Introduction
Most sales tools work with a database made up of companies and contacts. At SalesXMachina we work with events. The difference: a database tells you who fits you, and an event tells you who has a reason to talk to you right now. Based on that event (we call it a signal), we automatically find the right leads for you and write the lead a personal message.
This article shows where we get these events from: we regularly query 18,000 pages across the German-speaking region.
Our data in numbers for 2026 (Jan–Sep)
| Volume | |
|---|---|
| Sources in the German-speaking region | over 18,000 |
| Reported events since January 2026 | 1,205,392 |
| New items per day (average of the last 30 days) | 11,268 |
Over 18,000 sources means every single page we query regularly. Every job board, every official gazette, every feed, every podcast, every overview page counts individually.
Eleven thousand items a day sounds like a lot, and it is. The vast majority of them are irrelevant to any individual customer. That is exactly why there is an evaluation step between the item and the message, which checks every item against the customer's offering.
Our categories
We sort the sources into different categories.
| Category | What's behind it | Items |
|---|---|---|
| Social networks | Posts by decision-makers on LinkedIn and Instagram | 472,334 |
| Topic and web search | Ongoing research on the customer's keywords | 376,987 |
| Company and market research | Targeted research on individual companies | 128,889 |
| Job markets | Federal Employment Agency, chamber job boards, career pages | 125,624 |
| Trade and business media | Trade titles, industry services, regional business press | 58,272 |
| Corporate communications | Press areas, investor relations, annual reports | 13,484 |
| Official registers | Commercial register, Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce, patent offices | 10,779 |
| Audio and video | Industry podcasts and interviews with executives | 5,632 |
| Tenders | Public procurement via TED | 3,282 |
The categories vary greatly in size, and that is no accident. Social networks deliver a lot of important data and leads for our service.
Within the categories, podcasts make up the largest group of individual sources. That surprises most people. The reason is simple: a managing director says things on an industry podcast that she would never say in a press release. We analyse the transcript, pull out the relevant quotes and use them as a hook for a personal message, all fully automated.
Three sources many salespeople underestimate
In our view, these are the three most underrated sources:
Public tenders
Whoever issues a tender has a budget, a timeline and often has to make a decision. It is the strongest buying signal there is, and it is completely public. We currently read TED, the European tenders database (as of September 2026).
Commercial register announcements
Changes of managing director, capital increases, relocations, new powers of attorney. Each of these announcements describes a change that has consequences. A new managing director makes more decisions in the first six months than in the three years after. That is why we analyse this data.
Patent applications
At the European Patent Office we only read published patent applications. This is sometimes very niche, but in the right industry it makes a noticeable difference to know which technologies pharmaceutical companies are working on.
The largest source has only just been added
With 468,075 analysed items, LinkedIn posts are already our largest source type today. Behind that lies a much larger pool. By September 2026 we had stored over 1.3 million publicly accessible LinkedIn posts. Around 300,000 posts are added every month.
| Volume | |
|---|---|
| Collected LinkedIn posts | 1,350,299 |
| New posts in the last 30 days | 355,726 |
| Distinct authors | 240,184 |
What makes this different from all other sources: a LinkedIn post often expresses what a person thinks. Anyone writing about the skills shortage, a trade fair or a project currently under way often gives our customers a concrete reason to start a conversation.
Some of our customers also use this data as competitive analysis: which software is currently being rolled out where, and which teams and partners were involved.
Others use our new "Marketing Suite" module: posts in their own network and in the target market are rated automatically, and a relevant post turns into either a reaction or a message that refers to exactly that post.
Happy selling, Axel