Playbook

Track job changes of customers and key contacts

Fuel efficient growth and reduce churn at the same time.

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Overview

Tracking job changes of VIP contacts helps go-to-market teams feed three birds with one scone.

When a customer joins a new company, it gives your team an opportunity to celebrate milestones, it gives your sales team an opportunity to reach out and and see how your solution serves your customer's new context, and it helps success teams by enabling them to track when a customer moves jobs so they can better identify and avoid potential churn.

Instead of being surprised at the time of renewal, your teams can work hand-in-hand with the new points of contact on deck to ensure a smooth transition. Not to mention, it’s a lot more likely that a customer at a previous company will become a repeat customer at their new company.

This playbook will show you how to keep tabs on meaningful job changes using Common Room. It’s just a few steps and should only take about 20 minutes (not a bad time-to-value tradeoff)!

Here’s a preview of the job change activity you’ll be able to see across every tracked contact when we’re done:

Track org change history
Track org change history

What you’ll need

Common Room: What we’ll use to track job changes—sign-up for free to follow along.
Google Sheets or CSV: We’ll import a CSV to track contacts.
CRM or marketing automation access (bonus): If you have admin access to your CRM or marketing automation platform, we can sync contacts to track job changes.

Step 1: Import a CSV of contacts (or connect a data source)

We’ll first want to connect to sources where your customer data resides (e.g., Salesforce, LinkedIn, Slack) to identify cohorts of contacts we want to track.

One super easy way to get customer data into Common Room is through CSV import.

After creating a free account, you can click to jump into the Contact view.

Members overview with connected sources
Contact overview with connected sources

The screenshot above shows what that looks like when many sources are connected. If you’re starting from a blank slate, this will be empty. But we can quickly fix that with a quick CSV import.

Click on the + Add new contact button in the top right. Clicking triggers a menu to import new contacts. This feature allows us to import contacts of our community and customers by email, Twitter handle, LinkedIn URL, or GitHub username individually or in bulk.

Add a new member individually or in bulk
Add a new contact individually or in bulk

We want to import many contacts, so we’ll select the Bulk add or update contacts link.

We’ll then see a menu that gives us options to add contacts to a segment and add activity. Let’s add these contacts to a new segment and name it something with context.

Bulk add contacts to a new segment
Bulk add contacts to a new segment
Note: When importing via CSV, you’ll need to format it using this contact import template.

We can click Continue to import our CSV with our new segment created.

Import new contacts by uploading spreadsheet
Import new contacts by uploading spreadsheet

After uploading the file, you’ll be asked to confirm field mappings, review, and complete the import.

Confirm mappings and import your list of customers
Confirm mappings and import your list of customers
Note: While email is the only field required, the more detail you can fill in from the import template, the higher your match rate will be (i.e., you’ll be able to track more job changes).

After confirming your field mapping, your list will begin to import. This might take a few minutes, depending on the size of your list.

Segment populating from CSV import
Segment populating from CSV import

Step 2: Connect more sources to improve match rate

In addition to CSV import, we suggest connecting to additional customer data sources as it helps with match rates and future use cases. (Feel free to skip this step if you are satisfied with only importing a CSV.)

Out of the box, Common Room connects with dozens of customer data sources like LinkedIn, Slack, HubSpot, Salesforce, Snowflake, Zapier, and many more.

Connecting to a new source takes just a few clicks. For example, to connect LinkedIn, we can jump to the Settings menu and choose Connect LinkedIn.

Connect to Linked in and more sources for higher accuracy
Connect to Linked in and more sources for higher accuracy
Note: To configure this integration, you must be an admin of your LinkedIn page. Specifically, you must have the “Super admin” or “Content admin” role; the “Curator” or “Analyst” roles do not have sufficient permissions.

Once LinkedIn is authenticated, data import will begin, and contacts will import into Common Room along with contact activity related to your handle.

We can repeat a similar process to add more sources like Slack or Twitter.

Before jumping onto the next step, let’s review how to connect to customer data since that’s likely where your customer attributes are updated and fresh.

You can do this through native CRM integrations (Salesforce or HubSpot), data warehouse / ETL (Snowflake, Census, Hightouch), Zapier, or API.

Connect to business data sources
Connect to business data sources

Our business data integrations take a touch more customization than the others. You’ll have to get the help of a Common Room pro to get one of these sources enabled.


Step 3: Apply a filter to track job changes

With our high-priority contacts and customers now added to Common Room, we can start tracking (and sending alerts to our team) when they change jobs.

Let’s click over to the Contact menu and apply a filter by clicking the + Add filter button.

Now this is where the magic happens! 🪄

We can locate and select the Org change filter.

Filter by matched org changes
Filter by matched org changes

This gives us a view of every contact who has changed their job in the last 365 days by default. Let’s narrow that down a bit to the previous six months.

Set a date range for org change tracking
Set a date range for org change tracking

Just like that, we now have a view of any contact who has recently changed jobs! And when we click into each contact, we can hover over their previous org to see the history of job changes over time.

See a history of org changes for each contact
See a history of org changes for each contact

That’s all for this step. In the next few steps, we’ll show you how to take action!


Step 4: Create a segment to track new and existing contacts who qualify

Now that we can track when our key contacts change jobs, we’ll want to add those contacts to what we call Segments so our go-to-market teams can take action.

To do that, head over to our Segment menu in the left sidebar and create a view to add contacts when a job change is detected. Once there, click + New segment to create a new segment.

Create a new contact segment
Create a new contact segment

And we can automatically add contacts by clicking the Settings tab, locating the Contact management area, and selecting Set criteria.

Auto-add/remove members to your segment
Auto-add/remove contact to your segment

We can click the Add filter button and select the Org change option. A year is longer than we want, so we’ll want to narrow the date range to the last six months.

Add a filter to auto-add contacts
Add a filter to auto-add contacts

And we could further refine this by adding more filters for company size or region if we wanted.

All looks good, so we can click Save, and now qualifying contacts will start populating.

If we click on the Contacts tab within our segment, we can see customers and target prospects who have changed jobs in the six months.

Preview of Contacts who have changed jobs
Preview of Contacts who have changed jobs

This list alone is powerful. From here, we could have our team members sift through to identify owned accounts and reach out. But we should add more automation to save time for our go-to-market teams. Let’s do that in the following steps.


Step 5: Set automated alerts

Now that we have our segment of key contacts who have recently changed jobs automatically populating, we can set up alerts to get notified when new contacts are added.

It’s super easy to set up notifications. In our segment view, we can simply click the Get notified button located in the top right of our screen.

Get notifications when new contacts are added to a segment
Get notifications when new contacts are added to a segment

We want to know when there are new additions to our segment, so we can toggle the Contact additions/removals option. And we’ll probably want to get notifications when we set up status changes in the next step. So we’ll toggle that on as well.

Get notifications when contacts are added or when status changes
Get notifications when contacts are added or when status changes

Now, we’ll get an email (or a Slack alert if we set that up) whenever a new contact is added to this segment.


To help our go-to-market teams work more efficiently, we can further refine our new job-change-tracker segment so that reps can work solely with their owned accounts.

To do that, we can turn to the segment status feature by clicking the Settings tab, locating the Status area, and clicking to Set up statuses.

Set statuses for members of a segment
Set statuses for contact of a segment

We can name our statuses by team members (what we’ll filter on) and click to Save changes.

Note: We’ll need to connect to our CRM to filter by account ownership

We can click the Set criteria button for the first status we created and choose a source-specific filter of Company Owner.

Add a source-specific filter for contact owner
Add a source-specific filter for contact owner

Now we need to click Save, and contacts of our segment who meet the criteria will have a status with our rep’s name. And we can repeat the same steps for the other reps.

Auto-update contact status by setting criteria
Auto-update contact status by setting criteria

Here’s what that would look like when our segment is built out and fully automated:

Job change segment with status by rep
Job change segment with status by rep

Wrapping up

That was a lot! In this playbook, we imported key contacts, set filters to track when they change jobs, and set up views/alerts for our reps to take action.

Our narrative was centered around a sales use case, but the same could be applied to tracking brand advocates, community members, partners, you name it. If it’s filterable in Common Room, you can operationalize it!

Try running this playbook yourself now. Sign up for a Common Room account here or get some hands-on help from one of our experts.

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