Enabling your SDRs: Intent Data + Social Listening

TL;DR; We tried traditional lead scoring, but quickly pivoted to Intent + Social

In my last stack I shared my rationale behind halting a previous lead scoring playbook.

The most common question asked was how we were leveraging those tactics.

TL;DR; We tried lead scoring, but it didn’t work well for us because traditional lead scoring software fails to consider overall account fit and buying intent.

We pivoted our strategy to then activate our SDRs with a combination of intent signals and social listening.

So here’s the playbook we built on leveraging intent signals. I’ll do a part two for this that dives deeper into the social listening piece.

I want to start by saying that we by no means had the most sophisticated intent model on the planet. We were still sub-$20MM ARR at the time with a small, but mighty marketing team. After we ditched lead scoring, we took a crawl-walk-run approach to implement an intent model. This is a big disclaimer that we were very much in the crawl stage during my time working for this brand.

However, if you’re also just beginning to dabble in intent, hopefully this will give you an idea of where to start.

Step 1: Select accounts

Our SDRs worked off of a subset of assigned accounts from our target account list. The target account list is something our RevOps and Demand Gen teams built with the help of three data enrichment tools: Clearbit, ZoomInfo, and DataFox.

We had very specific technographic requirements for accounts we could work with, so these tools helped us identify accounts using those technologies. Company size, department size, and preferred industries are also factored into account selection as we had a tightly defined ICP.

This list is something overhauled on a quarterly basis, but also periodically updated when sales dev leaders indicate their team has saturated the existing target account list.

Step 2: Assign accounts

This is pretty straightforward. Because we were a remote company, we didn’t assign accounts based on geographic territories. We have a North America team and an EMEA team, but that’s the extent of geo segmentation.

Instead, we’d assign SDRs to queues based on company size, with fully ramped SDRs working larger companies and still-ramping SDRs working smaller companies.

Step 3: Surround the buying committee

In parallel to any outbound efforts the SDRs were doing, the Demand Gen team piped the target account list into Metadata, a demand orchestration platform, and targeted those accounts with ads (a dedicated post to come on how we thought about building a story line through our advertising) in an effort to surround the buying committee.

Step 4: Pipe in data from our three intent streams

We had three streams of intent data flowing in from different sources that are all visible to reps on the account level in Salesforce.

The first was Metadata. Through the SFDC integration with Metadata, reps can see which ads prospects within the target account list are engaging with.

Once a prospect lands on the site either organically or through an ad, we could see which pages they engaged with through the HubSpot integration. Take this with a grain of salt of course, because a prospect has to opt into cookie tracking in order to observe their behavior on site.

Lastly, reps were notified via a Slack integration when a prospect from the target account list views a high-value G2 page (product pages, comparison pages, and relevant category pages). This data appears in the activity stream at the account level in SFDC as well, so reps use SFDC as their source of truth for what’s going on in their assigned target accounts.

Step 5: Informed outbounding

Armed with info from three intent data streams, SDRs are then free to conduct outreach as they see fit. SDRs create their own cadences and personalize their outreach based on the data available to them from the intent streams visible in SFDC at the account level.

...and that’s pretty much it.

While it's not the world's most sophisticated intent model, it's a night and day difference from previous attempts at lead scoring.

The other piece of the puzzle was social listening. Stay tuned for another article detailing that execution.