Signal-Based Selling: Leveraging Data & Insights to Set Your Sales Team Up

I'm Jenny Garo I'm the CEO of a company called go Nimble rops consultancy I also have a little video series called this week in SAS where I cover something that happened in the news relevant to the SAS Network and then I also that little um logo on the bottom right is a game company so I actually make physical board games started off as a hobby and uh it's going to be half a million dollars this year so very weird little B Toc compan that I've created as as a side Hustle but today we're talking

about signal based selling and I think uh you know we're going to cover a lot first really having a data mindset when we're talking about preparing our sales team to have really relevant conversations talking about how I believe signals are way better than scoring uh if anybody's been here and I would say like 10 years ago we had like a big lead scoring hype and we all started creating lead scoring programs I think those are slowly dying and we should really be looking at signals and then lastly really setting ourselves our our sales team up for a really amazing

conversation deserves an operationalized handoff and I think this is where we're really really failing and uh as much as I love goon Nimble and I love my game company that's not the relevant examples I'm bringing you these are the logos that we work with so I've been super lucky over the last 10 years to work with some of the most incredible SAS Brands we really work with mid-market and above and you know to call out a few and projects that are relevant too we've been working with them since 2015 they were like 500 employees really helped them on their

developer first model uh zenes uh we worked on their free trial flow and making sure that their instance programs were were working um intercom was moving down Market we helped them with their product L sales motion uh corsera for uh during the pandemic they had a huge influx of Learners and we helped them with that I give you those examples because uh I think 2022 plg became like this big word that we all learned and and this big hype but these are Concepts

that we've been working on forever right like free trials uh $ Five Doll was like kind of the twilio model all that good stuff um just to make this super relevant and we like somewhat of a small crowd can you raise your hand if you have either a plg motion a free trial a free demo if you can add users automatically if you can have growth amazing these are all really incredible signals that we can harness if you don't you have marketing engagement you have infographic engagement you have third

party engagement those are all the things that we need to mix and match to understand our buyer and to have you know better more engaged conversations and I don't want to throw another acronym at you because I think we have enough acronyms and I don't expect this to blow up but whenever I hear people talking about product lid sales I'm like it's data sales and that can be through a plg motion it can be through I don't know now people are talking about event Le uh or Community Le uh fill in the blank you're going to have multiple

motions the big idea here is is collect all that data and I wish I had a little soap box here I don't if I did I guess I'll stand on my tiptoes uh we are doing a massive disservice to our sales teams we are expecting them to have really incredible conversations during sales cycles and we're giving them very little information and I think that's the biggest thing that if there's can you raise your hand if you're a marketer consider yourself a marketer seller

operator all right I a founder all right you're all of them Founders you should have raised your hand the whole time you're marketers your sellers your operators and you know ultimately what we're doing is we're doing a giant disservice because we're not setting our teams up to have relevant conversations this is what most people get this is uh considered a lead in my opinion it's the shittiest lead you could ever create it's like all right John Smith from Google went to a webinar awesome go have a super compelling conversation right

now and go close that deal this is pretty much the norise we're sending alerts to our sales team and expecting them to go be Consultants essentially on sales cycles and it's ultimately not working so I want to talk about how I think about you know the kind of the building blocks of product lid sales or signal base selling there's kind of four things I'm going to focus mostly on like kind of the gray green but in the First Column here you've got the collection of data right so you have to collect all these things and frankly most of us are doing that all right uh

our tools collect that information our product collects that information your maretto and your hubs spots they they're all collecting this so ultimately number one you have that or you have a lot of third party data um you know from your Zoom infos sales intels Apollos you have all that the big thing that you have to do is translate that into signals so that's sort of that gray bucket how do we take not just raw data your sales team doesn't care that there were five times a login and that they currently have like x amount of usage they care that there's been growth

they care that there's been a big news cycle there's been a change in their industry that they've been to specific events that they're searching for key terms how do we you know put that into a a in a way that that your sales team can actually consume that and the green here is actionable so uh what most people do and it's okay craww walk run is send some of these alerts to the team hey there's been a recent login hey there's been recent activity I think it's really important to have some sort of record of when we think somebody is ready for a

conversation uh and from that you know have that I'm calling it a signal story like consolidate all these signals and say why is right now a good time to have a conversation and then a Playbook if you really nail that you're really setting up your team for success and then insights tons of examples here but ultimately can we report on this so you know the the big idea here is most people start with a traditional lead score hey uh one through 100 and at 70 we send it over to sales and go have

a great conversation I think that that's dying out um I don't think that algorithms are stupid they're quite smart uh it's a propensity to buy but it doesn't set you up to why or why have that conversation so when we think about signal-based selling we're really looking at a ton of different scenarios so it could be a new business it could be expansion it could also be because you've detected a possibility of Churn it could be onboarding is not working you have that that use case right like why is it that you want to have a conversation with your customer and then

you can create a Playbook I just created a bunch of of examples here but one of them could be that they're ready for specific feature so they're doing things they're hitting a pay wall or they're doing something in your product and there's an expansion opportunity it could be from a if you have a very technical buyer it could be that they're engaging with specific help docs that tell us that they're really ready to build it could be that could be for new business uh it could be early renewal maybe they you expected their usage to be at a 100 but it's month three and they're at 70 so they're going to hit a

usage like go have an early conversation one that works at ton is multiple departments with separate instances both really engaged how do you go and have a conversation about you know going into an Enterprise level plan the big takeaway here is that there's uh real outcomes and real playbooks that are built and we're setting our sales team up to know why we think somebody's ready for a conversation and then at the bottom we talk a lot about routing to like an AE but you can route to anybody in the company right I'm not suggesting that it always has to go sometimes it could go to support it could go to

onboarding Team it could go to the CEO you know it doesn't matter but we're essentially saying really putting ourselves in the customer shoes and saying this this individual needs a conversation and you know ultimately you're sitting on a data gold mine and if you're not leveraging this uh your competitors will and they're going to create a much better sales process and you know ultimately they're going to beat you so leverage you know all this data that you're sitting on so one of the big things that I see people make a

mistake on uh is none of these signals are static so you're going to have multiple places so of course you're going to have product usage you're gonna have first-party engagement you know whether it's your own events your own web series your own you website interactions thirdparty engagement you should be layering all this and also don't forget ICP like we only care about you know customers that we want to sell to layer that on and you should be mixing and matching and testing these out and every time you roll out a new

feature you change your persona you go after a new industry this all changes so having a super flexible model where we can mix and match signals and send it to our teams is you know where we see people win so a couple of like things to keep in mind one being customer focused versus internal focus is really big so we're talking about the outcome or the problem or the issue that a customer is facing and how we can solve it I thought this is a really compelling example that intercom did which is they looked for

their customers customers uh seat score and if the cat score because it's what they fix if their sead score was decreasing and the team was growing they had a whole Playbook around hey seems like your team is growing and your business is doing well but your customers are feeling the pain of that and it's such an easy plugin for their AI feature which is Finn and so that Playbook killed right every single like the conversion rate was over 50% they were booking calls right away because we

were so focused on the fact that we knew that they had a pain and the product told us all of that so really thinking about where your customer might be you know hitting a wall or what they might be um having trouble achieving is incredible right and then the same thing is the kind of multiple Department one is also pretty huge um democratizing data and insights is uh another super important one we need access right we can't expect our sales team to have really incredible curated conversations if they don't have access to the

information and then lastly I've kind of been threading this through but having playbooks that we're building that are very outcome focused and these should be changing all the time things are like I said like these are and you should be testing them out and if they're not working you know switch it up I wanted to double click a little on democratizing data and insights because this is one where we've had a couple of like kind of big du moments with our customers we work mostly with with customers a little more up Market but we are working with a series B company that

was still doing a lot of founder-led sales but had a sales team and they were really failing like it wasn't even just hey the founder is always going to do a bit better but the sales team just could not close a single deal and we audited did we listened to some calls Etc and it was one of those like very obvious moments which is hey the founder logging into the platform looking at what they're doing showing up to calls with advice and the sales team is showing up going hey how are you liking the product are you using XYZ feature and like those

two you know experiences obviously one's going to convert really well and one's not so democratize that access to data and and let your sales experience really shine that way um this is a a screenshot of like what we actually I am going to zoom in by the way I know it's hard to see but um this is what we're actually sending to sales teams I have uh made it so that it's a little generic but you'll get the point we send here's a I think this was a $40,000 uh decision after I looked at

how many meetings and and uh uh runarounds we did on naming this this object we called it a go to market touch I know that seems silly but we didn't call it an mql we didn't call it a pql we didn't call it a lead we called it a go to market touch and the big idea here is hey this customer needs a touch from our goto Market team it could be the CSM it could be AE we don't really care because you know we believe that they need that in order to be successful you can't really see it but there's a field called here Target outcome this one's

expansion but there's new business one there's churn detection whatever it is and the rep can work on this right the whole Playbook is here and if you look at it we tell them the qualification signals uh again I've removed the clients information so so it's a little bit generic but we give them the specific outcome so we say for example hey we think that they're ready for an AI add-on and we know that because their team size is increasing their usage is increasing and we know customers of that size do really well with our AI product

and we give them that like 34% the team uses that in their outbound to the customer and obviously that converts really high we also link to the Playbook right here Outreach sequences all that good stuff uh another one that works really well is usage so hey you're at 125% of usage the number of customers of ours that wait to have conversations about usage at renewal and leave money on the table is insane uh Salesforce is one of them you guys are all probably over your usage on Salesforce they won't talk to you about it till your renewal I don't know why they don't want more

money um but this is a a play that works really well we like this one when it's trending so if you're trending at three months at a you know double your clip go have that conversation now um and then this is a couple of examples that you know we could sit on um which is play books that that we're testing and I I want to uh really emphasize that your playbook should be changing all the time uh and you should be able to monitor that they are or not working so for example the multiple

departments with high usage that one works really well your Champion is not usually your user you have to go and find you know kind of a a higher level Champion to say hey there's multiple people at the company using this product we need to get it you know maybe single sign on maybe security whatever it might be and Elevate that into a higher tier um um pricing and pacing this is the one I was talking about at three months you reached most of your usage go have a conversation about how you're on the wrong plan or that you should be expending to spend more um executive

users adding like lots of members but no team features so you've got your executive buyer but you know they don't have the features that they need for team collaboration uh no integration or key feature so they're doing their onboarding but that hasn't happened uh and then a huge number of of kind of user growth or activity that tells us that they need a new feature say if you have an AI feature or something along those lines these are kind of generic because ultimately it's it should be kind of the intercom cat example I gave you you got to put yourself in your

customer shoes and really double down on what is it that they're trying to get out of your platform and how do we know that they're not getting that and so my big takeaway here and then I'll have exactly a minute for some questions is uh think in customer outcomes put yourself in in the customer shoes in the product that they're using what outcome are they not getting and then create a Playbook around that and make sure that you're giving your sales team access to that data so that they can have those really productive calls

that's where we're seeing our customers be super successful amazing that's me I don't know if I was supposed to do a QR code I didn't so I have no idea where that goes but you could try and let's see where that takes you thank you very much