Chris Willocks
Key takeaways
- 10:10Judge signals through four lenses — sequence, recency, consistency and relevance: an ad click means little after about two days, and a signal from someone outside the buying group matters far less than one from a decision-maker.
- 12:12Match ad types to signal stage: early signals (new hires, funding, G2 competitor research) call for brand, problem and thought-leadership ads; later signals (pricing-page visits, forwarded emails, webinar attendance) call for case studies, demo promotions and versus-competitor ads.
- 17:18Only about 16% of ads get noticed — 75% are ignored — and 'active attention' is measured as just one to two seconds, so basics like a visible logo, short copy, a clear CTA and brand consistency are non-negotiable.
- 24:22Emotional ads are twice as likely to be remembered as rational ones, and faces are the simplest attention-grabber — heat maps show people look at a face first, which Influ2 exploits by putting SDRs' and executives' faces in pre-event ads.
- 15:15New hires are an underused trigger: people entering new roles are actively researching tools and are more responsive to outreach, so ads timed to a job change land in a rare open window.
Questions Chris Willocks answered
G2 sells intent analytics on who is viewing your profile, competitor profiles or the category, which you can plug into your CRM. Funding signals come from Crunchbase, hiring signals from Sales Navigator and LinkedIn, and aggregators like Keyplay are emerging that combine intent signals to help build your ideal customer profile.
Buyer Signals & Ad Strategy: The New B2B Formula30:30 · with Anna Tsymbalist
In Chris Willocks's words
“Buyers, they're not sitting there waiting for our ads. They're doing their own thing, they've got their own lives to live, and they're on autopilot.”
“We're obsessed with saying accelerating instead of speeding up, and we're obsessed with saying leverage instead of use because we think it sounds clever and a little bit more sophisticated, but the reality is people just gloss over it.”
“You want to be on that top five list before they've even started researching. And that's where memory comes into things.”