Researching Accounts Using Signals

What you’ll learn

By the end of this guide, you’ll have a firm grasp of:

• Efficiently leveraging email and Slack alerts for timely actions.
• Utilizing heat maps to identify engagement trends and prioritize personas.
• Accessing critical company insights, such as news, financials, and technographics.
• Uncovering opportunities through similar accounts, highlighted connections, and account hierarchies.
• Using our Chrome extension to simplify and enhance your research.

Why is this important?

Effective account research is the foundation for successful sales strategies. This playbook equips sales teams with the tools and knowledge to maximize their efficiency and impact. By leveraging the insights and signals outlined here, you can identify and prioritize high-value accounts, craft hyper-targeted messaging, and act at the most opportune moments.

With competition fierce and buyer expectations higher than ever, data-driven decision-making is no longer optional—it is essential. This playbook empowers you to uncover trends, align efforts across teams, and capitalize on opportunities that might otherwise go unnoticed. By mastering these techniques, you’ll not only deepen your account knowledge but also strengthen your ability to engage meaningfully and drive results. Use this guide to unlock the full potential of account research and gain a critical edge in your sales efforts.

What you need to get started

• Access to Demandbase One for Sales.
• Access to team accounts if Slack or email notifications are integrated.
• Permission to access key data sources like company news and financial reports.

Key Considerations

Before fully immersing yourself in the platform:

1. Define Your Goals – Are you looking to improve outreach, prioritize accounts, or identify new business opportunities?
2. Understand Scoring – Learn how account engagement scores are calculated so you can focus on the most promising leads.
3. Collaborate – Align with team members to ensure insights are shared and used effectively.

Step-by-step playbook

1. Sales Alerts

Email Alerts

• Send weekly (preferably on Sundays) to help reps organize their week.

• Provide high-level overviews, such as the account’s journey stage, trending intent, and engagement snapshot.

• Review patterns in engagement—look for overlaps between page visits and trending product interests.

Slack Alerts

• Near real-time Slack updates notify you when assigned accounts visit your website.
• Track anonymous or known traffic and view pages visited.
• Receive a notification each time a contact who has filled out a form revisits your website.

Pro Tip: Use this data to refine your outreach with hyper-relevant messaging. Knowing that an account has this level of engagement + engaged people, this will be an account to deep dive into.

2. Heatmaps

• Organize heat maps by persona types and engagement. Focus on who (personas/teams) and what (content/topic) to refine targeting strategies.

• Click on the row/column you want to dive into to view all persona-level engagement from SFDC campaigns (MQLs) over the past 6 months.

• Look for patterns within the activities that drove engagement:
  • People: Are the same individuals returning multiple times?
  • Personas/Teams (via Title): Is there a pattern in the teams showing interest in specific content? If so, we should target these teams.
  • Topics (via Details): Is the content they are viewing related to a particular topic? Use this information to identify individuals and craft targeted messaging.
  • Frequency and Recency of Activity (via Activity Date): Is it the right time to reach out, based on their activity?

Pro Tip: Look at the frequency and recency of activity to prioritize follow-ups.

3. Company News

• Access all macro-level news regarding your account under the “Insights” tab.

• News Agents
  • Use agents to filter news by categories such as expanding operations, funding developments, new offerings, and/or outperforming.
  • Leadership changes? Look for connections with execs who have worked with your company in the past or have initiatives related to your product or service.

Pro Tip: Bookmark public companies with investor presentations to uncover growth areas or priority shifts.

4. Company Financial Reports

• View reports via the “Financials” section in Account Overview.

• Analyze data such as “Management’s Discussion and Analysis” in 10-K or 8-K fillings for executive insights, growth drivers, and strategy.

Pro Tip: Paste financial excerpts into AI tools, like ChatGPT, and search for growth or initiative-related quotes.

• Guidance on Searching 10-Ks
  • Sections to know in a 10-k:
    • Business – Overview of products and services
    • Risk Factors – Significant risks faced by the company
    • Selected Financial Data – Key financial data for the past five years
    • Financial Statements and Supplementary Data – Detailed financial information, audited financial statements
    • Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations – Management’s analysis of the business results
  • Words/phrases to look for in a 10-k:
    • Growth
    • Strategy
    • Opportunity
    • Reporting/Segments
  • Understand the business and business units
  • Search for investor presentations for images for email or presentation
• Guidance on Searching Earnings Calls
  • Locate Company Presentations in Demandbase via News → Agent to find Earnings Call Transcripts.
  • Utilize ChatGPT to summarize key points and create a structure for relevant messaging. Search for terms like growth/strategy.
  • Incorporate this pro-tip from Ralph Barsi

• Use Listen Notes to find executive priorities
  
  • Use the executive’s language in the subject line, especially if you can connect it to your value proposition.
  • Find patterns in the topics the executive talks about.
  • Tailor a message to them or your target personas that mentions this content.

5. Technographics

Technographics can be used to filter your list of potential accounts to find companies that have the technology you are looking for. This information can be used in three ways:

• Competitive: Identify companies that are using a competitor’s product that you want to replace.
• Partner: Identify companies that are a good fit for your company based on the technology they use.
• Overall tech stack sophistication & spending: Identify companies that are using premium technologies and show a willingness to spend on tech.

6. Account Hierarchy

Account Family Trees can help you to:

• Determine the size of a company and potential expansion opportunities to its subsidiary accounts.
• Find accounts where you already have a customer and leverage that relationship to introduce new business within the account family warmly.

7. Similar Accounts

• For smaller teams with larger territories: Find accounts to work that are similar to your prioritized accounts and see their current engagement (blue pill). Use these accounts as examples for messaging the account you’re researching.
• For teams with assigned accounts: Find accounts that are your customers. Reference your customer account to the account you are researching in your outreach.

8. Chrome Extension

• Seamlessly integrate workflows by using the Chrome extension. It lets you access account insights as you browse the web or LinkedIn.

Pro Tip: Save time by directly pulling insights into your CRM or marketing tools.

The results

Sales teams that execute this playbook will be able to research and identify top accounts based on the insights available on DB1S. They can then expect the following:

• Prioritized personas or teams within a target account are identified.
• Messaging around key themes identified in engagement heatmaps and company news is created.
• Slack alerts ensure real-time action is taken when an account is most engaged.
• A template for presenting financial insights to stakeholders for enhanced strategic planning is built.