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Today’s B2B buyers are time-strapped and overwhelmed with information, making sales harder than ever. Being able to communicate with the correct context and timing is essential as a sales representative. Trigger events may help you prospect for clients by putting you in front of the right buyers with the appropriate context for beginning a discussion.
What is a Trigger Event?
A trigger event is an occurrence that promotes buyer awareness of the possibility for change or the need for what a vendor provides. Trigger events may happen in a variety of contexts, including at the executive, departmental, and even personal level within a company. Market volatility, environmental or economic adversity, and reputation concerns are all possible trigger events.
Triggers provide an excellent view into how a company is changing, allowing your sales team to see future possibilities. When a firm undergoes major changes such as mergers and acquisitions, it’s more likely to embrace new technologies or collaborate with different companies.
“Sixty-three percent of best-in-class firms currently deploy formal trigger event tools – notifications, RSS feeds, alerts, posting / tagging updates and the like – among their front-line sellers.”
Sales managers can take advantage of trigger events if they fully understand the characteristics of their ideal client profile (ICP). Sales leaders should comprehensively comprehend the characteristics of an ideal buyer, which range from basic facts such as company size, sector, and location to technology adoption, revenue, and growth rates.
These attributes are not the same as triggers. It’s not enough to just study a company by looking at its features. It’s also vital to identify who within your target companies will be making purchase decisions regarding your product or service, as well as what influences those decisions.
This implies that trigger events are not created equal; therefore, an in-depth knowledge of your ideal customer profile, buyer personas, and purchasing behaviors is required for creating a successful B2B trigger event selling approach.
By uploading a list of your existing clients to a tool like the Triggr platform, you can receive a graphical representation of what your ideal customer profile looks like. This tool will build out a profile based on firmographic and technographic data, which will be helpful in setting the fundamentals for your B2B trigger-event selling strategy.
Examples of Useful Trigger Events
Growth, location, financial, recruiting, and legislative actions are categories of trigger events that be detected. Below are some examples of trigger events that B2B sales professionals monitor for using tools such as the Triggr platform and an explanation of why they are important to track.
- Financial Activity: Any M&A activity is a sign of a company’s transformation. Changes in hiring, financing, and operations are expected throughout the organization, meaning new chances to use innovative technologies and methods. Further, a company’s announcement of financial progress might be a signal that change is required. Poor results, for example, may be an indication that management is seeking to embrace innovation, which you may utilize to advertise your product or service.
- Appointment of C-Suite executives: In a short time, the new C-Suite executives are frequently expected to bring about change and obtain results. As a result, their capacity to make decisions and desire for improvement makes them more likely to utilize cutting-edge technology and methods. This potentially opens up new opportunities for you.
- Hiring Surge: Hiring sprees might represent company-wide reform, which suggests that they are more receptive to new ideas. Alternatively, it might be a sign of outstanding internal performance—either of which can be strong buying signals.
- New Technology Installs: Identifying who is using technologies with which you have partnerships/integrations is one of the most effective strategies to take advantage of the signal of new technology installations. Look for firms that have recently started utilizing Hubspot in your ICP if your product works with it. They will be more likely to buy if your product or service works well with them.
Other examples of trigger events that are important to track on a tool like the Triggr platform are:
- New Job Postings
- Hiring Surges
- News/Media Mentions
- Office Location Changes
- Fundraises
- Website Updates
- Customer Role Changes
- Buyer Persona Role Changes
Why is having a strategy important when using trigger events?
It’s important to note that not all trigger events are relevant to every business, which is why having a customized B2B trigger selling strategy is so crucial. Before creating a B2B trigger event selling plan, you must first map out your ideal consumer profile (ICP).
Knowing your buyer characteristics and concerns will assist you in developing a plan and selecting the right people for your events. The following example illustrates why customizing your trigger events is so important.
Let’s assume that you’re a sales development representative for a company that sells an HR solution that links to human resources systems like Workday or SuccessFactors and serves more than 1,000 people in the financial services industry.
Every time a company starts using Workday or SuccessFactors, it represents an opportunity for you to engage with the contextual context around the trigger event. This isn’t particularly beneficial for a salesperson looking to sell marketing automation software to the head of marketing at small businesses.
As a result, every business or sales person will need their own correctly identified ICP and buyer personas. The characteristics of firms that are appropriate for what you’re selling are defined in your ICP. This is when you figure out what changes signal an opportunity and how to keep track of them in order to reach out at the correct time with the proper context.
For example, if you discover that aspects you’re searching for in your ICP is that the company is present in your country and is a fast-growing business, the triggers you’d be monitoring would be company expansion into your nation and strong financial performance.
B2B sales triggers can help you customize and personalize your sales pitch after you’ve identified when you want to reach future prospects. Triggers are beneficial in both timing and context, as they “warm up” the conversation we’re about to have.
They demonstrate the research and relevance behind your cold outreach. When you have a reason for contacting your prospects, they will be more receptive to your message.
After establishing a contact with a cold call, you can utilize triggers in a variety of ways. Adapting your sales team’s approach to sales outreach, sending automated marketing emails based on a trigger, creating relevant gated content around it, and sharing additional related material are just a few examples.
Marketers discovered that action on trigger events could save them 80% on direct mailing costs. All of this will help you sell better in the future.
How do you find trigger events?
There are many tools that exist to help you detect trigger events, one of which is Triggr. This platform can first help you find lookalike clients to your current ones using a combination of firmographic and technographic data.
Next, these tools will help you build trigger events that are relevant to your business and send you real-time alerts when these company and individuals changes occur.
Overall, trigger events are a very potent weapon for salespeople to utilize. They will aid in shortening your sales cycle and increasing the efficiency of your team by providing background and motivation for the sales discussion.
It was recorded that out of a group of 206 sales professionals, 20% more of those who utilized sales triggers met their sales target. As a result, it’s critical to keep using them and improving your selling approach from there.
Tom Rielly is the founder of Triggr – A B2B SaaS tool that helps sales teams uncover opportunities.