One of the most common questions we get from customers is: this data is really awesome, but how do we best leverage it? We’ve spoken to dozens of top sales leaders, AEs, and founders and are excited to share best practices in this guide!

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Most important tips

The most important concepts are:

  • Speed to lead. Try to get a message out the moment you notice intent (customers report that the intent intensity usually decays by 50% within 2-4 hours). Even something simple while the intent is high is better than sending the perfect message tomorrow. By tomorrow, there’s a good chance that your potential buyer is thinking about a new problem in the business.

  • Understand what your prospect cares about. Koala makes it easy to do lots of account research in under five minutes. Your primary goal is to figure out what each person cares about. You can use Koala’s profile pages to understand each person’s motivations — including who they are, how engaged they are, and what specifically they care about.

  • Be genuinely helpful. After you’ve figured out what they care about, figure out how you can be genuinely helpful to them. If you’re looking at an end user, figure out where they are stuck and offer a nudge. If you see an executive buyer checking out a broader resource, use that to tell them about an ROI story that might be interesting. Simple messages that (1) come at a moment of high intent and (2) are genuinely helpful perform much better than long sequences.

  • Multi-thread the account. By looking at the account profile, you have special knowledge about what the whole picture looks like. Often, individuals at companies aren’t talking to each other about what vendors they are researching. But you have everyone in one place and can put together patterns/figure out how to connect the dots for the account.

    • Example: if you see a “software engineer that keeps going to Vercel’s Edge Function docs”, you could target the CTO with a message: “would multi region serverless functions be impactful to your team this year?”

When the above happens, customers have reported positive response rate in the range of 20-40%. It does take a little longer than a cold email (15-20 minutes as opposed to 5 minutes), but for a 10x better response rate and a happy prospect, we think it’s worth it!

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How much should I “know” about their site activity?

Most customers prefer to not directly reference site behavior — what we like to call the “mind reading” game:

Lots of companies like XYZ tend to need ABC feature, so I wanted to ensure that you had a good understanding of this offering and where it fit into the overall package

If the person was in a logged-in context or filled out a marketing form, then it makes more sense to reference direct activity. Something like:

I was reviewing your account and saw that several folks had been poking around with hobby accounts at [our company]. I figured there might be enough interest at this point that we could get everyone together and do a walkthrough of the Enterprise Tier parts of our platform.

Whatever you do, you want to make sure that your knowledge of their interactions does not give them a “big brother” feel. Showing an unnatural amount of knowledge about their activity could turn them off, especially if they aren’t expecting it!

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Examples of Koala Wins

Here are some examples of this in action, starting with the first meeting we ever booked with Koala!

Intent Signal was 3 users had just signed up for a workspace; I realized I had met the founders once about 3 years prior.

Long time no chat!! It brought me great joy to see you guys playing with Koala a bit. Would love to chat about your experience thus far and see if I can help with any suggestions. Always looking to hear what folks think and how it could be better!

[CALENDAR LINK]

Congrats on all the progress w/ [PROSPECT_COMPANY] - looks awesome! Tido

Intent Signal was fired when 3 new emails added in the past week to a workspace that already had 10 active users

Hi [PROSPECT],

I noticed that many other members of your team are looking into [XYZ] or using the free version of it!

Is your team considering [XYZ]? We’ve actually had a few companies like [comparable company 1] and [comparable company 2] starting using [XYZ] recently. Whenever we see a great company like [PROSPECT_COMPANY] look into us, we like to reach out, establish a relationship, and make sure we are aligned with your goals.

Are you open to a zoom meeting next week?

Best, [SDR]

Intent Signal was a CTO was looking at technical docs. CTO didn’t realize that another team at the company was already looking at the product.

Hi [CTO], I just tried calling you. It looks like my colleague has a call booked with [OTHER_TEAM] on Friday, would it make sense to add you to the calendar invite as well? Our team here at [XYZ] thinks [PROSPECT_COMPANY] has a great use case for our platform and it’s great that you’re already seeing value in [XYZ]!

All the best, [SDR]

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Got a great Koala Win?

Email [email protected], we can help you anonymize it as needed, and we’d love to post here so other reps can learn from you!

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FAQ

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Got any more questions?

Email [email protected], we’ll answer them, and post it here for others!

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