Champion tracking setup guide for everybody + FREE DIY CHECKLIST

Originally published on LinkedIn. This piece further expands on my leveraging buyer signals post.
🎵 We are the champions, my friends.
And we'll keep on fighting till the end
We are the champions. 🎵
But wait…who actually are the famous “champions?”
In B2B, we call every former/power user of your product or service a “champion.”
Let’s say you have a power user named Max, and they move to a new role at a business that fits your ideal company profile (ICP). At that moment, Max goes from being a power user to an advance scout — an ambassador sent ahead of the troops(AKA your sales team).
Max knows your product or service. They understands its use cases. So, it’s pretty likely they’ll become your champion at their new company.
TL;DR: The champion job change signal lets you track customers when they change jobs. Think of it as step-changing the new hire sales trigger.
Before we dive in, here are five reasons why the champion job change trigger should be one of your biggest pipeline generation bets:
There are a lot of different B2B signals or sales triggers to consider. But few triggers or signals beat the 3X average close rate you get with champion tracking. Not to mention when your sales reps reach out, they aren’t calling a COLD prospect 🥶
But those aren’t the only benefits champions bring to the table.
Many champions are highly motivated to make an immediate impact in their new positions. That usually means hiring team members and investing in new products and services like yours. And since they’ve already used your solution before, they know what to expect. This makes them ideal leads for your sales team to pursue.
Champions typically fall into one of two categories:
The beauty of this sales trigger is that it scales as you grow — the more customers you’ll have, the higher the volume🤓
For each type of champion job change signal, you’ll need to have a dedicated process and separate messaging.
With key decision makers, you want to have more touchpoints than with end-users as they’re more strategic. A great way to begin the conversation is to start with providing value for free.
For instance, offering direct access to relevant and helpful gated content. If your content truly is valuable to the lead, you’ll be adding some reciprocity bias to the mix 😈
Ideally, this email should be sent from the Customer Success Manager ( CSM) that managed the account when the decision maker was at their former company. Then, sales can take the lead on any communication going forward.
Here’s what a potential sales sequence looks like with a champion decision-maker:
And here’s what your initial outreach email to one of them could look like:
End-users might not be in a decision-making role, but they can introduce you to the people who are. Here’s an example of an email you could send to a champion end-user:
To maximize coverage, have a “fallback” strategy. This could be a second sequence to target the decision-makers in the company.
In case your champion doesn’t make the intro — not necessarily because they don’t want to, but because they don’t have time, or it’s not a current priority. In this sequence, you can mention the champion end-user by name to engage and create trust with the decision-making lead.
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So how do you track champion job changes manually before jumping to purchase a third-party solution?
To start, you’ll need a list of your customers companies, related contacts, and their LinkedIn profile URLs.
Once you have their LinkedIn profile URLs, you can extract their job title and company information by using a LinkedIn data extractor (such as, Snov.io, Phantombuster, or Captain Data.)
Next, check if the current companies of these contacts match with any of your target accounts. You can do all of this with a spreadsheet and an “IF” formula.
The DIY version is not ideal nor sustainable because it’s time-consuming. But it could be enough to prove the value and ROI of tracking job changes to your team and management before scaling to an automated solution.
Now things are getting interesting. You have a big enough customer database to ensure that tracking job changes will make an impact on your bottom line, and you have the data to prove it.
When it comes to automating tracking job changes, you have two options:
In most cases, building an internal job tracking solution can be done using a LinkedIn data extractor as described earlier.
But if you want to make it less hands-on, you’ll need:
Ideally, a good internal solution will include:
At Spendesk(where I previously worked), we were tracking customer job changes by:
To track this intent, we used the following data:
As you can see, building an internal job tracking system requires some software engineering skills and tools such as Cargo and Hightouch.
Additionally, it also requires ongoing resources to maintain and fix product issues. If you don’t have the time or resources to plan, build, maintain, and use an internal job tracking system, a third-party solution like UserGems is probably your best bet.
Using a third-party job tracking platform like UserGems comes with a lot of benefits. Especially since they’ve made the entire process automated and user-friendly. Plus, when it comes to use cases, they’ve mastered them, hands down.
Here’s what implementing UserGems looks like:
For example:
If you need messaging inspiration for your champion audience, you can take a look at their customer job changes messaging playbooks.
With a third-party solution, your team only needs to focus on reaching out to your champions instead of researching or manually adding them to sequences. This ensures your team can act on these most valuable leads immediately.
To get the best out of this sales trigger, you need a suitable ops and enablement processes.
For sales:
For ops:
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Your champions are some of the warmest and most qualified leads you can get. But if you aren’t tracking job changes, you could miss out on some of your best opportunities to close a deal.
Manually tracking your champion job changes can be done, as long as you have the time and resources to do it.
But if you don’t, let UserGems automate the entire process for you. From updating contact information and noting relevant connections to updating roles and merging account details, UserGems has you covered. Try a free demo today to find out exactly what it can do for you.