What is contact tracking and how to use it?

According to a recent report, some 50 million U.S. workers quit their jobs in 2022. With PwC predicting that 26% of workers are poised to leave their jobs this year — compared to 19% who shared that sentiment last year — it follows that sales teams without the right tools will have an incredibly difficult time keeping CRM data up-to-date.

At a high level, contact tracking helps sales teams and customer success managers track buyer job changes, ensuring that they always have accurate contact information for each of the hundreds or thousands of people they’ve done business with over the years. Whenever a champion, buyer, or power user switches jobs, sales teams receive automatic notifications and can take action to continue building and nurturing the relationship. 

Whereas account tracking focuses on monitoring and managing all aspects of customer and target accounts — including account-level activities, relationship management,  potential growth and expansion opportunities, and movement at target accounts (e.g., hiring a new decision maker) — contact tracking focuses on individuals instead of entities. This helps teams maximize the value of already-established relationships. Whenever a contact moves to a new position, sales teams that prioritize contact tracking have a much easier time finding warm pipeline, which accelerates their efforts by reducing their reliance on inefficient cold prospecting outreach.

With so many buyers changing jobs, LeadIQ is launching new contact tracking features to help ensure prospect, customer, and champion data is always accurate and current. To help you get the most out of whichever contact tracking tool you use, let’s take a look a more detailed look at how teams can leverage this crucial technology and explore some best practices when implementing into your workflows or processes.

Understanding contact tracking for sales teams

Sales teams have long understood the importance of contact tracking, but many have struggled to do it effectively. With robust contact tracking capabilities in place, different departments enjoy a number of game-changing benefits.

Sales leaders

Whenever important contacts switch jobs, sales leaders receive automatic alerts and notifications, enabling them to easily stay on top of who works where. This can help them identify timely business opportunities when contacts change jobs.

Sales leaders should work with their reps to identify the best individuals within a target account to track. Typically, salespeople should track contacts who align with target buyer personas, decision makers and buyers, existing users and champions, folks at key accounts, and industry influencers, among others.

Sales operations

When sales ops teams monitor buyer job changes with contact tracking solutions, they get the peace of mind that comes with having exceptional data accuracy and hygiene. Instead of having to manually update records in a time-consuming, error-prone process, technology handles this automatically. As a result, sales operations teams reclaim time that they can then invest in other important areas of operations — like data analysis, reporting, and managing the daily fire drills tossed to them by sales and marketing.

Marketing teams

With contract tracking, marketing teams can begin engaging champions, buyers, and power users whenever they end up at new companies. By following contacts to their new organization and personalizing outreach from a familiar brand, marketers can nurture existing relationships and keep quality leads warm.

Contact tracking also enables marketers to identify expansion opportunities within existing accounts. When contacts switch jobs, marketers can begin understanding potential new responsibilities and pain points the other team members have. From there, they can identify cross-selling and upselling opportunities.

Customer success managers

By receiving automatic notifications whenever a contact leaves a customer account, customer success teams can maintain account continuity. Once they receive an alert, customer success can identify new contacts within the organization, initiate introductions with key team members, and ensure a smooth transition to the new point of contact.

Additionally, contact tracking helps customer success managers increase renewals. When customer success teams are aware that a champion who leads a key account has switched jobs, they can quickly determine who the new contact is. That way, when it’s time to renew, the team won’t have to scramble to figure out who to talk to and can build new relationships within the account ahead of time — instead of making the customer feel like an afterthought.

Best practices for effective contact tracking

Unfortunately, sales teams can’t simply decide to turn on contact tracking and get great results right away. Follow these best practices to increase the chances your investment in contact tracking pays dividends sooner than later.

Ensuring data accuracy and data hygiene

Unlocking the full potential of contact tracking is only possible when your team is able to trust the data that’s being used to keep records current. As you begin searching for a contact tracking solution, you need to ensure the products you’re considering are able to deliver highly accurate and clean data, with zero errors and no duplicate records.

Implementing contact tracking processes and workflows

For the best results, teams need to implement automated contact tracking processes and workflows to ensure that this important work is facilitated continuously and reliably. Leading solutions pull data from several different sources and can automatically update Salesforce data after a list of accounts and contacts to be tracked is created.

Build a specific playbook for job changes

You can’t use the same sequence on a former champion as you do for your cold outreach. Build out a specific sequence for job changes that is more open ended and friendly to hopefully start a conversation.

Training and educating teams on contact tracking

You can’t expect your team to be super excited about contact tracking if they’re not familiar with what it is and how it’ll help them work more effectively. Prior to rolling out contact tracking technology, spend some time training impacted stakeholders and ensuring they know exactly how contact tracking will make life easier.

Choosing the right contact tracking tools

Wondering how to receive job change notifications for sales teams? The easiest way is to purchase a purpose-built sales intelligence platform that includes contact tracking functionality.

As you begin searching for a solution, you’ll soon find out there’s no shortage of options on the market. From UserGems and Champify to ZoomInfo and Apollo, there are a lot of products to choose from.

We may be a bit biased, but we believe that LeadIQ is the ideal contact tracking solution for ambitious, high-performing sales teams. With LeadIQ, sales teams can:

• Identify prospect and contact data the competition can’t and automatically capture it in the system of record
• Determine the best times to reach out to key accounts and buyers for warmer outreach
• Tailor outreach with ease by generating personalized cold emails in just a few clicks
• Connect to the tools they use every day, including Salesforce, LinkedIn, Salesloft, Slack, Outreach, Gong, and HubSpot, to create a single source of truth
• And more!

If you’d like to learn more about our new Contact Tracking features, you’ll want to check out our product page. To see the power of LeadIQ Contact Tracking with your own eyes, you’ll want to request a demo.