Every salesperson has probably wished for a crystal ball at some point in their career. Wouldn’t it be so much easier if you could know when a prospect might be ready to buy? The technology to read minds and tell the future doesn’t exist just yet, but we’ve got something that gets pretty close: intent […]
Every salesperson has probably wished for a crystal ball at some point in their career. Wouldn’t it be so much easier if you could know when a prospect might be ready to buy? The technology to read minds and tell the future doesn’t exist just yet, but we’ve got something that gets pretty close: intent signals.
We know for a fact that they work – we’ve tried it ourselves. When four new business development representatives joined Lusha this October, we set them up with a fresh strategy driven by intent data. Turns out, using intent signals helps cut through the noise, reaching the right people at the right time.
My new team hit 100% of their qualified opportunity quota in just the first month using intent data from Bombora. Want to know how we got there? Here’s the story.
Establishing an intent-led motion for new BDRs
In September 2022, I was tasked with setting up a new motion to build something scalable and tangible for the business and testing it out with new team members. This new motion would use intent signals to scale up our outbound sales. We hired four new business development representatives (BDRs) who started October 15. After the standard two-week training, they started with a pretty aggressive ramp period.
Typically, we start out with a 25% target the first month and slowly raise it up: 50% the second month, 75% the third month, and then 100%. With this new motion, we started the BDRs with a 50% target on November 1st.
It was a bold strategy, but we had confidence it would work. We’d already seen success by focusing on strong outbound. After cutting marketing spend and putting that money into a BDR funnel team, we’d majorly decreased our cost per demo. That success proved that we have a strategy that works. We know our talk track and our pitches, so the next step was to invest more into our BDR teams, add an intent strategy, and see how far we can go.
And as we expected, these new BDRs crushed it. Just four weeks into this motion, our team hit 100% of their quota for qualified opportunities and two closed won deals. And the way we were able to do that is by leveraging intent data alongside our tried-and-true outbound business development best practices.
The winning strategy for targeting with intent signals
When you’re going outbound, the first thing you do is identify your ideal customer profile (ICP). And while it’s a great start, it’s not enough. You have to cut it down to which of those ideal companies are most likely in a position to buy right now. There are millions of companies out there, but only so many of us. We had four people to work with, so we had to figure out which companies to go after first.
To narrow it down we asked questions like: Which companies out there fit the right profile? Are they showing buying signals for something like Lusha? That’s where intent data comes in – it shows which companies that fit your ICP are currently looking for something like your solution.
The major strength of using intent for something like this is it helps to prioritize accounts. Intent data shows us what companies – and which locations – are actively searching for topics that are relevant to us. For our team those topics were keywords tied to our tool like “lead generation software,” and “outbound sales development” or competitor names.
It’s another layer we can add to our lead scoring to highlight the prospects who would be most receptive to what we have to offer. Knowing who is currently researching solutions we offer allowed our BDR team to hyperfocus on these set locations with highly relevant messaging.
Here’s another way to think of it: I’m not much of a fisherman, but I know you can buy radars for your boat to show you which areas have the most fish. Using that radar you can decide where to throw your net or cast a line. It’s not a guarantee that you’ll catch all the fish, but it’s increasing your odds because you know where they’re likely to be. That’s kind of how using intent data works: it’s a way to give you a more targeted approach by showing you which group is most likely to convert and guiding you to cast your net there.
Intent grants you early access to the buyer’s journey.
Using this intent data also accelerates the pipeline by getting you to engage with the prospect earlier in the buyer’s journey.
In today’s world, 70% of buyers fully define their own needs before they decide to reach out to a sales representative (The Marketing Blender). They already know what kind of solution they want to buy before they even start a conversation with someone who might sell it. As salespeople we always want to know how we can get in there earlier. How can we capture a prospect’s attention before they might have decided to look somewhere else for their solution?
When you pair your outbound prospecting with intent, you can get those interested prospects at that sweet spot in the buyer’s journey. You can reach out to them at the point where they know they have a problem we can solve, but they might not have thought about contacting us yet. They might not even know we exist. And that’s the power of intent – you can more effectively target with warm outbound, where a prospect is ready to hear what we have to say and more likely to buy.
Of course, knowing who to contact is half the battle. The rest is being a good salesperson. Leveraging this intent data has been about 40-50% of my team’s success. Then they had to put in the work to put those contacts into a specific cadence of messaging, go after the right decision makers, and follow it through. Intent signals helped with the messaging too – people get a lot of outreach, and you need to speak to their pain point to cut through the noise. Intent data shows us loud and clear what pain points a prospect faces, and then we can tailor our messaging to show them how we can offer what they need.
Prioritizing creates efficient solutions for outbound sales.
The prioritization power of intent helped our new BDRs hit the ground running. It gave them a direction to start and allowed them to quickly build out a list.
That’s crucial because building out a contact list can be time-sucking. The reps only have 8 hours in a day, and their pipeline has to be continuously filled. But intent data helps them build out those targeted lists quickly.
As a leader, it’s important for me to set my reps up for success and make the best use of their time. Building out these lists with intent data has saved time that’s usually spent on lots of research and manual effort so they can work more efficiently and effectively. This strategy has given them back two hours of their day where they can focus on adding these relevant contacts to their cadence instead of having to spend time hunting for them.
The ROI of leveraging intent signals with your outbound strategy
By the end of their first 30 days at Lusha, our four new BDRs got to 20 approved opportunities, hitting total quota attainment and two closed-won deals. It’s a lot of money to bring in new people, but our intent strategy justified that cost incredibly quickly. Within 45 days of bringing in those new BDRs, they already brought in ROI that canceled out the cost of hiring.
It’s only the beginning of this new motion, but we know that with intent signals we have a warm outbound strategy that’s tangible and predictable, and we’re going to continue scaling up on this front. We may not be psychic – don’t ask us for those lottery numbers just yet – but we can guarantee one prediction will come true: if you leverage intent data alongside outbound efforts, you’ll get more wins.
Key Takeaways:
- Bombora’s intent data helps sales professionals identify the prospects who are interested in what you’re selling and in the market to buy so you can reach them earlier in their buyer’s journey.
- Prioritizing accounts is key to making the best use of your sales reps’ time, and intent data gives data-backed insights to help designate which accounts to go after first.
- Using intent data to turn cold outbound into warm outbound works, and Lusha’s own team is proof of how well it drives success.
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