Signal-Based Selling: 5 Use Cases for GTM Teams

Moving from signal to sale

The vision of signal-based selling—using real-time data insights to engage prospects when they’re ready to buy—has tantalized revenue teams for years. With the breadth of information modern tools make available, it should be easy.

Unfortunately, sellers often need to navigate several different tools and spreadsheets to access these insights. Faced with the prospect of sifting through all this data, they may shut down, ignore it, and resort to instinct. Cue missed opportunities, wasted time, and a less-than- stellar buyer experience.

Instead, sellers need a single stream of prioritized intent signals they can act on with the click of a button—the kind you can find in an AI-powered Revenue Orchestration Platform like Salesloft.

This guide will show you just how easy and effective signal-based selling can be. Read on to explore five practical use cases to improve your team’s performance and buyers’ experiences.

#1 Engaging buyers early

Prospecting is the most thankless stage of the sales process. With buyers doing more self-service shopping, influencing purchases has become more challenging than ever.

But, making contact early in a buyer’s journey can significantly increase your chances of success. It allows you to guide prospects, promptly address their needs and questions, and build a relationship from the start.



To connect with buyers sooner, closely monitor these key early signals

1. Website Activity: Pay attention to which pages a buyer visits, how often, and for how long. Tools like Drift can provide insights into anonymous website visitors, which helps you identify high-intent accounts early.
2. Buyer Intent: Platforms like 6sense, ZoomInfo, and Demandbase capture broader buyer intent signals, identifying accounts that show signs of being in-market for your solutions.
3. Campaign Engagement: Tools like LeanData can capture campaign signals, identifying which marketing efforts are resonating with prospects and indicating a high level of interest.

When you see these primary signals, look for additional signals such as content interaction, social media engagement, and email engagement to confirm you have an in-market buyer.

How to manage multiple signals for early intent identification

Managing a variety of signals can be overwhelming, and it’s impossible
 to act on them effectively without the right technology. A Revenue Orchestration Platform like Salesloft is crucial to helping your sales team identify these early signals and take action at the right moment.

For example, sales teams can use Drift with Salesloft to engage website visitors with a real-time chat window. When a potential buyer interacts with the chat, Drift captures these signals and feeds them into Salesloft. This real-time data helps sales reps identify interested buyers immediately and make contact while the interest is still fresh.

Similarly, the buyer intent providers discussed earlier can add in-market accounts to Cadences in Salesloft. This gives sales teams
a head start targeting prospects with a high propensity to buy.

By using these integrations with a unified Revenue Orchestration Platform, sales teams can better detect early buyer signals and engage potential customers at the right moment with the right message.

#2 Engaging at the right time across the buyer journey

Today, buyers are in the driver's seat. To influence the buying decision, you need to meet buyers where they are in the buying process and build an ongoing relationship with them.

Why timing is the make-or-break factor in B2B selling today

Buyers and sellers are constantly interacting by chat, email, phone, and text, but with a traditional selling process it can feel like they’re talking at cross-purposes. Signal-based selling gives your team the tools to engage customers in a conversation, listening to their needs and responding with the right message at the right time.

When you engage buyers with precision timing, you can regain control of the sales process. Every point of contact becomes an opportunity to gain insights about the buyer’s journey and guide your next steps.

See it in action: Building an integrated workflow across the buyer journey

Salesloft Rhythm brings buyer signals directly into your seller’s workflow, highlighting buyers most likely to convert based on engagement. For example, Rhythm will show who’s primed for a sales conversation based on viewing a series of product pages or consistently opening emails. Specific signals can trigger a Cadence or a Play as the next best action.

• Salesloft Cadence: A repeatable series of steps, or sequence, that mimics your sales process to create a consistent process.
• Salesloft Play: A form of automation that generates one-off tasks. They look for signals from buyer and seller engagement and prompt users to take action.

#3 Upselling and cross-selling with product-led signals

First-party signals from your product surface product qualified leads (PQLs) based on how people buy or engage with your product. (A PQL is a lead in your Ideal Customer Profile who has used your products, seen their value, and shows intent signals for purchase or expansion.)

In contrast to MQLs, PQLs are direct and unambiguous. They already know your product—so it’s essential to find them and give them priority when they show interest.

Unfortunately, if product data is even available to sellers, it’s typically in Salesforce or another dashboard. This causes more headaches than you may realize.

Have you ever walked into a room and forgotten what you were there for? That’s called the “doorway effect,” and researchers have found that it also happens when people navigate from one computer window to another—particularly when they’re actively using their short-term memory for a task.

How to deliver relevant in-product signals to your sellers

Consolidate your first-party and third-party information into one Revenue Orchestration Platform. With your in-product signals integrated into your sellers’ workflow, they don’t have to hunt data down across multiple channels.

Salesloft Signals API gives you a simple way to get relevant data into Salesloft—a consolidated Revenue Orchestration Platform—without burdening the Product team. You can set up custom Plays in Rhythm based on any purchase or use behavior you can imagine.

See it in action: Product-led signals and actions for upsell and cross-sell

#4 Reducing churn with product-led signals

PQLs aren’t just about closing deals. They’re also crucial for catching and addressing signs of churn.

As far as your customers are concerned, you have a wealth of information about them, and you should be able to give them what they want. But most teams don’t actually have that data in a usable format, leading to frustration on both sides.

A Revenue Orchestration Platform that integrates product usage data gives your team the visibility your customers already think you have and signal-based insights to act upon.

How to use product-led signals to reduce churn

Churn is a broad strategic challenge that calls for a top-down approach. Ideally, your revenue leadership has a quarterly goal set to tackle churn. This should kick off a sequence of cross-functional activities:

1. The revenue organization defines retention and churn for the company’s purposes.
2. A revenue operations (RevOps) expert works with analysts to identify likely churn signals.
3. The team develops churn scores and GTM actions to mitigate churn in different scenarios.
4. A developer sets up Salesloft Plays that flag churn signals and assign follow-up actions.

From there, the GTM team can follow up with at-risk accounts as part of a cohesive customer experience.

See it in action: Product-led signals and actions to reduce churn

#5 Optimizing sales and marketing team performance

We’ve established that signal-based selling is great for personalizing individual interactions with leads or customers. It's even more remarkable to see how all that data can optimize overall sales team performance.

When GTM teams operate in silos, revenue teams miss pipeline targets, bicker with marketing about credit or blame, and still don’t know what action to take, when, and with which leads. When you consolidate your data and make it easy to see what to do next, sellers, marketers, customer success, and customers benefit.

How to keep your team synced over long and complex sales cycles

Use a Revenue Orchestration Platform as a single source of truth for your GTM team. It will give team members the information they need to hand off customers across presales, sales, marketing, and customer success while maintaining continuity.

Tactics for success with your Revenue Orchestration Platform:

1. Track and analyze sales activities to identify patterns that lead to successful outcomes
2. Provide real-time feedback and coaching based on individual and team performance signals
3. Foster a data-driven culture by regularly reviewing and acting on performance metrics

See it in action: Tangible business results with Rhythm

When sellers can focus on a holistic buyer journey and engage more responsively, they get more done and close deals faster. Since launching Salesloft Rhythm, customers have reported impressive strides in creating repeatable, scalable, and successful sales motions.

What’s your ideal signal-based selling use case?

Signal-based selling delivers on the dream of engaging leads and customers with the right message at the right time. With the right AI-powered Revenue Orchestration Platform as a one-stop dashboard, sellers can simultaneously see incoming data about leads and customers from all their sources. They can see a priority list of who to contact, find relevant resources, and reach out, all in the same window.

In-the-moment personalized engagement is a game-changer for prospecting and engaging with existing customers. But the power isn’t just in the information you receive—it’s in making it easily actionable and integrating it across your revenue organization to reduce friction for employees and customers alike.