Innovative approaches are essential in today’s challenging sales environment, defined by competitive pressures, prolonged sales cycles, and budget constraints. During my work, I’ve found an unexpected resource for sales intelligence: job listings. Far from simple recruitment tools, these listings are invaluable for data-driven strategies, providing deep insights into market dynamics and opportunities.
What is job listing data?
As most readers probably know, job listing data comes from online job ads. It includes data points such as job title, description, qualification requirements, and more. While a great insight source for HR tech platforms (talent analytics, sourcing, and mapping) and investors (competitive analysis, technographic insights), job listing data can offer interesting ideas for salespeople as well.
Most job ads come from online platforms like, for example, Indeed, Glassdoor, or StackShare. In the best-case scenario, your database will combine all sources, provided you want to gather as much information as possible. Now, let’s see how to put these job listings into action.
Uncovering business needs through job listings
Building a sales strategy involves two key steps. The first step is to determine your goals and ways to achieve them. The next one is finding new goals or methods by analyzing data. Let’s focus on the latter.
To develop a successful sales strategy, you must look beyond the descriptive data in your job listing dataset. Let’s say you find that a few companies in your area have been hiring extensively. They are in a totally different industry, so you’re not competing with them and have nothing to worry about.
But what does this data mean for you? If you supply office supplies, you can offer water coolers, printers, or anything else you’re selling. If you provide insurance, they might be interested in changing their provider. All you need to do is contact at the right time, which may be now.
Such job listing data analysis provides a richer and more comprehensive view of your market. You can then discover new leads and avoid nearly worthless cold-calling.
More examples of job posting data insights
Let’s check for more examples of the insights you can get from job data. While not all of these may be directly related to sales, they still can benefit your cause.
Observation 1. Increase in customer success or support role postings
- Trend: This suggests a focus on enhancing customer experience.
- What should I do? Propose solutions that enhance customer relations, capitalizing on the company’s intent to improve customer engagement and satisfaction.
Observation 2. Surge in tech-related role postings, like data analysts or software developers
- Trend: Indicates a shift towards digital transformation or tech upgrades.
- What should I do? Offer tech solutions or software services that align with the company’s evolving technological needs. Data analysts probably mean the company will buy data or scrape the web itself.
Observation 3. Usage of specific technologies or platforms mentioned in postings
- Trend: Reveals a company’s current tech ecosystem or interest in new technologies.
- What should I do? Map the technologies that businesses lack and offer alternative or complementary products that fit or enhance their existing technological framework.
Additionally, the size of the company and industry sector, gleaned from these postings, can provide further context. Based on my tracking, smaller, growing companies might favor innovative, flexible solutions, while larger enterprises typically seek scalable, comprehensive services.
By paying attention to these aspects of job listings, sales professionals can better understand and predict the business needs of both existing and potential clients. These indicators allow for a more effective sales strategy tailored to each company’s specific requirements and goals.
Finally, I want to mention that combining job listings with other datasets adds even more use cases. If you have employee and company data, you can check where your tool is being used now. And when a decision maker leaves for another company that doesn’t use your product, you may contact them and make a new deal.
Identifying tech trends and sales opportunities
I also want to discuss the tech industry and ways for it to leverage job listing data. Specifically, I’ll look into how you can identify technology trends and potential gaps for new product offerings.
Extracting technographic insights
Closely analyzing the technology stacks and tools mentioned in job postings provides key technographic insights. The frequent mention of specific software or programming languages reveals trending technologies and opens opportunities to offer competitive products.
For instance, if a company regularly mentions using an emailing tool Sendsend, it indicates a potential market for proposing alternatives such as Maimail. This strategy focuses on positioning your products as superior alternatives within a company’s technology landscape, complementing and enhancing its existing tech ecosystem.
I also want to remind you that combining different datasets can increase the value of your insights exponentially. Let’s say you also have a dataset of company product reviews. You may find that negative Sendsend reviews have been piling up recently, which you can use as leverage.
Extracting firmographic insights
Geographic location and industry type are other vital indicators. An increase in tech-related job postings in a specific region could indicate an emerging market for technology products there. Being the first to offer hardware or software for these new departments can help form a long-lasting partnership.
Similarly, shifts in hiring patterns across different industries point to sectors experiencing growth or transformation. For example, a rise in digital marketing roles in the healthcare sector could signal an increasing need for digital health solutions.
Let’s say your company has a product aimed at SMBs with 50 or more employees. You see a medical company with a headcount of 30 hiring 10 more people. On your sales platform, you create a note to contact them when ten more specialists join, increasing conversion chances.
These firmographic and technographic insights from job listings enable sales teams to focus their resources effectively. By leveraging this data, sales strategies can be adapted to target growing sectors and regions, ensuring efforts are concentrated where the growth potential is highest.
Spotting talent gaps as sales opportunities
Recurring job openings can clearly indicate skill shortages within organizations or the whole sector. Persistent vacancies offer sales teams a window to propose targeted solutions.
For example, when a company repeatedly seeks data analysts, it suggests a market need for data analysis software or consultancy services, which can be a point of entry for sales engagements.
Understanding these talent gaps can also help shape product development and sales pitches. If job listings often call for expertise in specific software or technology, there’s an opportunity to develop or highlight features of products that address these needs. This approach allows sales teams to present their offerings as solutions to the client’s staffing challenges.
Alternatively, lacking certain professionals creates a market for online courses, seminars, and other educational initiatives. This way, a company may decide to train its current workforce instead of hiring new people.
Competitor analysis and collaborations
Effective competitor analysis goes beyond understanding market positioning and product offerings. Through my work as Head of Product, I’ve learned that a key tactic is considering competitor job postings, which can reveal much about their strategic directions.
For instance, job listings for roles in new geographic regions or specialized technological fields can indicate expansion into new markets or the development of new products.
On the other hand, identifying companies posting jobs in areas where your products or services are available can lead to valuable partnerships. These companies might share expertise and know-how to help you expand or improve your selection. Such partnerships can open new sales channels and bring mutual benefits like combined market reach, shared resources, or co-developed products.
Conclusion
In today’s competitive market, smartly leveraging online information is needed not to stand out but to stay afloat. For the latter, having company and employee data may not be enough.
Job listing data turns out to be a valuable source of help for creating data-driven sales strategies. It enables sales teams to discover hidden opportunities and insights to align their strategy with market needs, talent gaps, and competitor insights. And let’s not forget that your HR department will also find this information valuable, allowing you to feed two birds with one scone.
This article was originally published on Datafloq.
