RevOps: running the signal

Where the leads go

The right answer is wherever your reps already get leads. Don’t build a new place for them to look. We drop into the existing funnel and add context and priority to it.

We write to:

All updates happen in real time, whichever destination you pick.

Fields we create

We create these at the contact and account level in HubSpot or Salesforce. All plain text, so you can build HubSpot lists and Salesforce reports off them without any extra work.

We also write individual activity as Tasks / Activity records, so the history sits on the record rather than in a separate report.

If you connect your CRM, we create these custom fields automatically. It’s a one-click integration.

Emails and phone numbers

When we write to your CRM we enrich with contact info as best we can. Full enrich succeeds around 70% of the time on average.

Account ownership and routing

We can look up account ownership from your CRM. Tell us which fields to read and we’ll follow whatever ownership patterns you already have. Accounts with no owner, or that don’t match anything, can be round-robined.

Our strong recommendation:

• AEs and CS get an immediate email notification for any competitor activity on an account they own. Any activity, regardless of what it is. They know their accounts and can act on it faster than anyone else, and they can direct the BDRs.
• Everything unowned goes to the BDR queue on the normal 48-hour SLA.

See the routing table for who works what by account type. Flagged current customers go to CS, not sales.

Expect accounts outside your ICP

Your competitors sell to companies you don’t target. Those accounts will show up, and that’s information, not noise.

Customers use this two ways:

• Who your competitors are actually selling to. Segments and company types you may not have considered, which can inform your own targeting.
• Job titles you’re missing. We see which personas competitor AEs are taking demos with. If that’s consistently a title you don’t sell to, that’s worth knowing.

What the reps actually see

Don’t make BDRs think. A rep needs two things: a contact, and the SLA they’re working it within. That’s it.

• They use your existing messaging. The signal changes who they call, not how they sell. There are playbooks here if they want the exact words.
• If you use Clay for AI messaging, we can generate the messaging too. Give us the prompt you already know works, and we’ll write the output to Slack, Salesforce, HubSpot, or Clay alongside the contact.

Attribution

Attribution is built in, as long as your CRM has all outreach activity in it. Meetings booked and opportunities created need to be logged cleanly. If they aren’t, no attribution model will save you.

We report meetings and opportunities created:

• After the signal. This is the one you count.
• Up to 30 days before the signal. This one doesn’t prove causation, but overlap with deals already in your pipeline tells you the detection is pointed at the right accounts.

If you want booked meetings to go up, the team has to act within 48 hours of a signal. Without that, holding the pilot to a booked-meetings number isn’t a fair test of the data.

What has to be true for this to work

Be honest about these before the pilot starts, because each one invalidates the measurement.

• You need an already-working outbound motion. If reps can already book meetings and run a talk track, this multiplies it.
• You can’t run other outbound experiments in parallel. If you’re testing new messaging at the same time, you won’t be able to attribute anything to the signal, and it’s unfair to judge it on meetings booked.
• This will not change your outbound conversion rate. It changes who you call. It points you at accounts that are more likely to be in market and to spend money, because they’re evaluating competitors instead of being cold tire-kickers. Your conversion on them looks like your normal cold conversion.

Interception timing

Most flagged accounts are ones your competitors are prospecting. A fraction are live opportunities: about 1 in 4 of the high-priority ones, and 1 in 7 across the whole list.

Accounts merely being prospected aren’t time sensitive. Active opportunities are. By the time a signal is detected, delivered, worked, and a meeting lands, two weeks may have passed since that account started talking to a competitor. You need enough cycle left to compete:

• Early leads (a single signal on the account): your competitive sales cycle should be at least 45 days.
• Later-stage leads (repeated activity across several people): at least 60 days, and they work best when you have a strong late-entry offer.

Under 45 days, interception isn’t viable. The defense play on existing customers still is.

Tiers and the 48-hour SLA

• High and medium priority: multi-channel outreach (phone, email, LinkedIn) within 48 hours. Worked same-day converts much better than worked next week.
• Low / nurture: work manually if you have capacity, otherwise automated sequences plus marketing air cover.
• Without the 48-hour SLA you will not intercept the live opportunities. That’s the whole mechanism.

How the pilot gets verified

What customers measure to decide whether this is worth a long-term investment.

The volume ladder

Before the gates, know what the numbers actually look like, because the gate and the expectation are not the same number.

The gates

The leader-facing version of these same gates is on the leader page.

Ramp

Month one is structurally the weakest. Your team is learning the motion, and detection strengthens over the pilot as coverage and the feedback loop build. Weight the back half accordingly. Longer sales cycles extend the conversion window, not the detection gates.

We’ll do the setup with you

You don’t have to work this out alone, and most teams shouldn’t.

• Connecting your CRM is one click, and we create the custom fields for you.
• Using Clay? Clone our template. It handles updates for every contact we’ve written, and you map the fields from there. You’re welcome to invite us into your Clay table if you’d rather we set it up.
• Want a Google Sheet instead? It updates automatically, in real time.

Ask and we’ll do the RevOps setup with you.

Related: Who works what · How reps work a signal

Print quick-reference →