Working as an SDR and SDR manager for almost 8 years, I have tried dozens of different cold outreach and prospecting strategies: starting with simple non-personalized mass outreach sequences and finishing with highly personalized targeted campaigns.

One thing I’ve noticed in recent years is that intent-based (sometimes they call it trigger- or signal-based) prospecting is way more effective than other tactics.

So, what’s it all about?

Intent-based cold outreach relies on specific events signaling that a company, account, prospect, or opportunity is ready to purchase software, products, or services. 

Thus, there is no need to reach out to thousands of prospects, as we can focus on the few hundred who are more likely to engage with us. As a result, we can get higher open and reply rates.

So, let’s talk about 1 simple yet powerful intent-based prospecting strategy that is focused on reaching out to prospects who recently changed their position or company.

Intent-based prospecting strategy

So, first of all, how does this strategy work?

Imagine this. A sales director was working in Company A, but then they decided to move to Company B, and now, their new role is VP of Sales.

Typically, it means that they will have more responsibilities & bigger budgets. Thus, they will try to implement new tools, new services, and new playbooks in order to drive the growth of the company they recently joined.

This makes it a great opportunity to reach out to these prospects, as they now may need your tool or your services to achieve their new and/or expanding goals.

So, how can we automate this prospecting tactic, relying on just 4 tools: Sales Navigator, Captain Data, Reply, and Email Finder of your choice? 

Let’s get started with Sales Navigator — one of the prime B2B intent data providers. 

1. All we need to do is to open the Leads Search page.
2. Then, go to the “Recent updates” filters section.
3. And choose the “Changed jobs” option.
4. Now, we need to specify their role in this new company, e.g., VP of Sales.

As a result, we will get a list of intent-based leads who have changed jobs in the last 90 days, and their current position is a VP of sales.

If needed, we can proceed with the basic filters we all typically use with Sales Navigator: location, industry, company size, etc. Thus, we can nail down our list based on our ideal customer profile.

Now it’s time to automate our list-building process.

We will use Captain Data for that.

Captain Data is a powerful, no-code data automation platform that is ideal for extracting valuable buyer intent data to make informed sales decisions. With Captain Data, you can take your intent-based targeting to a whole new level by extracting accurate data points on relevant prospects that have shown specific intent signals, in our case — changing jobs. 

So here is the process:

1. First of all, Go to your Captain Data account.
2. Create a new Workflow from a Template called “Find leads with email from Sales Navigator Search.”
3. Then, copy the Sales Navigator search URL.
4. And paste it to Captain Data.
5. Then follow a few more steps and configure this workflow.
6. As a final step, we need to Connect your Reply account to Captain Data and map fields accordingly.
7. Save and launch the workflow.

That’s how you can automate the workflow once and forever. Once there is a new contact in Sales Navigator, Captain Data will grab all needed information and push contacts to the Reply sequence right away.

Then, all we need to do is create a new sequence in Reply for this specific automation.

Here are a few email templates that could help you with this intent-based prospecting campaign.

Also, we can add a few more email follow-ups to our sequence to increase the chances of a response.

Find even more cool high-performing email templates here: https://reply.io/email-template-categories/follow-up/.

Bottom Line

Successful prospecting has shifted from quantity to quality over the years, and modern sales teams rely on intent signals and data to target their prospects with meaningful outreach at the most relevant time to spark a connection.  

For SaaS companies like ours, the Changed Job intent we’ve discussed helps you prioritize prospects who are most probably interested in acquiring or upgrading to a solution like yours, given their shifting software needs. 

But it doesn’t end there, as there are tons of other intent-based prospecting examples for you to choose from, such as technographic or engagement intent, all depending on your unique audience and business. 

So, gear up with the appropriate tools, such as those discussed today, set up the processes to capture and extract your desired intent signals in real-time, and use them to supercharge your sales prospecting strategy to close more deals.