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Work the deal signals before the forecast slips

Reps work deals blind between meetings. The champion quietly leaves, the account starts hiring for the exact problem you solve, the deal sits single-threaded, and nobody notices until the forecast call. The signals were there the whole time; nobody was watching the accounts already in play.

[ BUILT GTM ]

Work the deal signals before the forecast slips

Solvethe problem worth solving
Problem · 01Sales

Reps work deals blind between meetings.

The champion quietly leaves, the account starts hiring for the exact problem you solve, the deal sits single-threaded, and nobody notices until the forecast call. The signals were there the whole time; nobody was watching the accounts already in play.

Stackthe workflow, box by box
Stand up the radar
Salesforce01
Never miss a contact's job change again.
Stand up the standing watch: who earns a slot, how each tier gets checked, and where every detected move routes.
Powers up with
AI
Deepline02
Turn job postings at your accounts into deal moves.
Add the second lens: job postings at in-play accounts, read as timing, stakeholder, and budget signals tied to named deals.
Powers up with
AI
Move when it moves
Salesforce03
Turn a champion's job change into two plays.
When the watchlist fires, run the two-sided play: flag the risk on the old account, open the door at the new one.
Powers up with
AI + human
Claude04
Find the warm intro before you ever go cold.
Before any touch on the new account goes cold, find and rank the warm path in, and write the forwardable intro request.
Connect to analyze
AI
Protect the deal
Salesforce05
Map the buying committee and widen every live deal.
The deals the signals touched get the coverage read: map the committee the stage requires and run the widening play per missing role.
Powers up with
AI
Gong06
Send the follow-up the deal stage actually owes.
Every interaction the plays create gets the follow-up its stage owes, one ask, one dated next step.
Powers up with
AI
Compound it
Salesforce07
Turn your last 10 wins into your next 40 targets.
Close the loop: extract the win profile from what the signals closed, and feed the scored lookalike list back into the radar.
Powers up with
AI
Splithow control passes: agents branch left, humans right
HUMAN + AI, IN THE LOOP
How control passes.
AgentsHuman
Agent01
Never miss a contact's job change again.
Salesforce runs it.
Agent02
Turn job postings at your accounts into deal moves.
Deepline runs it.
AI + human03
Turn a champion's job change into two plays.
AI drafts, a human checks.
Agent04
Find the warm intro before you ever go cold.
Claude runs it.
Agent05
Map the buying committee and widen every live deal.
Salesforce runs it.
Agent06
Send the follow-up the deal stage actually owes.
Gong runs it.
Agent07
Turn your last 10 wins into your next 40 targets.
Salesforce runs it.
The skills run the work. You stay in the loop on the calls that need judgment.
Outputwhat the workflow produces
OUTPUT · 01

A standing watch on every account in your pipeline

OUTPUT · 02

Book

OUTPUT · 03

A same-week play for every job change

OUTPUT · 04

Hiring signal

Outcomethe result it drives
OUTCOME · 01

3.56x vs 1.13x

The backtest that justifies watching behavior: against real won and lost deals, the strongest win predictor was a behavioral signal at 3.56x lift; the firmographic fit score everyone trusted sat at 1.13x.

OUTCOME · 02

Every live deal multi-threaded

The motion this playbook operationalizes: reps moved from reactive-to-reply to multi-threaded, multi-channel outreach on every live deal, because single-threaded deals die far more often.

Built GTM
── 01 / WHY RUN IT

The deal was moving, then it was not, and the reason turns out to be three weeks old: the champion left, the account froze hiring, or a rival got introduced to the boss you never met. You find out on the forecast call, when the only move left is to explain the slip instead of preventing it.

RUN THIS AND YOU CAN
A standing watch on every contact and account already in play, not another prospecting feed
A same-week, two-sided play every time a champion changes jobs
A hiring-signal read tied to a named deal and one dated move
Coverage maps and stage-owed follow-ups on the deals the signals touch
── 02 / THE RUN, STEP BY STEP

The workflow that solves it, one step at a time.

Each step is the plain question you are already asking. The skills answer them in order, one handing its receipt to the next.

1Stand up the radar✓ TESTED
Never miss a contact's job change again.

A standing watchlist that tracks every champion, user, and past buyer for job changes. Tiered detection, a weekly diff that filters title cleanups, and every real move routed to a named owner with a deadline.

YOU GETThe tiering scheme, the detection ladder per tier, the weekly diff routine, and the routing rules.
OPEN THE SKILL →
2Stand up the radar✓ TESTED
Turn job postings at your accounts into deal moves.

Watches job postings at the accounts already in your pipeline and customer book, and reads each one as a deal signal. Every read ties to a named deal and ends in one dated move, not a cold sequence.

YOU GETThe four posting reads, the in-play scope rule, the deal-tied radar table, and the verify-before-acting gates.
OPEN THE SKILL →
3Move when it moves✓ TESTED
Turn a champion's job change into two plays.

When a champion or key deal contact changes jobs, one event becomes two motions: a churn or deal risk flag with a named owner, and a door-opener to the company they just joined. Verify the move, score both sides, ship both the same week.

YOU GETThe three detection tripwires, the verification checklist, both risk and opportunity rubrics, the internal flag format, and the door-opener rules.
OPEN THE SKILL →
4Move when it moves✓ TESTED
Find the warm intro before you ever go cold.

Sweeps your team's network, customers, past colleagues, and shared investors for every warm path into a target account, scores each one, and picks the single best connector. When no path clears the bar, it says go cold and names the signal to anchor on.

YOU GETSix path sources, the strength scoring, the one-path rule, the forwardable intro blurb, and the fallback rule.
OPEN THE SKILL →
5Protect the deal✓ TESTED
Map the buying committee and widen every live deal.

Maps the committee each deal should have at its stage, scores who is actually engaged, and hands you the widening play for every missing role. Ends with a per-deal move list, not a warning.

YOU GETThe stage-based committee model, the engaged-contact check, the coverage score, and three widening plays.
OPEN THE SKILL →
6Protect the deal✓ TESTED
Send the follow-up the deal stage actually owes.

A follow-up system keyed to deal stage, not a generic cadence. Each stage's exit criteria decide the ask, every send carries one ask and a dated next step, and two silences trigger a real escalation.

YOU GETThe per-stage follow-up jobs, the exit-criteria asks, the same-day rule, the forwardable demo recap, and the escalation path.
OPEN THE SKILL →
7Compound it✓ TESTED
Turn your last 10 wins into your next 40 targets.

Builds a win profile from your closed-won deals, weighing behavioral signals over firmographics, and keeps only the traits that separate wins from losses. Then scores lookalike accounts against it and writes a shared-situation first-touch angle for each.

YOU GETThe win-profile extraction, the wins-vs-losses contrast test, the scored lookalike list, and the per-account angle.
OPEN THE SKILL →
WHERE YOU LAND

A standing watch on every account in your pipeline and book, a same-week play for every job change and hiring signal, wider coverage on the deals that matter, and a win profile that feeds the next quarter's list.

EVERY STEP, TESTED AND PASSED
EVAL RESULTPASS4/4 dimensions
HOW WE EVAL →
Skills resolve
Structure + proof
Example chat
Quality judge
  • All 7 chained skills resolve to real, scored skills.
  • Has a problem, an outcome, 2+ steps, and proof from a real build.
  • Ships an example chat showing the play run in Claude.
  • Reads in plain operator voice, grounded in a real build.
Last eval run 2026-08-05
── 03 / SEE IT RUN

Watch the skills answer in order.

Describe your situation in plain language. The right skill fires on its own and hands its receipt to the next.

EXAMPLE CHATDana, Head of Sales, running the loop in one sitting
D
Two deals slipped last quarter and both times the reason was weeks old by the time we heard it. One champion had left, one account had frozen hiring. How do I stop finding this out on the forecast call?
S
Stand up the watch· Job-change watchlist
Start with a watchlist of everyone who matters on the accounts already in play: champions and users at customers, engaged contacts on open deals, past champions at closed-lost. Tier them and set a check cadence per tier.
Receipt
Sample run: 84 contacts earn a slot across 31 in-play accounts. Tier 1 is 22 people checked weekly, everyone else monthly.
A
Add the hiring lens· Pipeline hiring radar
Then point the radar at job postings on those same accounts. Four reads: hiring for your problem, hiring the role that would own you, leadership turnover, or a freeze. Each read ties to a named deal.
Receipt
Sample sweep: Northwind posts two RevOps roles that own your category, a timing signal on a deal in Evaluation. Vertex takes every posting down, a budget flag two weeks before their renewal call.
R
Run the move play· Champion move detection
When the watchlist fires, run both sides of the play the same week: risk-flag the account they left with a named owner, and open a door at the company they joined, through a warm path if one clears the bar.
Receipt
Sample fire: your Acme champion lands at a bigger competitor of theirs. The CSM gets the risk flag with a 14-day save window; the AE gets a door-opener with two mutuals ranked as intro paths.
P
Protect what it touched· Multi-thread coverage
Every deal a signal touched gets the coverage read: the committee its stage requires, who is actually engaged in the last 30 days, and the widening play for each missing role. Then each interaction gets the follow-up its stage owes.
Receipt
Sample read: the Northwind deal claims Proposal with one engaged contact. Coverage score 1 of 4. The widening play adds the economic buyer through the champion, with a dated ask.
── 04 / SEE IT IN PRODUCTION

Before you run it, I ran it for real.

This workflow is genericized from a real build. Here is the number it moved, and what I actually did.

THE BUILD · SCORING EVIDENCE
The Win/Loss Backtest
2.67x
win-lift from the strongest behavioral signal
3.56x
that signal stacked with an ICP threshold
16 to 0
won-lost record of every account that reached Hot or Strike
1.13x
the fit score everyone trusted, barely discriminating
WHAT I DID
01
Measure lift, not opinion. For every signal, I compared how often it showed up in won deals versus lost ones. Lift, not vibes. A signal that appears equally in wins and losses is noise, no matter how good it feels.
02
Find the predictors that were not in the model. The strongest discriminators were behavioral, how the buyer actually worked, not the firmographics we had been scoring on. The single best one carried a 2.67x lift and was not weighted at all.
03
Stack the signals that compound. One behavioral signal plus an ICP threshold stacked to a 3.56x lift. The combination beat either alone, which is the whole argument for keeping signals separate so they can compound.

Before you trust a scoring model, backtest it against the deals you actually won and lost. Measure lift per signal. The ones that feel important and the ones that are important are rarely the same list.

Dig into the full build
THE BUILD · LENS: DEAL EFFORT
The Love Test
~2
touchpoints per account, on average, my reps
5%
win rate when a deal is single-threaded
40%
of deals die from single-thread dependency
6.8
stakeholders in the average B2B purchase
WHAT I DID
01
The love test. I ran the analysis: were reps earning attention through multi-step prospecting, or just reacting to whoever already showed it? The data was blunt. Reps averaged about two touchpoints per account and over-indexed on inbound, neglecting every other channel. Effort was following responsiveness, not opportunity.
02
Make persistence a motion, not a mood. If most deals need five or more touches and reps average two, the fix is not motivation. It is a multi-step prospecting motion that runs across every channel, whether or not the account has written back yet.
03
Thread the deal, not the champion. Ladder each altitude of the problem, personal, team, and org, to the person who owns it, so the deal survives any one contact going dark. Multi-threading covers the whole buying committee, not just the contact who answers first.

Reps invest effort where interest already exists. The fix is not more leads, it is a prospecting motion that earns attention before the account gives it: multi-step, every channel, threaded across the whole buying committee.

Dig into the full build
THE OTHER HALF · SELLING ENABLEMENT

The radar is only as good as the rep who answers it

The watchlist and the radar hand the team signals; the revenue comes from what a rep does in the 48 hours after one fires. Here is how a sales leader turns signal alerts into trained reflexes instead of another ignored Slack channel.

THE FRAMEWORK BEHIND IT
The signal-to-move drill

Every alert type gets a named play and a rehearsed first move. Reps drill the champion-move call, the warm-intro ask, and the widening outreach against a live roleplay, and clear a cert bar before alerts route to them.

  1. 01
    Teach the reads, not the tools

    Walk the team through what a champion move, a hiring signal, and a single-thread flag each mean for a live deal, so they trust the alert enough to act the same day.

  2. 02
    Set the 48-hour SLA

    A signal older than two days is a trivia fact. Every alert carries an owner and a clock, and the weekly pipeline review starts with the signals nobody answered.

  3. 03
    Rehearse the two hardest conversations

    The door-opener to a champion who just landed somewhere new, and the ask that adds a second thread without going around your contact. Roleplay both until they sound human.

  4. 04
    Inspect the loop, not just the alerts

    Once a month, check which signal types actually turned into meetings and revenue, and reweight the radar toward what converts.

05 / INSTALL THE WHOLE PLAYBOOK

One plugin. 7 skills, bundled.

The whole playbook installs as a single plugin in Claude Code, no copy-pasting 7 times. Or grab any single step above. It runs on what you paste; connect your stack to go live.

OR KICK IT OFF IN CHAT
Here is my situation: [describe your workflow or account in a sentence or two]. Walk me through Work the deal signals before the forecast slips step by step, and run each skill as we go.
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