This is the series where we explore signal-based sales plays that drive real results using real-world examples. Namely, ours!
Job changes are one of the most popular buying signals used by sales teams. And for good reason.
Former product champions are 3x more likely to become customers than cold prospects and new execs tend to spend their tooling budgets quickly.
But if every rep is running job-change plays, it gets that much harder to stand out.
That’s why my SDR team at Common Room approaches job-change signals a little differently. They don’t just use them to spotlight warmer-than-average leads—they also use them to get crucial context for their target accounts.
The sales plays they run around job changes see a 17% or higher reply rate and 10% booked meeting rate on average.
Now it’s your turn to take a peek at our playbook.
Primary signal plays
When we say “primary signal plays,” we’re referring to plays where job-change activity is the initial trigger that puts a prospect on our radar.
There’s a variety of ways to tackle job-change activity—it all depends on who’s doing the job changing and what your organization’s relationship is with them. There are too many to list here, but these are a couple of our top plays.
Pro tipNever make a job change your sole reason for reaching out. Job-change activity may be your initial trigger, but it’s important to get account-level context that will help you build a compelling reason to meet. Job changes can indicate that the timing is right, but you still need a hypothesis for why a company should care about your offering in the first place.
Former product champions whose new companies have business-relevant job listings
The what
Former product champions—whether they were power users or purchase decision-makers—are people who advocated for your offering at their last job.
The job listings at their new company—whether for that particular role or additional headcount—are a gold mine of account context, from existing challenges to new business priorities to tech stack configuration.
The why
Helping prospects see the value of your product—and convincing them to fight for it internally—is half the battle. That task gets a lot easier when you’re talking to a bona fide fan.
And if their new gig is advertising openings that align with your product—a problem you solve, a workflow you enable, a technology you compelement—it gives you yet another reason to get in touch.
The how
Common Room tracks both job changes and job listings automatically, right out of the box.
This makes zeroing in on former product champions who are starting high-fit gigs a breeze.
Differentiate between end users and execs. Economic buyers are more likely to live inside your opportunity than inside your product. Just because a former product user changes roles doesn’t mean they suddenly have purchasing power. Think of job changes from non-economic buyers as a chance to gather information. These contacts can help you get the lay of the land at a target account and act as an in to decision-makers.
Step 1: Capture job-change and job listing signals with Common Room
Common Room auto-captures contact and account activity across all of our connected data sources—website, product, CRM, social, community, open-source, you name it. It also pulls in signals from the open internet, including business-relevant job listings.
Person360™, our identity resolution and waterfall enrichment engine, creates a profile for every person and account detected in our digital ecosystem. Job history is revealed alongside contact information, cross-channel activity, firmographic fit, and more.
AI-powered identity resolution and waterfall enrichmentCommon Room’s out-of-the-box identity and enrichment engine uses machine learning models to automatically deanonymize contact and account activity, merge cross-channel signals into unified profiles, and fill in the blanks with rich contextual data.
We can quickly slice and dice contacts based on job-change activity over set time periods and filter our view to only see contacts whose new companies have job listings that mention certain keywords (popular ones for us are complementary tools, like Outreach and other sales execution platforms).
Even better, by using Common Room’s tags feature, we can automatically surface job changes from contacts who match our criteria for product champions.
We created a product champion tag that’s based on product usage and cross-channel engagement. This helps us highlight power users who regularly interact with us across social and community channels.
Then we use automated workflows to tag these individuals at scale.
Workflow automationCommon Room’s intelligent automations build end-to-end workflows using your custom filtering criteria and action endpoints, automating prospecting and outreach based on any combination of contact, account, and activity signals.
Step 2: Automatically segment contacts
Contacts who recently changed jobs, joined companies that match our job listing filter, and are tagged as product champions are automatically added to dedicated segments.
Playbook automationCommon Room’s intelligent automations build auto-replenishing segments using your custom filtering criteria, automating play creation based on any combination of contact, account, and activity signals.
Thanks to Common Room’s team segments feature, we can create one segment and replicate it across the entire SDR team. Each rep’s view of the segment is customized based on their book of business in Salesforce.
These segments are constantly refreshed as new contacts who meet our criteria are detected. We’ve automated alerts so reps are notified in real time whenever new contacts are added to the list.
Real-time alert automationCommon Room’s intelligent automations build real-time alerts using your custom filtering criteria, automating notifications based on any combination of contact, account, and activity signals.
My SDRs burn down their lists in search of economic buyers, ideal personas, and contacts who joined companies that match our ideal customer profile first. Like with our product champion tag, these are all tags we apply automatically using Common Room to speed up prioritization.
Step 3: Outbound based on relationship history and job listing context
My SDRs can easily add contacts to prebuilt outbound sequences in Outreach directly from Common Room.
Native integrationsCommon Room’s natively built and fully managed integrations sync your stack with an AI-powered system of intelligence. Integrations include popular CRMs and sales execution platforms like Salesforce, HubSpot, Outreach, Apollo, Salesloft, Gong Engage, and more.
That said, we personalize the message as much as possible based on our prior relationship with the contact (the AEs and CSMs who worked with them are super helpful here), their new job, and the context we gather from the company’s job listings.
Pro tipKeep in mind that new hires are likely still assessing the situation at their company. They may not be ready to buy just yet. That said, there’s a good chance that they want to rack up some quick wins in their new role. Your messaging should thread the needle accordingly. Opt for softer, low-pressure language wherever possible.
Product usage data also gives us a lot of insight into how former champions used us previously. That—together with the context we have about their new role and company—lets us infer which use cases will likely be beneficial moving forward.
Outbound template for former product champion playsSubject: Back at {{previous company name}}
{{first_name}}—looks like you were a pretty heavy user of {{product name}} back at {{previous company name.}}
Congrats on the new gig BTW—{{current company name}} seems super interesting!
Let me know if this is too much to ask, but my team has been trying to break into {{current company name}} for some time and I’d love to get your thoughts on building a compelling case for the exec team.
I see you’re already using {{complementary tech}} there and I’d love to get {{product name}} back into your hands.
Worth a quick call? Happy to send over a gift card for your time :)
Prospects whose former companies used a competitive technology
The what
People change jobs every day. Not all of those people will be former champions.
But job changers who previously used one of your competitors can give you an in.
The why
Job changers who previously used products similar to yours may not be your biggest advocates, but they’re familiar with the types of problems you solve and have demonstrated a need for tooling in the past.
By understanding which tools they have experience with, you can better position your offering as something they might want to use in their new gig.
The how
Common Room’s Person360 automatically surfaces tech stack details for all orgs active in our digital ecosystem.
This makes it easy to uncover job changers who previously used competitive tooling.
Step 1: Capture job-change and tech stack signals with Common Room
Common Room’s always-on signal capture—combined with automated deanonymization and waterfall enrichment–does the heavy lifting for us.
When we click into our view of contacts, the default display shows both their current org and their last org.
We can click into their previous org to see what their tech stack looked like and quickly search for competitive tools that we can rip and replace.
Step 2: Automatically segment contacts
Contacts who recently joined an ICP-match company and who previously worked at an org that used a competitive tool are automatically added to a segment dedicated to that competitor.
Step 3: Add contacts to preconfigured outbound sequences
We have prebuilt outbound templates for each of our primary competitors. Each one focuses on how we stack up to the competitor in question.
Pro tipTry to templatize as much of the outbound process as possible. Prebuilt sequences for different plays are a huge time-saver and make it far easier to scale outreach based on different combinations of signals and fit criteria. Reps can always customize templates as needed for different situations.
My SDRs can add contacts to the appropriate sequence in Outreach directly from Common Room and handle last-mile personalization based on any other contextual info we have—or they can let our GenAI messaging agent, RoomieAI™, do it for them.
Messaging agentCommon Room’s messaging agent automatically pushes signal data to a self-learning large language model to craft personalized, relevant messaging at scale. Dynamic variables are controlled by you and updated in real time based on contact-, account-, and activity-level data.
Automated workflows allow us to auto-segment contacts and push them to prebuilt outbound sequences with zero human input.
If a RoomieAI message snippet is mapped to that sequence, our AI agent will craft unique messaging for the contact based on preselected variables that pull from all the demographic, firmographic, and behavioral data captured in Common Room.
Outbound template for competitive tech stack playsSubject: {{previous company name}}
{{first_name}}—how’s the new gig treating you?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it looks like you might be pretty familiar with {{competitor name}} and {{!value prop related to competitor tech}} from {{previous company name.}}
Not sure if you’ve been dealing with the same challenges as before, but thought I’d at least reach out to throw our name in the hat as you ramp up and consider similar solutions.
If you haven’t heard about {{product name}}, we do things a little differently than {{competitor name}} by {{!list the capability of how the product works (e.g., capture signals into a single pane of glass and make them actionable for your teams).}}
Is this on your radar at all?
Secondary signal plays
When we say “secondary signal plays,” we’re referring to plays where job-change activity is more about providing additional context versus being the main trigger. It’s just one signal stacked on top of others.
There are far too many signal combinations to list, but here are a couple of examples to illustrate what I mean.
Organizations with existing product usage or web visits that hired a new exec
The what
Product usage and web visits are both popular signals, but they don’t always indicate buying intent.
Layering job-change data on top of these signals can help you discover if this activity is random or if it means a prospect is ready to talk.
The why
At the end of the day, most software is sold when there’s a problem or initiative. If you see groundswell activity within an account, your job is to figure out what that problem or initiative might be.
If a new exec has joined a company, it may mean they’re tackling a challenge or changing priorities, which is causing people to look around for solutions. In this case, you can think of job-change tracking as a form of account research.
The how
You guessed it: Common Room.
That’s the beauty of centralizing all your signal data in one place. We can quickly spotlight product usage, web visits, and other buying signals, then layer job-change data on top.
Step 1: Capture product usage, web visit, and job-change signals with Common Room
With all of our signal data captured in Common Room, we can simply filter our view of contacts to see prospects who are active inside our product or on our website.
From here, we can drill down by filtering for economic buyers who recently changed jobs.
Step 2: Identify economic buyers
The people poking around a free trial of our product or viewing the pricing page on our website won’t always be the purchase decision-maker.
If we see groundswell activity from an account but no executive new hire is present, we can click into the account and use Common Room’s news and event tracking to pull up any mention of new hires.
We can then find that person on LinkedIn and add them to Common Room for enrichment via our Chrome extension.
Another option is using Prospector. We can click into any account within Common Room, tell our prospecting agent to find any contacts who meet our criteria for both job title and job change, and add them to Common Room.
Prospecting agentCommon Room’s prospecting agent retrieves prospects and companies from a proprietary, constantly refreshed database of more than 200 million B2B contacts and accounts based on your custom filtering criteria. These people and organizations are then enriched via machine learning-powered models.
Step 3: Outbound based on product usage and web visit activity
Finally my SDRs will outbound the new executive based on the activity they’re seeing from the account.
Outbound template for groundswell activity playsSubject: {{!#} free trial users at {{current company name}}
{{first_name}}—I’m sure the team over at {{previous company name}} already misses you. Sounds like an epic run over the last {{!#}} years.
Understand you’re likely still assessing the current state at {{current company name}}, but I know most new execs are looking for a couple of quick wins.
Wanted to put one on your radar.
We’re currently seeing {{!#}} free trial users at {{current company name.}} Looks like there’s some appetite to {{!value prop related to product.}}
For example, {{free trial user}} recently {{!list feature usage (e.g., built a list of prospects interacting with your top competitor on LinkedIn).}}
Worth seeing how we can do this at scale for the whole team?
Organizations expanding into a new region that hired a new exec
The what
New state, new country, new continent—companies expand into new regions every day.
Just like with job changes, this gives reps a reason to pay attention.
The why
When orgs set up shop in a new region, it usually means they’ll be adding fresh headcount that will need to be equipped with tooling.
And if they’re entering a region with new restrictions or requirements, it adds yet another reason they might be shopping around for a solution.
The how
Common Room, of course.
Our news event and job-change tracking make it easy to surface accounts that are expanding into new regions and uncover the execs hired to lead the charge.
Step 1: Capture news event and job-change signals with Common Room
Both news event and job-change tracking come right out of the box.
Common Room automatically handles all the prep work in terms of signal capture, identity resolution, and enrichment.
Step 2: Automatically segment contacts
We auto-segment executive job-changers who recently started at companies that are expanding into a new region and who are located in that region.
Step 3: Outbound based on account research
My SDRs dig into the account to understand more about the expansion and how our product might help.
RoomieAI comes in very handy here. In addition to our messaging agent, RoomieAI also offers an account research agent.
Research agentCommon Room’s research agent scours the open web to answer any account-level research questions that need answering. Out-of-the-box and custom prompts let you instantly spotlight key information to power outbound, from earnings calls and annual financial statements to user sentiment and product feedback.
Reps can ask RoomieAI anything they want and our research agent will return results from earnings calls, 10-K releases, news articles, and more to help them better understand the org—from product lines to competitors and everything in between.
Then my SDRs will outbound execs based on their findings.
Outbound template for regional expansion playsSubject: {{region}}
{{first_name}}—was reading {{current company name}}’s Q{{#}} earnings report earlier this year. Cool to see this expansion finally come to life.
Must be an exciting time leading the {{region}} expansion right now.
Had an idea for a quick win for the team.
The competitive landscape is quite different in {{region}}, but it looks like most of your competitors aren’t {{!value prop related to product.}}
Here’s {{!provide real-world example of what your product can do.}}
Worth seeing how we can do this at scale for the whole {{region}} team?
Job changes are an excellent buying signal. They can help with timing, research, messaging, and lots more. But they’re even more powerful when combined with other signals.
Compared to traditional cold outbound, our job-change plays drive:
- 2x higher reply rates
- 2x higher booked meeting rates
Job-change activity—either as a primary trigger or a piece of account context—is now a key part of our pipe gen motion.
Keep an eye out for the next edition of Plays that pay. Got a specific signal you want us to cover? Let us know.
Turn job changes into more meetings with Common Room
Get started for free or get in touch to see how Common Room’s AI-powered customer intelligence platform helps you capture, enrich, and take action on every buying signal.
