Employee Spotlights: How We Use Interactive Demo Intent Signals for Outbound

This spotlight features tips from Business Development Representative, Jack Buckley, who heads up the outbound sales motion at Navattic.

On a daily basis, Jack uses interactive demos and other intent signals to reel in, assess, and nurture highly qualified leads. These signals clue Jack into just how interested leads are — in a specific use case, in an enterprise package, in speaking with sales.

Read on to learn how Jack uses intent signals to power his outbound engine, what he’s learned along the way, and how you can implement the same strategies yourself.

Sure — most of it has to do with collecting and acting on intent signals. Here’s how the process breaks down:

1. Create Use Case Interactive Demos

First, we created multiple interactive demos and sprinkled them throughout the site. Each one has a somewhat different use case, so if someone runs through more of one than another, I can gauge what the lead might be most interested in.

Navattic also tracks how many people from an account have engaged with a demo and how long they spent going through it.

2. Use Account Level Tracking

Because none of these demos require users to provide their email addresses, I use Navattic’s account-based engagement data to see what account is going through each demo and how they interact with it (clicks, steps reached, etc).

3. Aggregate Signals in Koala

I pull demo intent signals into Koala, a pipeline generation software, where I’ve also set up signals related to pricing page visits, G2 page views, and other visitor demographics.

Based on which prospects are “surging” — i.e., have completed a series of high-intent activities — I shoot out a connection request on LinkedIn and put them into an email sequence, which I’ve tailored based on their activity so far and the due diligence I’ve done on their company.

Koala tracks and unifies intent signals, which is useful in and of itself. Its prospecting feature also helps me fill in gaps, providing a best guess of a lead’s location, role, and seniority.

But what it’s really great at is automatically scoring each prospect, pointing me to the leads that best match our ideal customer profile at Navattic.

And because these scores are changing in real-time, I set up Slack alerts set up to notify me when accounts have hit a specific intent threshold. That way, I can reach out when the lead is particularly hot — sometimes while they are still on or just left a Navattic demo or webpage.

I’ve got a few tips that might help people looking to level up their outreach:

1. Look At All of Your Data

When you’re just starting to use intent signals, you don’t know what you don’t know.

The number of visitors from an account may be a super important data point. The time spent on a certain webpage or interactive demo maybe even more critical. Or, email engagement may turn out to be one of the most crucial indicators.

My advice would be to track as much as you can and then keep an open mind as you look for patterns.

For example, over time, I found out that visits to the Navattic Docs page (in addition to other interactive demo intent signals) are a strong indicator that a lead matches our ideal customer profile and is in the buying mood.

They either want to know about our integrations, are sharing the page with their technical team, are getting a sense of what it takes to get stood up, or all three.

I never would’ve known that if we hadn’t been tracking that signal.

2. Embrace Trial and Error

In outbound, you’re trying to guess why someone is interested in your product, and you may not always be right.

Knowing that it’s a bit of trial and error going in gives you the freedom to try out different talk tracks and see what sticks.

For example, now I know that if a prospect has a bunch of screenshots on their website, they probably want to show off their tool but don’t yet have an interactive way to do it.

So in my communications, I emphasize the hands-on nature of Navattic, the data we can collect about customers, and any other relevant benefits, which has worked really well.

Pay attention to people’s behavior post-outreach and make note of the techniques that worked best. Then try to refine those over time.

3. Use Intent Signals to Prevent Objections

Here’s an example — many times, AEs will deal with situations where marketers think Navattic is cool, but they need leadership buy-in.

It’s not the most scalable thing in the world, but I’ve had a lot of success proactively tackling this objection by building an example demo for prospects. This helps them better understand what Navattic does — going through an interactive demo on interactive demo software can get a little meta.

After I send it their way, I go into the backend of my Navattic instance and track engagement, including whether they’ve circulated the demo among their team. If their numbers are good, I ask them if they want to see a live demo and pass them along to an AE.

For more ways to incorporate interactive demos into your GTM motion, I encourage you to check out our Customer Interview series. It’s full of actionable tips from industry experts at Fivetran, Dropbox, and Envoy.