Plays decide what gets watched
A play is one kind of buyer and the signals that find them. Stage 1 runs every play four times a day, and you can pause one without losing it.
· 3 min read
Most target lists are a guess written once and never touched again. The accounts sit there whether or not anything is happening inside them. A play turns that list into something that watches.
What a play is
A play is one kind of buyer and the signals that tell you they're ready. You start it with a sentence about who you want to reach.
US insurers between 1,000 and 5,000 people that just hired a head of data.
The sentence names the play and keeps your team clear on what it's for. The work is done by what you tell it to watch for.
What it watches for
Under the sentence, you pick the signals that matter for this buyer. Ten families. RFP, leadership change, hiring, business pressure, your network, growth or deal, competitor, tech stack, topic and influencer. Pick none and Stage 1 starts with hiring, leadership change, business pressure, competitor and topic.
Then you can sharpen it. Topics to listen for, like a platform name or a problem your buyers post about. Posts by people at your accounts that mention one become topic signals, and your Brain adds topics of its own. Events to watch, so people at your accounts posting that they're going, speaking or exhibiting show up. And public tenders, which checks federal RFPs on SAM.gov against your topics and puts the agency on your Board.
Under Posts to watch for reactions, you can list competitor company pages, competitor posts, posts by voices your buyers follow, and your own team's posts. The people who react or comment become signals, read through your connected LinkedIn.
How often it runs
Stage 1 runs every play four times a day, four hours apart, starting at your workspace's run hour. By default that's 6, 10, 2 and 6, in your own time zone. Each run checks LinkedIn, news, company newsrooms, filings and the other sources your plays turn on, each as often as that source needs, then reranks the Board.
Pause without losing it
Every play has a switch. Turn it off and the play stops watching. Nothing about it is deleted. Turn it back on and it picks up where it left off.
Each play shows whether it's running or paused, how many signals it has found so far, and what it's watching. Posts, competitor pages, events, tenders and the first few topics.
Pausing is how you run a season. A play for companies after an acquisition might run hot for a quarter and go quiet. A play for state agencies might wait until budgets open. You don't rebuild it every time.
Where you find it
Plays has its own screen. The form for a new play sits at the top, and every play you have sits below it with its switch.
When you first set up Stage 1, it turns on the plays your Brain suggests from your website, so you start with plays that already fit what you sell. Starter includes three plays. Team and Partner have no cap.
Why this matters for a services firm
A services firm usually sells a few distinct things to a few distinct buyers. A data platform rebuild for a CIO. A cost program for a COO. A security assessment after an incident. Each one has its own signals.
One list can't hold that. Separate plays let each offer watch for the events that lead to its kind of deal, and the Board ranks them all together. A new CFO matters to one play. A job post naming the platform you replace matters to another.
For which signals to start with, read the ten buying signals a services firm should watch and how to rank signals for your offer. For why two or three at once beat one, see signal stacking.
Write the sentence, pick the signals, and let the play run.