Sales “Triggers” : Guess what you should do when you see a spike in Product Usage? It’s not what you’re thinking

Attn: Revenue Operations for Open Source, Freemium or Trial products

Sales Pros keenly understand the value of timing. Activity of the prospect gives you an understanding of when and more importantly how to engage. The most valuable “Activity” that correlates to a prospect being most open to beginning a dialog is their product usage. PQL

“Activity” : defined as the key action within your product (ie deploy, add integration, add server, etc). If you don’t know the Key Action then use how often they Login as a proxy.

Buyer Stages: What’s the best indicator that the prospect is ready to be helped and most receptive to starting a dialog?

1) Single day spike for one user?

Buyer Stage: “Sniff test” — Initially people spend 5–15 minutes to validate if this product is worth further investigation. They may initially try to break the product with an Enterprise edge case to see what it’s limits are. (ie if this product can’t even handle Z amount of data then it’s a show-stopper) This is seen as a 1 day or singular spike in usage.

Activity per day for 1 user

Should you chase? NO

The vast majority of teams will chase this one-time spike but the user is not ready yet to begin a dialog. You’re wasting your most valuable sales resource = time.

This is however an opportunity to Dodge Low → Punch High

2) “Sustained” spike within a 7 day period for one user?

Buyer Stage: “Deep Dive” — at this point the user is showing they have dedicated time to evaluate the product. Typically they will spend multiple days running various Use Cases and Stress Tests. Engineers will definitely try to break the product to see what the limits are.

The red line shows a Last 7 Day Average of Activity which has reached >3X previous baseline so the spike has been sustained

Should you chase? YES

This indicates that there is more focused evaluation happening where they are much more likely to be in a position to engage. Note, you should lead with teaching a high value point of your product. Knowing how the Activity metric is defined will give you context to why should reach out and help them evaluate faster. Don’t sell, HELP.

3) Sustained spike over 7 days with 3 users on 3 individual accounts?

Buyer Stage “Social Proof”: Only after the single Engineer has vetted the product on their own will they invite others to expand the evaluation use cases. Do their peers share the first engineer’s account? Unlikely. Why? Because they want to do their evaluation in isolation to ensure thoroughness and objectivity.

Key Activity of 3 users (red/orange/green). Blue is the sum of all users + accounts. Purple is the 7 day Average to indicate it is sustained for a period of time and not a one-time spike.

After a Sustained Spike in User Activity is seen, the next ? is “Who”

Demographic + firmographic qualification filters must be applied. The Octothorpe is the single most important (previous post here)

(@gmails are a typical problem in Open Source/Freemium and a blindspot Whalr uniquely solves)

Here’s an example of Whalr Intel which is triggered immediately when there is a Sustained Activity Spike with an Account which meets the Ideal Customer Profile firmographic criteria.

Find a way to setup Sales Intel that monitors and triggers so that your SDRs & Sales Pros are focusing their time on the prospects that are Acting in a way that makes them more open to learn something. If you can teach your prospect something and help them evaluate faster you’ll differentiate yourself from 98% of the competition.

Here are more examples of different Whalr Intel triggers that we monitor to help sales teams focus more effectively

Moneyball for SaaS