A Classification of Company Signals in Sales Intelligence

1. Introduction

Companies signal their activities, current status, internal workings, and market conditions through various publications, such as blog articles, press releases, patents, and social media posts. These signals assist sales and marketing teams in identifying potential opportunities, prioritizing leads, and refining their engagement strategies. They are a crucial data source for sales intelligence, enabling more informed decision-making and personalized outreach.

To attract candidates, companies often share extensive information about the work environment, including location, company, products, tools, and team dynamics. Additionally, the volume of job postings can indicate the company's growth rate or demand for new employees.

In this article, we provide a comprehensive classification of these company signals, primarily found in job postings but also from other sources.

Outline of the Article

1. Introduction
2. Company Signals in Job Postings
3. Extracting Data from Job Postings
4. Identifying New Locations or Offices
5. Practical Steps to Implement Extraction
6. Conclusion

2. Company Signals in Job Postings

As mentioned, company signals are valuable indicators that offer insights into a company's operations, current status, internal processes, market conditions, strategic direction, and future objectives. These signals are crucial for uncovering sales opportunities, understanding market trends, and crafting targeted sales strategies.

These signals are collected from a diverse range of public and proprietary sources, such as job postings, press releases, patents, annual reports, public records, conferences, interviews, social media content, and third-party news articles or documentaries.

By effectively utilizing these signals, we can identify potential sales opportunities, gain a deeper understanding of companies' needs and interests, determine optimal outreach timing, and tailor sales and marketing efforts for maximum impact.

Typical signals from companies contained in job postings include:

1. Product-related signals provide information about a company's offerings, such as products or services. These signals can be leveraged to identify potential customers, opportunities to differentiate one's own products, or upselling and cross-selling opportunities

   • Product Launch Signals: Mentions of new products or significant updates to existing products can indicate innovation and competitiveness.
     • Example: A tech company hiring for a new team working on an AI-powered product.
   • Product Strategy Signals: Shifts in product focus or strategic direction, often indicated by hiring trends or changes in product development.
     • Example: A car company seeking many experts in "large-scale battery production" hints at plans for new production facilities.
   • Product Pricing Signals: Announcements of cheaper, slimmed-down, compact, streamlined, or alternative product variants can indicate upcoming price changes.
     • Example: A phone company mentioning the development of a more affordable and compact smartphone.

2. Operations-related signals provide information about how a company operates and is organized, both internally and externally. These signals can be utilized to identify opportunities for business deals and reveal potential areas for collaboration, co-marketing, or strategic alliances.

   • Organizational Signals: Mentions of organizational structure, new departments, business areas, or teams can signal internal restructuring or departmental changes.

     • Example: A company announcing a reorganization to streamline operations.

   • Collaboration Signals: Partnerships with other companies can indicate entry into new markets or the development of new products or technologies.

     • Example: A healthcare company partnering with a tech firm to develop a new telemedicine platform.

   • Supply Chain Signals: Updates about new or changed supply chain partnerships or logistics can signal strategic and operational shifts, upcoming expansion plans, increased profits, supply chain resilience, and present opportunities for further partnerships.

     • Example: A company announcing new suppliers based in low-wage countries.

3. Work-related signals provide information about how a company's employees work, including the tools and technologies they use. These signals can be exploited to identify opportunities for offering products or services that replace, enhance, or complement the mentioned solutions.

   • Tool Signals: Mentions of tools or software used in a department to improve workflow can indicate the current technological adoption and efficiency within the company.
     • Example: Job postings requiring proficiency in new project management software like Asana or Jira.
   • Tech Signals: Mentions of technologies, materials, or components used in product development can reflect the company's technological level and development speed.
     • Example: A company's job posting mentioning the use of blockchain technology for developing secure transaction systems.
   • Process Signals: References to processes, techniques, or methodologies used in product development can reveal the company’s workflow, pace, and operational efficiency.
     • Example: A company mentioning the adoption of agile methodologies in software development.

4. Financial-related signals provide information about a company's financial status, such as investments, revenue, expenses, profits, and losses. These signals can be harnessed to identify opportunities for offering hiring, investment, or advisory services that align with the company's financial health and objectives.

   • Investment Signals: Mentions of funding events from venture capitalists, business angels, or IPOs, indicating the company's financial health and potential for growth.
     • Example: A startup mentioning securing a $50 million Series B funding round.
   • Revenue Signals: Mentions of successful product lines, new customers, or market segments can indicate increased revenue and means to invest in new projects.
     • Example: A company reporting a 30% increase in revenue due to the success of a new product.
   • Salary Signals: Increases in salaries for specific jobs can indicate revenue growth, a shortage of skilled workers, or increased competition in the labor market.
     • Example: A company offering a significant salary bump for software engineers.

5. Image-related signals provide information about how a company is perceived or aims to be perceived by the public. These signals can be leveraged to identify opportunities for offering branding, public relations, or marketing services that enhance the company's public image and align with its desired brand identity.

   • Branding Signals: Receiving industry awards, honors, or recognition, as well as improvements in industry rankings or inclusion in prestigious lists.

     • Example: A startup mentioning being listed in Forbes' Top 100 Most Innovative Companies or winning an innovation award in a specific industry.

   • Firmographic Signals: Mentions of company size, industry, headquarters, and future prospects.

     • Example: A company reporting a new industry they're working in or communicating a new employee count.

   • Workforce Signals: Mentions of new employee benefits, awards, or changes in workforce management reflect internal company conditions, responses to external labor market pressures, or negative ratings on employer review portals (e.g., Glassdoor).

     • Example: A company offering remote work options and enhanced health benefits to attract and retain talent.

6. Growth-related signals provide information about a company's current performance and growth trajectory, as well as insights into its future ambitions and plans. These signals can be utilized to identify opportunities for offering business development, strategic planning, or consulting services that support the company's expansion and scalability.

   • Location Signals: Mentions of new offices, manufacturing facilities, or building sites can signal geographic expansion or market entry.
     • Example: A startup mentioning new office space in a previously un-served country.
   • Hiring Signals: Increased job postings in specific locations or roles, suggesting company growth, new project development, or market entry.
     • Example: A surge in hiring for sales roles in a particular region.
   • Merger Signals: Information on mergers, acquisitions, or strategic partnerships can reveal growth strategies and market consolidation.
     • Example: A tech giant acquiring a smaller AI company to enhance its product offerings.

While this classification of company signals addresses a wide range of signal types, it is important to note that it is not exhaustive. There is ample opportunity to expand this classification by incorporating information from additional sources beyond job postings, such as financial reports, patents, SEC filings, press releases, social media activity, and more.

These signals can be applied to various use cases besides finding sales opportunities, such as identifying emerging market trends, finding new investment opportunities, or assessing a company's stability and growth potential. Moreover, they can be found in job postings published by the companies themselves.

3. Understanding Job Postings

Job postings are typically targeted at potential new employees and used to create awareness that a company exists, is hiring for a specific role, and provides insights into what the company does, plans, wants, uses, builds, etc. Their content mostly contains information such as:

• Company Information: Industry, company size, and location(s), goals, products, achievements, vision, mission, values, and culture.
• Workplace Information: Teams the employee will join or work with, career paths, opportunities for advancement, personal budgets for hardware or conferences, or social activities of the team or company.
• Job Information: Employee’s tasks, role, responsibilities, objectives, expected start time, work environment, and workplace.
• Requirement Information: Experience, industry background, skills, competencies, qualifications, certifications, working hours, work location, and travel requirements.
• Compensation Information: Salary range, bonus structure, benefits, perks, and incentives.
• Application Information: Required application documents, application deadline, contact information such as phone numbers, email addresses, or contact forms.

Companies distribute their job postings on various platforms, including their own website, career pages of their HR tools (e.g., Personio or SAP SuccessFactors), job boards (e.g., Monster or Stepstone), job aggregators (e.g., Indeed or CareerJet), job meta-search engines (e.g., Trovit or JobRapido), and social media platforms (e.g., LinkedIn or Facebook).

Techmap's job posting data is sourced from many of these locations, cleaned, normalized, and stored in data files in AWS S3, which we offer on the AWS Data Exchange (ADX) platform. ADX is a service that allows customers to securely find, subscribe to, and use third-party data in the cloud. It enables businesses to leverage a wide variety of datasets for analytics, machine learning, and other data-driven applications.

4. Identifying Company Signals from Job Postings

To identify company signals in job postings, we first need to define keywords and synonyms — possibly in multiple languages — that support various writing styles. This can be achieved with regular expressions (regex), which can be easily used in all programming languages.

The second step is to use these regexes to identify matching job postings from a data source such as Techmap's Job Postings on AWS Data Exchange for a specific country of operations.

A third step is to reduce the information from the extracted job postings and filter out interesting signals such as which companies send the signals or in which regions the signals were found.

Finally, we can analyze the extracted signals and utilize them by enriching lead data in other databases, prioritizing sales activities, or generating charts for better visualization.

As an practical example, we've described the process for location signals in our blog article How to Identify new Office Locations from job postings, which outlines the process and provides the necessary code.

5. Conclusion

In this article, we presented a classification of company signals with 6 main classes and 18 sub-classes, describing various signals identifiable in job postings and other company publications.

We also described how to extract and analyze company signals from job postings using Techmap’s free data feed. By leveraging these signals, companies can easily identify sales opportunities, develop targeted sales strategies, prioritize sales activities, and gain valuable insights into their competitors’ activities.

By using improved identification techniques, companies can extract and analyze more and a wider range of signals to gain a comprehensive understanding of their market environment. For example, leveraging machine learning and AI can enhance this process by automating extraction, increasing precision, and uncovering deeper insights.

If you are interested in further exploring the potential of job postings for competitive intelligence, we encourage you to experiment with our data feeds. Happy analyzing!