Inform outbound based on news and events Playbook | Common Room

Inform outbound based on news and events

Get a grip on your prospects’ top priorities.

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Getting started

Buying signals come in all shapes and sizes—including company news and events.

But it’s hard for sales reps to keep up with every merger, acquisition, and regional expansion. After all, they can’t stay glued to TechCrunch and The Wall Street Journal all day 📰

In this playbook, we’ll show you how to automatically highlight business-relevant reports and announcements, hone in on high-fit opportunities, and take action fast.

What you’ll need:

Step 1: Create segment

Let’s say our company provides cybersecurity tooling for enterprise organizations.

First, we’d log in to Common Room and go to Segments.

🔦 Product spotlight: Segments Common Room’s segments feature allows you to automatically add individuals or organizations to dedicated lists based on customizable criteria.

Then we’d click New segment, create one for contacts, and customize how people are added to it.

Let’s start by filtering our segment to only display the leads we own within Salesforce.

Next we’ll add a News & events filter. We can customize the filter based on date, category, and keyword.

In this case, we want to surface people active across our digital ecosystem who work at organizations in the news because of a data breach 🔒

We can select News keyword search within the filter and configure it to pull up news stories with the words “data breach” in them.

Common Room will search a database of more than 40 million companies globally that’s refreshed daily to find a match.

Step 2: Filter segment

We want to focus on budget holders, so we'll refine our list by adding a filter for individuals who are tagged as economic buyers.

🔦 Product spotlight: Tags Common Room’s tags feature allows you to automatically label individuals and organizations with specific tags based on customizable criteria.

If no economic buyers at an organization are currently tracked in Common Room, we can always use the Prospector feature to find the right person and add them to our segment.

Finally, we’ll configure our notifications to make sure we’re alerted in real time whenever a new person is added to this segment ⏰

Step 3: Prospect with highly relevant messaging

We want to make sure our messaging is as personalized and relevant as possible (especially in a case like this, where the news may have a negative connotation).

We can click the Preview button over the person’s organization to get a look at the news story in question 👀

Beyond contact information, work history, and other key details, we can also get a look at their recent activities across digital channels, including posts, comments, and reactions.

🔦 Product spotlight: Person360 Common Room’s Person360 feature allows you to deanonymize, merge, and enrich signals from every channel connected to Common Room.

Now that we have a better handle on our prospect, we can add them to a personalized outbound sequence or send them a direct message over LinkedIn or Slack—all without leaving Common Room.

Our message might look something like this:

Outbound template based on news and events
Hi [first name],
Hope the dust has settled after the [name of breach] we spotted on [news outlet].

We help companies like [names of current customers in the same industry] prevent this from happening by using [unique features or functionalities associated with product].

Here’s a [asset that shows differentiator]. Let me know if it’d be worth a convo to explore further.

[Your name]

Wrapping up

Surfacing relevant news and events—and using them to support outbound efforts—just got a whole lot easier 💪
Now you can quickly spotlight opportunities based on business-relevant reports and announcements, drill down to find high-fit contacts, and reach out to them on the right channel—all from the same place.