Guest: Jonathan Spier, Founder & CEO of GetRev
The future of SaaS go-to-market may depend less on waiting for buyers to show intent and more on recognizing the conditions that make them likely to buy in the first place.
In this episode of SaaS Backwards, host Ken Lempit sits down with Jonathan Spier, Founder and CEO of GetRev, to explore the rise of signal-based go-to-market and how AI is changing the way SaaS companies identify, prioritize, and reach their best potential customers.
Intent data was a major step forward for B2B sales and marketing because it gave teams visibility into accounts actively researching a problem or solution. But as Jonathan explains, much of that information is now broadly available. When competitors are working from many of the same signals, knowing who is already in-market may no longer provide the same advantage.
AI opens another possibility: finding the characteristics and changes inside companies that indicate they could be a strong potential customer, even before traditional intent appears.
Jonathan calls these characteristics “exographics.” By analyzing public and semi-public information such as hiring patterns, organizational characteristics, technology environments, and other observable company behaviors, SaaS teams can uncover signals that would be difficult for individual sellers or marketers to identify at scale.
Just as importantly, those signals can be matched against a company’s own historical results. Instead of defining an ICP primarily by static characteristics like industry, revenue, geography, and employee count, GTM teams can ask which attributes actually correlate with engagement, closed-won deals, higher spend, retention, and customer lifetime value.
That creates an opportunity to build a more precise and differentiated SaaS go-to-market motion around the customers your company is uniquely positioned to serve.
Key takeaways:
- Why SaaS GTM teams are looking beyond traditional intent data for their next competitive advantage
- How AI can surface meaningful buying signals hidden in public and semi-public company data
- How exographic signals can help identify accounts before they actively enter the market
- Why traditional firmographics may not be enough to define a high-performing SaaS ICP
- How past wins, engagement, spend, and customer value can reveal the attributes of your best-fit buyers
- Why signal-based targeting can help sales and marketing focus finite resources on higher-potential accounts
Prefer to watch? Check out this episode's video here.
Other resources to check out:
Interview with Vinay Bhagat, Founder and CEO of TrustRadius who publishes a yearly report about how B2B buyer behavior is changing.
The Lead Gen Mistake I Guarantee You’re Making – how to create content that better identifies intent from today’s b2b buyer.
And, if you want an outside look at your content with actionable advice, take advantage of our Content Audit. Valued at $20K in free consulting
