Cody Bernard
At what point in the buyer journey do you start listening for buying signals?
Listening likely starts when someone engages with your brand for the first time. Maybe someone attended a webinar you put on or downloaded a piece of content. With that prospect now on your radar, so are any future buying signals they send like website visits or demo requests.
Although perfectly acceptable, this approach limits your pool of targets to just those accounts that have expressed some form of interest.
But what if you could tune into an account’s buying signals well before they engage with you? Before intent is ever revealed…maybe even before intent exists.
There’s good news — you absolutely can.
And you should. Because contrary to popular belief, expressions of intent aren’t the only indicators of sales readiness. Buyers often send out other types of signals well before intent comes knocking. They come in the form of pain indicators, new projects and initiatives, hiring decisions, or the contents of a tech stack.
When put into the right context, not only are these signals strong indicators that an account is poised to buy, they’re also often early indicators that let you get in front of buyers before your competitors do.
So how can you pick up on a more diverse range of buying signals? Look for key events that drive buying behavior, like these ones here .
A successful product solves a specific pain for its buyers. This makes the presence of pain a powerful buying signal. But how do you know if a potential buyer has pain?
Through pain indicators of course. For example, an account hiring of a customer support escalations manager could be a strong signal of customer service pain. Hiring patterns in general are very telling because when someone starts increasing headcount, they are really trying to alleviate pain.
Other examples of pain indicators include layoffs or reorgs, negative customer feedback, security breaches, (too) rapid business growth, and more.
Identify the pain indicators that signal pain your product can solve. By listening for those relevant to your business, your sales and marketing teams can hone in on prospects with a tangible—and probably urgent—need to buy.
While companies usually try to keep their pain close, most are eager to broadcast new initiatives. This buying signal comes in loud and clear and offers all kinds of insights for your teams to capitalize on. Like where the prospect will point budget and resources in the near term, the products or services they’ll need to execute the initiative, their growth strategy, and more.
For example, let’s say a prospect acquires one of their suppliers. This could mean that they’re planning to further expand into new industries (perhaps ones that you serve). It may also reveal a pain point around hitting revenue goals.
Similarly, the launch of a diversity hiring program demonstrates a prospect’s desire to make a positive social impact. It’s not a stretch to presume they also care about their environmental impact.
The mere presence of a key decision-maker with the authority to approve spending and make things happen is a positive buying signal. If the decision-maker is new to their role or the role itself was newly created, even better. A recent arrival can signal buying enthusiasm and energy—on the part of the decision-maker and the business.
Bonus: If the decision-maker is new to their role and comes from an organization that currently uses your product, you now have a brand champion inside the account.
Adjacent technologies are elements of a buyer’s tech stack that your product complements. The presence—or absence—of an adjacent technology could signal a real need for your product. Conversely, it could signal a hard no.
Imagine you sell an e-gifting product. Wouldn’t it be great to know which businesses are investing in ABM initiatives or have tools like that in their tech stack? Absolutely. These buying signal lets you focus right from the start on accounts that are a good fit, instead of wasting time with hard sells.
What other buying indicators come to mind for you? There are countless creative ways to find accounts that are ready to buy. Each one is invaluable when used in the right context.
Unfortunately, it’s a lot of work.
Your sales and marketing teams must continuously monitor websites, job boards, blogs, press releases, 10-Ks, social media… (and the list goes on) to uncover buying signals outside of just a prospect’s interactions with you. No matter how dedicated, nobody has the bandwidth to do this at scale.
Fortunately, CloseFactor’s got your back. Just make sure you’re ready to handle a fat pipeline .
Want to see CloseFactor in action? Get a demo today.
