Leveraging job change leads, especially those from your champions, can set the stage for meaningful engagements and potentially lucrative deals. However, the full potential of these opportunities is often not realized, largely due to a lack of understanding and a one-size-fits-all approach in outreach strategies. Drawing insights from both industry knowledge and the specific challenges identified, this blog post outlines strategies to use champion tracking to more effectively engage champion job change leads.
Understanding the Value of Champion Job Change Leads
Champion job change leads are a gold mine that sellers often overlook. When a point of contact (POC) or a key influencer in a deal moves to a new company, they carry with them the knowledge of your solutions and a positive disposition towards your brand. This familiarity can significantly lower barriers to entry in a new organization. However, many sellers fail to differentiate between these leads and standard cold outreach prospects, missing out on leveraging built goodwill and existing relationships. These leads offer a unique opportunity to acquire new customers, generate repeat business from previous customers, and foster strong relationships in sales.
Crafting Contextually Relevant Outreach
A common pitfall in reaching out to job change leads is the failure to reference previous engagements effectively. This lack of personalized touch can diminish the perceived value of your outreach, reducing its impact. Approaching a former champion without acknowledging past collaborations or successes makes your outreach indistinguishable from any other cold email, failing to capitalize on the established relationship.
Strategy:
- Integrate CRM Insights: To tailor your outreach effectively, integrate CRM data that highlights previous interactions, enabling sellers to craft messages that resonate on a personal level. This data can provide valuable insights into various customer profiles and help identify buyers' intent.
- Personalize Your Approach: Customize email copy to reflect the lead's past role and your shared history, while also acknowledging their new position and the potential new set of challenges they're facing. Personalization is key to effective customer remarketing and ex customer remarketing.
Tailored Engagement Tactics
Not all leads should be approached with the same strategy. Higher-level executives, such as VPs or C-suite professionals, typically expect a different level of engagement. Pushing these high-value leads directly to sales development representatives (SDRs) for cold outreach may not be as effective as a more personalized, executive-level prelude.
Strategy:
- Executive Pre-engagement: Before the SDR follow-up, have an executive from your team reach out to congratulate the lead on their new role. This not only warms up the lead for subsequent engagement but also sets a precedent for the level of communication they can expect. This approach can be particularly effective for engaging high-value customers and reference customer leads.
- Empower SDRs with Context: When SDRs do engage, ensure they're armed with all necessary insights and context to make a meaningful connection. SDR engagement should never feel like a cold call but a continuation of a valued relationship. This approach can help generate warm sales leads and contribute to generating pipeline.
Centralize Your Engagement Strategy for Consistency and Impact
By automating the routing of leads to the right sequences on Outreach or Salesloft, every team member knows precisely the action plan for every job change lead, ensuring a synchronized and professional approach that capitalizes on your investment in lead generation. Effective customer relationship marketing by implementing well-thought customer relationship projects is essential for maintaining strong connections with best customers and driving repeat purchases.
Executing a Centralized Strategy:
- Empower Your Team: Make sure your sales team understands the importance of maintaining relationships with champions, even when they change jobs. Provide training on effective strategies to increase sales and foster strong relationships in sales.
- Leverage Data Effectively: Use data from previous interactions to create personalized outreach sequences that speak directly to your champion’s past experiences and present opportunities. B2B lead generation tools like Boomerang can help you identify and engage with customers in new roles.
- Define a Clear Engagement Hierarchy: Set up a protocol for engaging high-value leads, preferably involving C-level or other executives before handing off to SDRs.
- Standardize sequences in Sales Engagement Platforms: Implement a system to automate lead routing, ensuring a seamless transition and consistent follow-up for champion job change leads. This can help you effectively execute ex customer retargeting and ex customer remarketing strategies.
Conclusion
Driving more responses from outreach to champion job change leads requires a nuanced understanding of the value these leads bring and a tailored approach to engagement. By appreciating the unique opportunities these leads present, crafting contextually relevant outreach, and varying the engagement strategy based on the lead's executive level, your sales team can significantly improve their outreach ROI.
Incorporating these strategies can transform how your team approaches champion job change leads, turning potential missed opportunities into fruitful engagements and, ultimately, closed deals. By leveraging effective customer tracking, job change tracking, and customers in new role strategies, you can unlock the full potential of these valuable leads and drive significant growth for your business. Remember, the goal isn't just to reach out—you're aiming to reconnect, re-engage, and reignite a mutually beneficial relationship that aligns with their current journey and objectives.