How We Use Intent Data and Social Listening to Activate Our SDRs (Part 1)

Last month, I published an article about why my team at Chili Piper stopped scoring leads.

The most common question I got was how we are leveraging those tactics.?

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

We pivoted our strategy and now activate our SDRs with a combo of intent signals and social listening.?

So here’s our playbook 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 have the most sophisticated intent model on the planet. After we ditched lead scoring, we took a crawl-walk-run approach to implement an intent model. This is a big disclaimer that we are very much so in the crawl stage.?

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 work off a subset of assigned accounts from our target account list. The target account list is something our RevOps and demand generation teams build manually with the help of three data enrichment tools: Clearbit, ZoomInfo, and DataFox.?

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

This list is overhauled on a quarterly basis, but we also periodically update it when our sales dev leaders indicate their team has saturated the existing target account list.?

Step 2: Assign accounts?

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

Instead, we 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 our SDRs are doing, our demand gen team pipes our target account list into Metadata and targets those accounts with ads in an effort to surround the buying committee.

Step 4: Pipe in data from our three intent streams

Currently, we have three streams of intent data flowing in from different sources that are all visible to reps on the account level in Salesforce.?

The first is 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 our site either organically or through an ad, we can see which pages they engaged with through our HubSpot integration. Take this with a grain of salt of course, because a prospect has to opt into cookie tracking in order for us to observe their behavior on our site.?

Lastly, our reps are 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 our 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 our 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 our previous attempts at lead scoring.

The other piece of the puzzle is our social listening strategy. Stay tuned for another article detailing that execution.?

Stay spicy,?

Kaylee?