Prospect at the perfect time with signal trends

Getting started

Buying signals are critical for building sales pipeline, but seeing how they trend over time can be even more valuable for prioritization and precision outbound.

RevOps and marketing leaders can try to identify signal trends manually—stitching together spreadsheets, Salesforce reports, and BI dashboards for reps to dig through. Or they can serve up actionable trend activity with the click of a button using Common Room.

In this playbook we’ll show you how to transform signal trends into sales-friendly visualizations, automate segmentation and alerting based on trend activity, and take action on hot prospects at just the right time.

What you’ll need

Step 1: Create signal trend field

Let’s say we’re a RevOps leader at a product-led company.

We don’t just want to highlight prospects and companies sending out buying signals—we want to help our reps understand how signal activity trends over time so that they can prioritize the hottest leads and reach out at the right moment.

First we’d create a signal trend field.

Since Common Room automatically captures all the data points and signals we care about—both via out-of-the-box signal capture and our connected data sources—we can pick and choose from any numeric field at our disposal.

In this case, we’ll start with product signals. We run a product-led sales motion and want to show reps which contacts are seeing a surge in product activity over a given time period.

Keep in mind that we can just as easily create signal trend fields at the account level, too.

Once our field is live, Common Room will begin taking daily snapshots.

We can then make this field visible to reps by adding it to any contact-level view in Common Room.

We can also choose to make our field a key field, which will make it visible whenever a rep clicks into a contact or account profile in Common Room, alongside key demographic, firmographic, and behavioral data uncovered by Common Room’s identity resolution and waterfall enrichment.

Now reps can quickly see how business-critical buying signals are trending with an easy-to-understand visualization that’s updated daily.

Step 2: Automate segmentation and alerting based on signal trend fields

We can create auto-replenishing lists of contacts or accounts that match our criteria for different signal trends, like economic buyers who have seen a 10% increase or higher in product usage over the past week.

We can assign these segments to reps—and automatically update them based on a rep’s book of business in our CRM—to give team members an interactive burndown list of hot leads showing increasing signal activity.

In this case, that means a tailored list of every contact in their BoB who is seeing a spike in product usage.

We can also keep reps updated to signal trends in real time via automated alerts.

When a contact or account meets certain signal trend criteria, we can automatically notify reps in a dedicated Slack channel so that they can follow up right away.

Step 3: Action on signal trends

Now let’s say we’re an SDR.

We want to prioritize the prospects who seem most primed to buy.

We can easily see which contacts in our BoB are seeing a surge in signal activity and take action directly from Common Room.

Our message might look something like this:

Wrapping up

Now you know how to turn signal trends into actionable insights, zero in on leads showing a surge in signal activity, and take action ASAP.

Want to see a playbook on a different topic? Get in touch.