How can you work contact tracking into your existing sales prospecting processes?

These days, contact tracking — the process of tracking champion, power user, and buyer job changes — is more important than ever before. 

As workers continue to leave their jobs in search of greener pastures, sales teams need to do everything to keep tabs on the most important people in their networks: the folks they already have relationships with. Luckily, by investing in a contact tracking solution, sales teams can rest comfortably knowing that the contact information for the hundreds or thousands of people in their network is always accurate and up to date.

With a reliable contact tracking solution in place, sales teams receive automatic alerts and notifications whenever important contacts switch jobs; it’s much more efficient and much more reliable than updating contacts manually. As a result, reps are able to get a headstart on prospecting should a key decision maker, power user, or champion wind up working for a new organization or taking on a new role with more influence.

Why is it important for sales teams to monitor buyer job changes?

The right contact tracking solution has the power to transform sales teams, enabling them to cover more ground faster and close more deals. With that in mind, let’s examine some of the key benefits sales teams experience by investing in contact tracking technology.

Enhanced sales effectiveness

When companies invest in contact tracking for sales teams, sales efforts become considerably more effective. When past customers and champions — folks who are already familiar with your offerings — switch jobs, contact tracking makes it easy for sales to know who to target. Since there’s already a relationship, these individuals are easier to sell to. As a result, conversion rates increase while sales cycles accelerate.

Improved lead prioritization

Since contact tracking automatically sends job change notifications directly to sales teams, employees quickly learn about contacts who might have moved into positions with decision-making power or ended up with greater influence at a new organization. In turn, this allows sales professionals to focus more on higher-quality leads that are more likely to convert, saving time and resources while increasing the chances of success.

Better personalization and outreach

In an age where consumers care about personalized experiences more than ever before, it comes as no surprise that personalization helps sales teams convert more customers. In fact, according to one report, increasing personalization is one of the top goals for a successful email marketing strategy. 

When sales teams monitor buyer job changes, they can customize outreach efforts by congratulating contacts on career moves and mentioning their new roles. This personalized approach demonstrates attentiveness and empathy, which helps build trust and strengthens relationships. By proving that you’re paying attention to contacts, it becomes that much easier to make a deal.

Access to a single source of truth

Contact tracking enables sales teams to continuously enrich CRM data, ensuring they always have access to a single source of truth. This gives sales reps the information they need to target prospects more effectively, improve lead scoring, and identify potential cross-selling and upselling opportunities with the confidence that comes with knowing the data they’re leveraging is accurate.

Stronger relationships with buyers

At the end of the day, people like doing business with people they like doing business with. By tracking buyer job changes, sales teams can proactively maintain strong relationships with customers and prospects alike, developing and building rapport. Such an approach highlights a salesperson’s commitment to the buyer’s success beyond a single deal, which is a great way to develop productive long-term relationships — and potential word-of-mouth referrals as each contact’s network grows.

How to incorporate contact tracking into the prospecting process

At this point, you understand why contact tracking for sales teams is important. But you might be wondering how to get started. We’ve got you covered.

1. Pick the right tool and lay the groundwork

Unless you’re keen on spending endless hours maintaining CRM data by hand, it’s easiest to add contact tracking to your existing sales prospecting processes by investing in a contact tracking solution built for B2B sales teams.

Of course, you can’t just pick any solution on the market; you need to select the platform that can help your sales team reach its full potential. In addition to being reliable, the ideal solution should also include robust integration capabilities so you can consolidate your sales tech stack and improve data accuracy and hygiene.

After finding their preferred solution, sales teams then need to make sure their CRM data is clean and accurate. Once that’s done, they need to determine which accounts to track; decision makers, existing customers, champions, and folks who work at key target accounts are a good start. From there, sales teams need to set realistic targets for outreach and engagement. To do this, establish engagement benchmarks, monitor progress, and adjust targets accordingly.

2. Leverage job change notifications for targeted outreach

Studying a company’s hiring strategy and job change notifications can be a great way to assess its priorities. If you’re in the market of selling developer productivity tools and a company hires a new VP of Engineering or CTO, you may want to get your message in front of key contacts at those organizations sooner than later.

Since you probably don’t have time to write individual messages to each of your contacts who switches jobs from scratch, you can move faster by segmenting prospects into similar groups (e.g., technology buyers and product power users) and targeting those personas. From there, build sequences specifically around job changes, and use AI-powered tools that enable you to create personalized messages in seconds.

3. Integrate contract tracking into your CRM and sales tech stack

Doing your best work starts with having clean, up-to-date data across your tech stack and ensuring it stays in sync across systems. When data is erroneous, nothing good comes from it. Imagine congratulating someone on switching jobs only to find out that they’ve been in the same position for seven years.

It bears repeating: Sales teams need contact tracking solutions that integrate with the other prospecting tools they use every day. That way, sales reps can trust their data and confidently move forward targeting the right person at the right time with the right message. 

For the best results, look for a complete prospecting platform that gives you all the tools you need in one place — like contact tracking, contact data, and generative AI for emails — instead of cobbling several point solutions together.

4. Educate your team on the importance of contact tracking

Since most employees resist change, it’s important to ensure your team buys in to the new way of working. To this end, devote time and resources to educating your team on contact tracking and sales enablement. By demonstrating the benefits of contact tracking — including increased sales effectiveness, improved lead prioritization, and enhanced personalization — it’s much easier to get your team on board.

5. Collaborate with sales reps and customer success managers to determine the best contacts to track

Just because you can track and measure something doesn’t mean you should. To increase the chances your team gets the most out of contract tracking, it’s important to ensure they are tracking the best accounts. 

As you begin rolling out your contract tracking initiative, make sure your reps and CSMs know the most important accounts to pay attention to: decision-makers, power users, and key prospects — either those who loved your product and left before a deal was made or those who hated your product and switched jobs. Don’t forget about standard users, too; while they’re not power users, they still may be in a position to influence a decision-maker.

Now that you have a better idea of how to incorporate contract tracking into your existing sales prospecting workflows, it’s time to get started. When you’re ready to build a more effective sales operation, take LeadIQ for a test drive or reach out to our sales team to schedule a demo.