you want to track for job changes?

For maximum coverage, you can group your champions into three categories. And prioritize them based on your business needs. Our recommended categories are:

1. Key champions: These include your Closed Won Opportunity contacts, power users, and admin users. 
2. Happy users: Think of your product end-users with high net promoter scores (NPS) or high product usage. Also, trial users if it makes sense for your business. 
3. Key prospects: Here, you’ll have your Open Opportunity contacts, and Closed Lost Opportunity contacts. 

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Now, when your champions leave an account, you have to monitor those accounts to find out who backfills the vacant position. This prevents churn (for your CSMs), de-risks any open opportunities (for your AEs), and in some cases, revives a closed lost opportunity (for your SDRs). 

For these reasons, you might want to consider monitoring these 2 additional groups for job changes:

1. New hires in target and customer accounts
2. New promotions in target and customer accounts

PRO TIP: Make sure your vendors can (a) capture the contacts you care about and (b) segment them properly. This will pay off tenfold later by enabling you to operationalize this play at scale, i.e. routing leads to the right owners, sending alerts, and adding leads to relevant sequences/playbooks.

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2. How do you filter for the most relevant job changes?

Not all job changes are created equally.

You want to surface only the most relevant signals or job changes to your team. Why? They start to ignore these leads if there’s too much noise. 

We recommend setting up two filters:

1. ICP account criteria: Filter the job changes using firmographic, technographic criteria such as employee count, geography, revenue, tech stack, etc. 
2. Target persona: Filters here include job function and seniority. Don’t forget to account for title keyword inclusions and exclusions.

These two filters ensure your job change lists aren’t flooded with irrelevant job change alerts. 

PRO TIP: Check if your vendors have filter capabilities. If they don’t, check with your RevOps team if they can create dynamic reports in your CRM with these filters built-in to exclude any irrelevant job change leads that are surfaced, before sending them to your SDR / AE / CSM. 

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3. How accurate is the job-change data?

Most champion tracking solutions rely on publicly available data sources, such as LinkedIn, Google, and Bing. However, the technical challenges are capturing this information accurately and doing it consistently, applying many logical exclusions to filter out false alarms, and verifying new email addresses.

To verify the accuracy of your vendor’s data, you should evaluate the following criteria and spot-check for these in a data test:

1. Match rate: A company can have multiple “John Smith at ACME.” This is especially true for enterprise companies. 
2. Job change detection rate: More doesn’t always mean better. Ensure these changes are relevant. Remember the output filter section. 
3. False alarms: Buyers can have multiple roles at the same time. For example, a buyer could become a fractional advisor or an investor. It doesn't mean they have left your target account or customer.
4. Email bounce rates: For most B2B vendors, this hovers between 8-12%. The lower, the better. Test a few emails provided by your vendor during the sales process (they should have a data test - more on that further down). And monitor the bounce rate even after you’ve purchased the tool.
5. Refresh frequency: This varies depending on the vendor’s underlying technology. For example, legacy B2B databases like ZoomInfo refresh their databases every 6-18 months. LinkedIn sends notifications in real time. And others are somewhere in between - weekly, monthly, or quarterly.
   The question you need to answer is: which frequency is most optimized for ROI and ensures consistent follow-up across your teams?

PRO TIP: Run a data test with each vendor and compare their results, how fast they completed the test, and ask for a few examples of the changes to validate.

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How accurate is the UserGems job change data? 

In comparison with LinkedIn Sales Navigator and ZoomInfo, UserGems provides more relevant job-change leads. Take it from our customer, Mimecast:

But don’t just take his word for it. Here’s what the data says:

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UserGems vs. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

From a pool of 9,000 contacts we tested for a customer, LinkedIn Sales Navigator:

• Generated more than 1,000 false alarms
• Missed over 500 job changes
• Provided fewer than 3,263 accurate leads

With LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you miss out on 18% of the available warm leads. Plus, your sales team would waste their time trying to contact the 1000+ false job change alerts.

On the flip side, UserGems surfaced over 4,000 relevant and verified job changes.

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UserGems vs. ZoomInfo

From a pool of 100,000 contacts we tested, ZoomInfo:

• Generated over 1,700 false alarms
• Missed more than 10,000 job changes
• Provided 4,500 accurate leads

Meaning: ZoomInfo missed out on tracking 70% of warm leads who had moved to new roles. On the other hand, UserGems surfaced over 14,000 relevant and accurate job changes.

Bonus: UserGems also refreshes its data every month.

UserGems analyzed 40,000 prospects with seniority levels of Manager and above. We found that reaching out to buyers within the first 30 days at their new job resulted in 3X higher conversion rates.

This is why UserGems refreshes its data pool on a monthly basis. So you can easily find the right people at the right time — never missing out on new opportunities or churn risk alerts.

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4. Which automations and integrations are available? 

Here is where the rubber meets the road. How does the tool make it as easy as possible for your team to action the job-change leads? 

Lead routing:

Here’s an example of the routing logic you want:

If you already have routing logic in place, evaluate if the vendor can sit on top of that without creating a “shadow routing logic”?

The ability to surface the signals where your teams are: 

• For SDRs: does the tool auto-enroll job-change leads into the right sequences in Outreach or Salesloft?
• For Marketing: does it auto-enroll the contacts in Hubspot or Marketo? 
• For AEs: do they get alerts via email and Slack? 
• For CSMs: does the tool auto-trigger churn prevention plays in Catalyst or your preferred CSM platform? 

“There can be a lot of volume on this play,” Steven Farina, Director of Customer Success at UserGems, notes. Automation takes the work off reps’ plates as “they only need to review the messaging and get the sequence started rather than sifting through job changers and deciding where to plug them in.”

Automating your workflows also ensures your team doesn’t miss out on following up with any leads. UserGems customer Mimecast applauds automation for this reason. Their VP of Revenue Marketing Operations, Gar Smyth, writes:

5. How secured and compliant is your job change vendor?

If you asked every vendor if security was important, they would say, ‘Security and compliance are so important to us. And we do everything in our power to protect our customers' data.’

But the questions you need answers to are: 

• Do they have a dedicated person in the team responsible for security and compliance?
• Does the individual have the authority to make sweeping changes, such as retooling their development process due to security and compliance concerns?
• Are they SOC 2 Type 2 compliant? 
• Does their SOC 2 report show any limitations?
• Do they have tools to monitor their compliance levels?
• Do they run penetration tests at least once a year? 
• How is their data encrypted in transit and in rest?
• Who has access to data do they all go through background checks? 
• How long do they store the data?

How secure and compliant is UserGems? 

At UserGems, we understand the importance of security and compliance. As Stephan Kletzl, Co-Founder and CTO of UserGems, puts it, “We approach security from the mindset that if any of our customer’s data were to get out, that would be the end of UserGems.” 

To ensure none of that happens:

• We have a dedicated Head of Security and Compliance who oversees the product development and data management processes.
• We run internal and external pentesting twice a year.
• We have stringent data access policies.
• Every employee (contract or full-time) undergoes background checks.

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6. What level of support can you expect?

A champion tracking program can get complex as you scale the program across the revenue team. This is due to the number of inputs (contact types), job-change scenarios (target vs non-target accounts, seniority), and the number of stakeholders involved. 

PRO TIP: Your vendor must be able to provide you with:

• Technical support: Any revenue operations resources available pre-sales and post-sales beyond implementation 
• Strategic support: Monthly QBR with CSM to discuss strategies, goals, and optimization

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What level of support does UserGems provide? 

The UserGems team works closely with you both during and after implementation. You’ll get a dedicated:

• Customer Success Manager who will outline and assign all stages of implementation. And explain what’s needed from each member — including the time commitment of each step.
• Technical RevOps Manager who guides you through all stages of implementation. They can schedule additional time with you to make sure all the processes are set up correctly.

UserGems also has pre-built playbooks for multiple job change scenarios. You can access them as a PDF, or the CSM can create them directly in your Outreach or Salesloft.

Steven Farina, Director of Customer Success at UserGems, adds:

“Every month, our CSMs check in with the customers to share re-enablement strategies, review their adoption metrics, messaging, and sequencing. We’ll also suggest any new automations to add if those will drive more adoption or make things easier for your team.”

Clare Corriveaut agrees, “UserGems is one of my favorite tools from a demand generation perspective because our CSM makes everything easier.”

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7. What types of reporting does the champion tracking tool provide you?

As the program owner, you’ll need to report ROI to the leadership to justify the spend and measure the business impact.

As a wise person once said, “What’s measured can be improved”. The more visibility you have into the program’s effectiveness, the more actions you can drive with your team and stakeholders.

Here are the metrics you want to see:

1. Adoption rate
2. Conversion rate
3. Pipeline generated
4. Revenue generated

ROI measurement and attribution can be tricky. And varies from company to company. An example of how you can attribute ROI to the champion-track program:

‍PRO TIP: Evaluate if your vendors have out-of-the-box reporting capabilities. And pay attention to how they attribute and measure the ROI. This will prevent finger-pointing and attribution headaches with your stakeholders down the road.

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Next 👉 Chapter 3: How to know if champion tracking is NOT right for your team

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Track customers, generate predictable pipeline

UserGems is pipeline generation software that helps revenue teams generate and protect revenue efficiently. With UserGems, companies can track and automate outreach when their champions change their jobs and capture the buying groups to find the warmest path into every account.

Companies like Mimecast, Greenhouse, and Pluralsight use UserGems to reach their revenue goals quickly and efficiently. Book a demo to learn more.