I have been a contributing writer to FreePint, a UK based information services journal, for several years now.  Unfortunately, most of my work rests behind a subscription firewall, making it difficult to share content to non-subscribers.

Last week, my most recent piece, “Detecting Latent Sales Opportunities via Sales Triggers” published.  The article discusses how sales reps use sales triggers to identify emerging demand for B2B products and services.  While traditional reps followed the money to customers and prospects with long-standing demand patterns, trigger-driven reps focus on “agile organisations in a state of flux”.  Unfortunately, many of the firms with established demand are subject to institutional inertia due to established purchasing patterns and relationships.

But firms that are in a state of flux are less beholden to historic decisions and relationships and more willing to accept the risk of adopting new products, services, and processes.  Flux is often tied to trigger events such as M&A activity, PE/VC funding, and executive changes.  For example, a new CMO is not beholden to historic decisions, but can freely evaluate Martech and AdTech vendors.

When evaluating sales trigger vendors, precision is a key quality variable.  You want to purchase a service that has high precision for both company and subject tagging.  The service should also have strong de-duping so that sales reps do not receive more than a few hits on any event (and no direct duplicates of articles and press releases republished on different sites or with trivial modifications).

Sales Trigger Precision (STP) should be viewed as

STP = Company Accuracy * Topic Accuracy * (1 – Duplicate Frequency)

Thus, if company or topic accuracy fall below 90% or the duplicate frequency exceeds 10%, the overall STP falls quickly.  Unfortunately, if precision is low, then sales reps will quickly begin ignoring their trigger feeds or turn them off.  Then a valuable resource goes to waste.

While determining the overall accuracy of a sales intelligence service is difficult, setting up a few triggers and measuring the STP is fairly straightforward.  Just make sure you use the same companies and topics when comparing vendors.  Even better, if you can run your benchmark over the same period then you will have an even stronger test.