Turn former users into advocates when they change jobs

Use job changes to reach happy users at their new company, where they can champion you.

Impact
High
Effort
High
Filed under
Referral, Sales
Updated

This tactic turns a customer's job change into a sales lead. When a happy user of your product moves to a new company, you find out and reach out to them, because they already know your product, may have buying influence in the new role, and can recommend it internally. It suits B2B products sold per seat, where one champion can bring a whole team. It takes some tracking, and it raises privacy questions you should settle first.

How to do it

  1. Define a "champion". For example: someone who made a set number of payments, runs a weekly report, or invited teammates. Pick the threshold from your own usage data.
  2. Track their job changes. You have three options. In LinkedIn Sales Navigator, saving a lead gets you an alert like "A saved lead has moved to a new company". A job-change data tool such as UserGems does it at scale. Or check your top 50 users by hand each month.
  3. Filter new employers against your ideal customer profile. Skip tiny companies or companies that already use you.
  4. Send a short, personal message within a couple of weeks of the move. Congratulate them and ask if they would like a quick intro or a trial for their new team. Say you saw the move on their public profile.
  5. Make advocacy easy: an offer for their new team, a one-line message they can forward to a manager, a referral reward, or a free setup call.
  6. Track what happens. Count how many champions moved, how many you reached, how many replied and how many new accounts started.

Examples

  • Greenhouse. The recruiting software company used UserGems to track job changes of former users and decision-makers and send alerts to its sales team. UserGems' case study, published November 12, 2024, reports about 150 opportunities generated in 2024, and $5.8M in pipeline and $1.6M in closed-won revenue across 27 opportunities in less than a year. This is a vendor case study, and the figures cover all of Greenhouse's UserGems use, not job-change alerts alone.
  • Spendesk. An October 12, 2021 post in the Growth Twins newsletter describes Spendesk's process for new finance executives. When the team identifies a C-level finance hire who recently joined a company, it sends an automated invitation to the CFO Connect community. It also notifies a sales rep in Salesforce to reach out. That covers new C-level finance hires in general, not only former users.

When it backfires

  • Cost. UserGems' pricing page lists plans at $40,000, $75,000 and $150,000 a year. For a small company, Sales Navigator alerts or a monthly manual check do the same job on a smaller scale.
  • Privacy law. Tracking a named person's career moves is processing personal data. The UK ICO says UK GDPR still applies to B2B marketing when you process personal data, and sole traders and some partnerships get stronger protection under PECR. Get advice on a lawful basis and your notice duties before you automate this in the UK or EU.
  • Email rules. In the US, a congratulations email that promotes a product is a commercial message under CAN-SPAM, with the same requirements as any other.
  • Unhappy users. Contacting someone who left on bad terms, or who churned, makes things worse. Only target users with clear signs of satisfaction.
  • They owe you nothing. Make the ask small and let them say no.
  • Small numbers. Only some users change jobs in a given year, so this adds to your pipeline rather than replacing it.

Questions people ask

What is a customer advocacy tool for B2B? Software that tracks people who bought or used your product and helps you turn them into references or referrers. For this tactic, the key feature is job-change alerts.

Do I need UserGems? No. Start with Sales Navigator alerts or a manual list of your top users. Buy a tool when the volume justifies it.

For a related approach on the outbound side, see account-based sales development.

Sources

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