Modern B2B companies are under pressure to scale revenues with limited budgets. And go-to-market teams are going all out, ramping up their outbound sales motions, experimenting with AI tools, and more.
Amidst all the new initiatives to build bigger pipelines and convert deals faster, GTM teams often forget an easy-to-grab low-hanging fruit: mine their existing CRM for warm leads by tracking job changes of contacts.
Every year, about 30% of the corporate workforce changes jobs. This means that a third of the contacts in your CRM, including customers and prospects, are likely to change jobs. These contacts can include existing customers, prospects you’re in conversation with, and ICP leads that are in your pipeline that you will reach out to.
Tracking job changes on a real-time basis can open up avenues for upselling, cross-selling, and even create new opportunities. You can unlock a new source of pipeline and accelerate deals by re-engaging with your customers, users, and prospects at their new companies.
Importance of using job changes to create business opportunities
Here’s why job change tracking is an important pipeline building engine:
- Most B2B sales rely on strong relationships and customer loyalty. Job change tracking allows you to capitalize on existing connections to close more deals.
- When individuals take on new roles, they often seek to implement new tools and improve team operations. This presents a prime opportunity for your team to pitch products and secure deals.
- During organizational restructuring, companies are more likely to adopt new processes and tools. Tracking job changes helps identify these opportunities to redefine processes.
- Monitoring job changes ensures your CRM remains up-to-date, preventing leads from being overlooked due to outdated title or designation information.
- Tracking job changes among prospects and non-customers can revive previous closed-lost opportunities. An opportunity that didn’t work for a lead in another role but could work for them in their new role.
- Keeping track of people leaving their roles is critical to minimize churn risk. If a key customer champion leaves, alerting the customer success team can help them nurture another point of contact, ensuring customer satisfaction and retention.
Job change tracking: Key use cases
Job changes can manifest in various forms, including promotions within the same organization, former champions moving to new companies, or current customer advocates transitioning to different roles in other accounts. All of these can open up sales opportunities – either new ones or upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
If you're investing in tracking job changes and want to set up processes or workflows to monitor the subtle moves that could signal buyer intent, consider the following key use cases:
Here are the main use cases for tracking buyer intent signals:
New hire in an account
A new employee joins an existing customer or target account.
Why it is important: New hires are often eager to make an impact. Since B2B tools are often a good way to demonstrate impact, ICP leads in new roles may be more receptive to a pitch.
Promotion
An employee is promoted within their current company.
Why it is important: Promotions often come with increased budgets and more decision-making authority. They’re also more likely to invest in new initiatives.
New role within the same company
An employee takes on a new role in their current organization through programs like internal transfers or internal job postings (IJPs).
Why it is important: This can create opportunities for cross-selling or upselling, as the contact may be more open to exploring additional products or more features/use cases of your product.
Existing champion moving to a new company
A current customer champion leaves their company to join a new organization.
Why it is important: This opens up new opportunities, as they can introduce your products or services to their new company. As a loyal customer, they might also be willing to influence the purchase decision in addition to simply introducing your product to the new account.
Past champion moving to a new role
A past champion transitions into a new role, either within their current company or at a new organization.
Why it is important: There are many cases where you have loyal users of your product, but the company takes a call to discontinue using your product. These loyal users can be extremely valuable. When these past champions move to new roles, they can open doors to new opportunities. The company they’ve joined may not be on your radar but your loyal user joining a company can create a new account for you.
Past champion joining a target account
A past champion joins a company that is a target account for your business.
Why it is important: This can help speed up decision-making processes, as they already have experience with and trust in your products and your brand. Moreover, they’re already aware of the pain points and the way your tool solves those problems, helping you save time on convincing them about the product’s value proposition.
Referrals from a contact when a decision-maker joins a new role
A decision-maker you’ve worked with moves into a new role, either in the same organization or a new company
Why it is important: Referrals from contacts who have moved into new roles can provide you introductions and recommendations, potentially leading to new business opportunities.
Exit of a contact from an account
A key contact at one of your accounts leaves their job at the company
Why it is important: This is important so the customer success team can take relevant action with the new point of contact and prevent churn by maintaining strong relationships and ensuring continuity.
New job openings
New job postings are created in a target company.
Why it is important: Monitoring new job postings related to your product or service can indicate potential buyer intent and upcoming purchasing decisions.
Organizational restructuring
Changes in roles and responsibilities of contacts as a result of changes in department structures and organizational hierarchy.
Why it is important: Identifying these changes can help you understand organizational shifts that might impact your sales strategies.
Company expansions, mergers and acquisitions
A company expands its operations, such as opening new offices, or launching new lines of business.
Why it is important: Expansions can indicate growth and potential increased demand for your products, and possibly, increased budgets.
Steps to turn job changes into sales opportunities
Track job changes proactively, in real time
Job change tracking should become a part of your daily workflows as it is essential to reach out and strike conversation at the right time.
Put processes in place to automate and proactively track job changes of all contacts in your CRM, and ensure that you receive real-time alerts each time a change is noted.
Highperformr, for instance, can run periodic syncs on your database to identify all kinds of job changes in real-time, and also notify SDRs or other stakeholders for instant action.
Automate CRM enrichment and updates
Customize GTM workflows so that whenever a job change is detected, it automatically triggers data enrichments and updates your CRM accordingly.
This should include enriching the CRM with updated information about contacts, such as the latest designation or title, and new responsibilities.
This ensures your sales team has up-to-date, accurate data at all times and is able to reconnect with contacts at the right time with a congratulatory message or a relevant message and act on job change signals effectively.
Create personalized outreach messages using AI agents
It is important to engage a contact as soon as you spot a job change, whether it is a congratulatory message or a direct sales pitch. Using a tool like Highperformr, you’ll also be able to automate the process of crafting outreach messages based on the job change data.
Configure real-time alerts to sales teams
It isn’t enough to have an enriched CRM; the sales teams and other folks in your customer-facing teams need to be made aware of the job changes so they can act on the signals.
To ensure that the signals have impact downstream, so integrating the job-change tracking tool to your CRM won’t suffice. Be sure to integrate your job-change tracking tool with other communication tools such a Slack or Teams to notify or alert team members. Also sync the job-change tracking software with other marketing automation or sales tools to ensure that the entire tech-stack is updated.
Train sales teams on proactive relationship management
Most sales and marketing teams are aware of how to use buyer intent signals such as website visits or content downloads. Similarly, it is essential to educate your team on the value of job change signals and train them to use those triggers to strike conversations with existing customers or prospects. A product like Highperformr can be handy for sales teams in such cases, as they get not just the job change alert, but also get comprehensive AI insight about the lead and the account. This helps save time on background research and also helps enhance outreach.
Unlock the hidden value in your CRM using Highperformr
Highperformr’s job change tracking product has been built to help you mine your existing contacts list for warm leads. Highperformr tracks your contacts in real-time and provides you with timely alerts for immediate action. To learn more about how you can use Highperformr to automate job change tracking and orchestrate GTM action on job change signals, schedule a demo today or sign up for a free trial today!
