Track news at your target accounts

The news that should trigger outreach is the news that changes what the company needs or who decides. A company's press page is full of events, but only a few of them give you a credible reason to get in touch. These are the ones worth acting on:

• A funding round. New money usually comes with a plan to grow, new hires, and budget for tools the company couldn't justify before.
• A new executive in the role that buys from you. A new head of marketing, sales, or operations often reviews the current tools and vendors early on, and is more open to a conversation than the person they replaced.
• Hiring for the team your product serves. A company posting several roles for the function you support is investing there right now. If you sell sales tools, a burst of account executive postings tells you more than any press release.
• A product launch or a move into a new market. Launches and expansions create new work, and that work often needs new help.
• An acquisition, a partnership, or a big customer win or loss. Each one changes the company's priorities, and sometimes its budget.
• A public ask. Someone at the company asking on LinkedIn or in a community thread what tools other teams use is the clearest signal of all.

Kite uses this as a starting point and adjusts it to your business. It knows from your research which roles buy from you and which problems you solve, so a new CFO might matter a lot to one company and not at all to another. You can add or remove event types at any time by telling Kite.

Kite covers your accounts in two complementary ways, so a funding announcement and a LinkedIn post both reach you.

The first is a standing watch. You can ask for it in a sentence, such as "Tell me when any of our target accounts raises money, hires a new marketing leader, or asks publicly for tool recommendations." Kite saves the account names and checks on a schedule, as often as once an hour, for news, posts, and discussions that are new since the previous check. It reads each result against your request and stays quiet when nothing matches.

The second is a scheduled sweep through PredictLeads, which is built into Kite. For each account's website, Kite reads the company's recent news events, including funding, leadership changes, expansion, product launches, partnerships, and client wins and losses. It also reads the company's funding rounds with their amounts and investors, and the job openings the company currently has posted. Every event carries the date it was found and the article or posting behind it, so Kite can drop anything too old to count as a current reason to reach out. If your team pays for Crunchbase, connect it and Kite can check each account's latest funding round there too.

You decide how often the sweep runs and where the results go. A weekly sweep on Monday morning gives your team a full picture of the list at the start of the week, and the standing watch catches the urgent news in between.

Finding news is the easy part, and deciding what to do with it is where most alert tools stop. Kite reads each event the way an experienced salesperson would and decides whether it gives you a real reason to get in touch.

To make that call, Kite looks at three things. It checks the event against why the account is on your list, using your target-list notes and what it knows about the customers you sell to. It checks how recent the event is, because a funding round from last week is an opening and one from last year is background. And it checks your own records for an existing relationship, such as an open deal in HubSpot or a past conversation.

Say a logistics company on your list hires a new VP of Operations, and you sell reporting software to operations teams. Kite reads the announcement, sees that the new VP runs the team you sell to, and flags it as worth acting on. If the same company had hired a new general counsel, Kite would keep the finding on file and leave your inbox alone.

When the news needs more context before anyone writes a message, Kite researches it further. It reads the original announcement, finds interviews or posts from the new executive, and checks what the company has said about its plans, with a source for every fact.

Every alert Kite sends is ready to act on. It names the person or event, quotes or links the source, says why it matters for this account, and includes a message written in full.

The message depends on the event. For a public ask on LinkedIn, Kite writes a reply someone on your team could post as it stands. For a new executive, it writes a short email that mentions their new role and connects it to a problem your product solves. For a funding round, it writes an opening that refers to the round and what the company says it plans to do with it.

When your records show an open deal, Kite changes who should make the touch. Instead of a cold message from marketing, it names the deal owner and writes the note for that person to send, referring to the conversation already in progress. That keeps two people at your company from emailing the same prospect about the same news.

Kite asks before it sends anything. You can approve and send the email from Kite's team address or your connected email product, or copy the message and send it yourself.

News is only useful to sales if it lands on the account record. With HubSpot connected, Kite reads the existing notes, tasks, and deals on a company before it adds anything, then writes the event onto the company record as a dated note with its source. It can also create a follow-up task for the account owner with a due date, so the news turns into a next step someone is responsible for.

Kite can also keep your target list itself current. When the sweep finds a company that fits your customer profile and just showed a strong signal, Kite can add it to HubSpot as a new company record, with the signal and its source attached as a note. Over time, your list fills with accounts that have a reason to talk now, not just accounts that looked good last quarter.