There’s nothing quite so frustrating as crafting the perfect pitch—only to find out your main contact just left the company. Or maybe you’re blindsided when a competitor swoops in, thanks to a new decision maker you didn’t even know existed. If you work in sales, partnerships, or customer success, you know how crucial it is to stay on top of who’s actually calling the shots. That’s where contact intelligence tools, like Harmonic, can save you hours of detective work (and a lot of embarrassment). This guide walks you through how to use Harmonic to keep tabs on decision maker changes—without turning it into a full-time job.
Why Decision Maker Changes Matter (and Why Most People Miss Them)
Let’s be blunt: organizational charts are never up to date. People get promoted, poached, or just quietly move on. When you’re managing dozens (or hundreds) of accounts, it’s easy to miss these shifts—until it’s too late.
Here’s what’s at stake if you don’t track this stuff: - Lost deals: You keep chasing someone who’s gone, while a new stakeholder gets cozy with your competitor. - Outdated messaging: You reference old priorities, making you look out of touch. - Missed expansion: New leaders love to shake things up—if you know who they are, you can get ahead.
Most teams rely on LinkedIn stalking, random email bounces, or waiting for the client to tell them. That’s slow and unreliable. Harmonic promises to automate this grunt work, but let’s be real—it’s not magic. Here’s how to make it actually useful.
Step 1: Get Your Accounts and Contacts into Harmonic
First, you need to tell Harmonic who you care about. If you skip this, you’ll end up with a firehose of irrelevant updates.
What works: - Upload a clean list of target accounts (companies) and key contacts (people). Harmonic lets you import CSVs, sync from your CRM, or even just paste in LinkedIn URLs. - Tag or segment your list. For example: “Current clients,” “Open deals,” “Strategic prospects.” This helps you prioritize updates later.
What doesn’t:
- Just dumping your entire CRM into Harmonic. You’ll get swamped with noise and end up ignoring the alerts.
- Relying on Harmonic to “figure it out” from a messy import. Clean your data first.
Pro tip:
Start small. Focus on top-tier accounts or your most active deals. You can always expand later if the alerts are actually helpful.
Step 2: Set Up Role Change Tracking
Now the actual magic: telling Harmonic what role changes you care about.
How to do it: 1. Go to your Harmonic dashboard and look for the “Alerts” or “Triggers” section. 2. Set up a new alert for “Role changes” or “Job movement.” 3. Define your criteria. For decision makers, this usually means: - Titles like “VP,” “Director,” “Head of,” or specific functions (e.g., “CIO,” “Head of Procurement”). - Moves within the same company (promotion, lateral move). - Moves to or from competitor or target companies.
What works: - Being specific. Don’t just track every job change—filter for roles with buying power. - Using boolean logic if available (e.g., “Title contains ‘Chief’ OR ‘VP’ AND Department = ‘IT’”).
What doesn’t: - Tracking every contact, regardless of their influence. You’ll get buried in noise. - Ignoring internal promotions—sometimes your champion gets promoted and now runs the whole team.
Pro tip:
Set up a separate alert for “departures” (when a contact leaves a company entirely). That’s often your first sign to reroute your efforts or pitch the new person.
Step 3: Tune Your Notification Settings (or You’ll Hate This)
Here’s where most folks go wrong: they set up alerts, then get bombarded with emails or Slack pings until they tune it all out.
What works: - Weekly digests for role changes, unless you’re working a very short sales cycle. - Push notifications only for high-priority accounts or “whale” deals. - Routing alerts to a shared team inbox or Slack channel for visibility.
What doesn’t: - Real-time alerts for every change. That’s just asking for notification fatigue. - Letting Harmonic send updates to people who don’t care (your CEO doesn’t need to know every SDR promotion).
Pro tip:
Do a sanity check after the first week. Are you getting alerts you actually use? If not, adjust your filters or frequency.
Step 4: Integrate with Your Workflow (Otherwise, It’s Homework)
A great alert is useless if it doesn’t make you act.
What works: - Pushing updates into your CRM as tasks or notes, so you can see right in the account view who’s changed roles. - Linking Harmonic with your email or sales engagement tool, so your next outreach is never out of date. - Assigning someone to “own” decision maker tracking—ideally an ops or enablement person, not just left to sales reps to remember.
What doesn’t: - Relying on memory or hoping someone on the team “just notices” a change. - Treating Harmonic as a side project. If it’s not integrated into your tools, it’ll get ignored.
Pro tip:
Build a simple playbook for what to do when a change happens. For example:
- If the main contact leaves, quickly identify the new decision maker and reach out.
- If a champion is promoted, congratulate them and ask how their new priorities have shifted.
- If someone moves to a new company (especially a customer), see if you can expand your relationship there.
Step 5: Actually Use the Insights (Don’t Just Watch the Alerts Pile Up)
This is where the real advantage comes in. Once you know about role changes, act on them—fast.
For Sales: - Update your messaging. Don’t send the same pitch to a new CMO as you did to the last one. - Use the change as a natural reason to reach out (“Saw you just took on a new role—congrats! How can we help as you settle in?”). - Flag accounts where your champion left. Decide if you need to rebuild the relationship or reprioritize.
For Customer Success: - New executive sponsor at a client? Set up a quick intro call. Don’t wait for the renewal to go sideways. - If a champion leaves for a new company, follow up—this is often the easiest “warm intro” you’ll get.
For Partnerships: - Decision maker moves to a partner org? Reach out and see if there’s an opportunity to expand collaboration.
What to ignore:
Don’t treat every job title tweak as a crisis. Some people change titles with no real change in influence. Focus on actual function and decision-making authority.
What Harmonic Gets Right (And Where You’ll Need to Fill Gaps)
Strengths: - Fast updates—usually quicker than waiting for LinkedIn to show a change. - Good filtering if you take the time to set it up. - Plays well with most CRMs and sales tools.
Weaknesses: - If your contact data is sloppy, your alerts will be too. - Can’t always pick up on “shadow” decision makers who don’t update their profiles. - Not a crystal ball. It won’t tell you who’s about to leave—just who already has.
Ignore the hype:
No tool will magically surface every power shift inside an org. It’s still worth picking up the phone, asking questions, and doing a little digging.
Keep It Simple, Iterate, and Don’t Overthink It
You don’t need a massive overhaul or a six-month “change management” project to start tracking decision maker changes. Upload your best accounts, set up a couple of targeted alerts, and see what actually moves the needle. If you’re getting useful updates, expand from there. If not, tweak your filters or try another tool. The goal isn’t to automate everything—it’s to stop missing the moments that matter.
Stay skeptical, keep it practical, and remember: even the best tech is just a nudge. The real difference is what you do next.