Getting started with Sonar
Welcome to Sonar, You should have received an invitation to access your account. Let's make sure that you properly setup you account and understand the key features that make Sonar powerful.
1. Activate your account
First, let's activate your account by starting your subscription. You can do so by heading over to "subscriptions" in the settings and follow the instructions to subscribe.
If you need the payment details to be submitted by someone else in your company, just invite them to your Sonar account by following step 2 below.
2. Invite your team members
Sonar data can provide value to various teams in a company. As such, we suggest that you invite everyone in the company that can leverage this data.
Some of the use cases we have seen with our customers include:
Sales: monitoring companies moving to a technology we integrate well with or installing a competitor
Marketing: performing exports to understand better our target market (size, etc)
Customer success: detecting churn by monitoring technology changes or hiring with our current customers
Account managers: detecting upsell opportunities by setting up technology alerts on current customers
Product managers: finding new integration opportunities by analyzing technology trends
3. Connect an integration
If you plan on sending alerts to Slack or a CRM you can turn on your integration by heading over the integrations page. We recommend just setting up Slack to begin with.
4. Create a sample alert
Setup a simple technology alert. For example, you can look for domains adding Shopify as shown below:
You can then hit "Create alert" and chose the name and destination all future alerts should be sent to. Let's chose the Slack channel you added in the previous step.
If you haven't setup any integration, you can simply select "webhook" and enter your webhook URL or a test webhook URL from: https://webhook.site/
5. Edit existing alerts
Your account should come with pre-created alerts that we think are relevant to your business.
You can simply edit these alerts by clicking the "edit alert" button on any alert:
Then you should be able to edit the alert details on the following screen and even the destination of the alerts after clicking the update alert button
6. Send a test alert
Once an alert is created or edited you can test it by going to the alerts page and hit the "send latest alert" button for the alert you want to test.
Before testing an alert, make sure events exist for the alerts by clicking "View latest signals" for the alert you want to test
Before testing an alert, make sure there is an actual past event in Sonar for the alert you want to test by clicking "View latest signals".
7. Export domains list or signals list
Sonar allows you to create exports for both domains and technology signals. The export buttons should be visible on both:
The domains dashboard
The technology signals dashboard
8. Recommandations
Congrats! You should now be ready to go and start using Sonar to power your go-to-market.
Before you leave, we'd like to share a few important recommandations based on our experience powering the data stack of several companies:
Don't be too restrictive when filtering alerts
It is always better to start with 100 alerts per day than 5
If you chose to filter your alerts by segments, we recommend not being too restrictive on them to start with.
For example, let's say that you want to use the following segment:
Shopify stores + United States + Apparel industry
We would recommend looking for a broader segment by dropping the last filter:
Shopify stores + United States
The reasons are multiple:
You might not be comfortable with our verticals yet and might forget a segment similar to the "Apparel industry"
Our coverage on some attributes like "industry" is evolving and we might not have industry data for all our websites yet. If you apply this filter, you might miss some opportunities
Be creative The success of using signals data for outreach is being creative on the way you think about the events you want to listen to.
It all comes down to understanding your core value proposition and what signals can show a readiness to benefit from your value proposition.
Below are typical use cases that you should reflect on and apply to your own business.
Opportunity signals
Websites installing competing solutions
Websites installing partner solutions
Growth signals
Websites installing an expensive tech solution
Websites seeing traffic growth
Websites investing in Ads
Pain signals
Websites installing a solution to fix a problem you provide value with
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