As we move towards 2025, capturing the attention of B2B buyers in outbound is as challenging as ever — it requires laser-focused targeting, messaging and timely relevance, and multiple touchpoints. Setting up RB2B and a Clay table just won’t cut it.

The explosion of MarTech tools for prospecting, signals, enrichment, and automation is not just creating lots of noise on LinkedIn, but also false promises that signal-based outbound is quick and easy. But it’s not.

With an overabundance of data and tools at our disposal — and email client servers cracking down on outbound as a channel — how can growth operators orchestrate effective signal-based outbound campaigns that generate sustained pipeline?

By strategically leveraging simple tools — LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Clearbit, Apollo.io, GetCargo.io, and Instantly.ai — Attention was able to create highly targeted, data-driven set of campaigns and effectively engage high-potential accounts — efforts that generated a staggering $1.2M in pipeline in just 4 months.

Because of the overabundance of outbound content on LinkedIn these days, most people think they can go from 0 to hero with outbound in a flash, regardless of your stage, budget, and persona. But again, it’s not that simple. So here’s a disclaimer.

This playbook provides a step-by-step guide on how Stewart and the Attention team — with the help of Loic from HyperGrowth Partners — implemented a tactical outbound strategy, maximizing outreach efficiency, and driving sustainable pipeline. It’s ideal for companies that target B2B buyers in a sales-led motion, with ideal customer profiles like Marketing & Sales living on LinkedIn.

To implement this playbook, it’s key to work back with the right resources. You need to have a sales team ready to engage prospects — be it BDRs or full-cycle AEs — and at least one growth marketer in-house to help run the program. Budget-wise, this setup would cost approximately $1,500 per month in SaaS subscription, making it best suited for businesses with an average contract value (ACV) above $6,000.

Ok, now that we’ve got this out of the way, let’s dive in!

Step 1: Define your ICP and messaging

Identify firmographics traits

To build an effective intent-based outbound strategy, the first step is to identify the key traits that define your ideal customers. 

This involves determining:

• Their geographic locations

• Specific industry verticals they operate in

• The size of their companies

• The job titles of potential contacts

• And the pain points they experience that your product can solve

By clearly defining these characteristics, you can focus your efforts on a target audience that is most likely to engage with your offering.

Create 1-3 buyer personas

Next, develop one to three detailed personas for each target role within your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). These personas should provide in-depth insights into:

• The specific outcomes they’re looking to achieve in the context of your product

• Motivations behind their outcomes

• How they measure such outcomes, with relevant KPIs

• Existing alternatives they’re using to achieve their outcome in absence of your product

• Challenges, problems, and pain points arising from using such alternatives

• Capabilities — what your product does — that help them achieve their outcome

• Benefits of your product/features that come from using your capabilities

• Differentiators that make your product better/different from current alternatives

Creating comprehensive messaging frameworks for each persona allows you to create conviction across marketing and sales, and tailor your outreach messaging and channel strategies to increase resonance and relevance with each segment. 

“I recommend to focus on one persona per campaign — it enables you to be more targeted in your approach, making your tests more effective. Begin by targeting your economic buyer first — e.g. VP Sales/Revenue in the case of Attention — or the persona that is closest to the most significant pain point your product addresses.”. - Loic

By focusing on the key decision-maker who stands to benefit the most from your solution, you increase the likelihood of engagement and expedite the sales cycle. This focus ensures that your outreach is not only targeted but also more likely to convert into economically tangible results — pipeline!

Step 2: Build your TAM, SAM, and SOM lists in Apollo

Start from existing account data

Once you got your personas and messaging locked down, start by leveraging your existing account data. Retrieve current accounts from your CRM.

“Clean up the data to ensure accuracy of your seed list — validate their emails, websites, and phone numbers.” - Stewart, VP Growth

By starting with data you already have, you can build a strong foundation for your campaign and focus on prospects that are more likely to engage.

Alternatively, you can create a new list of target accounts on Apollo by importing your segmentation criteria outlined above.

Expand your initial list with ICP traits filters

Once you have your initial list, expand it by applying Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) trait filters to identify additional high-potential prospects. 

“Attention used prospecting tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Clearbit, or Apollo.io to create highly targeted account and persona searches that matched our ICP.” - Stewart

Use lead scoring to tier your segments

Once you have identified all your traits, come up with segments for each trait, and assign a score to each bucket that will determine how good of a fit each bucket is. For example:

• Geo: US might have a higher score than UK or France, because sales cycles are shorter

• Industry: SaaS might also be higher fit than healthcare as MarTechs are more used

• Company size: mid-market might have a higher fit due to higher ACV and lower churn

• Job titles: as mentioned before, roles that are also budget owners might be score higher

By the end of this exercise, you should have 2-3 key prospect tiers — e.g. tier A, B, and C — each with a corresponding score range. This will inform various aspects of your outbound:

• Align marketing and sales on what great looks like, focusing around a shared pipeline goals

• Which prospects to prioritize with outreach

• How to route various tiers through relevant sequences and sales hand-offs

In the case of Attention:

• Senior buyers like VPs of Sales/Rev Ops receive the highest scores, junior titles receive lower ones

• They prioritize specific industries such as enterprise software and financial services

• Sales headcount is another key factor — prioritizing accounts that have sales teams between 5-100

“We bucket these into three tiers — high quality, normal, do not contact. High quality leads receive both Linkedin messages and SDR phone calls. Normal leads just receive emails, and ‘do not contact’ are not engaged at all.” - Stewart

Get market size data to work back funnel projections

Next, gather data on your Total Addressable Market (TAM), Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM), and Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) sizes to understand the scope of your opportunity.

“We employed Apollo.io's Data Health Center to assess TAM/SAM sizes, identifying the best go-to-market opportunities across startups, mid-market, and enterprise segments — and tailor our focus and messaging accordingly” - Loic

You can use this data to decide whether you should focus on persona X or Y, considering factors like competition, your product's capabilities and feature parity, and your brand positioning — all of which impact your sales cycle and pipeline. 

Use these estimates to further narrow down and size your ICP segment, and — based on your Average Contract Value (ACV) — work backward to determine the number of deals, opportunities, meetings or calls, and set pipeline/lead targets across your segments. 

This GTM planning allows you to allocate resources effectively and set realistic goals for your outbound marketing and sales teams.

Step 3: Enrich and score your accounts in Cargo

Import and analyze SAM in Cargo

“Cargo is a next-gen AI growth engineering SaaS that allows you to automate and orchestrate your growth workflows at scale. At Attention, we use it to extract, enrich, prioritize, and trigger outbound campaigns on thousands of contacts.” - Loic

To effectively enrich and prioritize your Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM), begin by importing your SAM account list from Apollo.io into GetCargo.io for enrichment.

Find lookalike accounts with Ocean

Within Cargo, use the Ocean.io integration to find lookalikes of your target account. 

“Creating lookalike audiences based on your current customers allowed us to target prospects with similar characteristics and higher conversion potential.” - Stewart

Enrich accounts with waterfall research

Then, add another Cargo step to enrich your target account list. This step is twofold — account-level and contact-level.

Start with contact-level information such as:

• Where your contacts live

• The college they attended

• Their LinkedIn career — including years of experience and previous roles or companies

• Recent job changes or promotions

• Any personal interests found on their profiles, like skiing or playing a sport in college

Then, layer in recent intent signals to tailor your outreach effectively. Examples include:

• Recent revenue milestones, fundraising, product launches, or new market expansions

• Purchase of specific technographics

• Hiring or layoffs surges in their company

“We monitored a 20% increase in SDR hires in the last six months to identify accounts with a higher fit for Attention’s product. Or, we tracked champion job movements — when new hires joined key accounts who could advocate for us — and gain quick internal recognition from implementing Attention.”. - Loic

These signals can help you estimate a higher propensity to buy and an increased likelihood of expanding their go-to-market motions, in line with the need for Salestech products like Attention. 

Then, use your ICP segments and lead scoring criteria to rank your accounts based on their fit and engagement potential.Score and rank accounts based on their fit and engagement potential to focus your efforts on the most promising opportunities.

Step 4: Set up targeted outreach waves

Group high-score accounts in themed waves

To maximize the effectiveness of your outbound campaigns, group your high-scoring accounts into targeted outreach waves. 

Theme these waves based on your segmentation criteria — like industry, specific use cases or pain points, geography — or personas — such as VP Sales/CRO, Sales Director, or RevOps Lead. 

For example, if you have a champion persona (Account Executive) and two decision-maker personas (Head of Sales and Head of Marketing) operating across three regions (US, EU, Asia), you can structure your outreach as follows:

US Campaign

1. Champion (AE): Test three messaging strategies around three specific signals.

2. Decision Maker (HoS): Test three messaging strategies around three specific signals.

3. Decision Maker (HoM): Test three messaging strategies around three specific signals.

Then, scale this template across all your key theme combinations, and progressively start creating messages from the highest-scoring segments.

Group high-score accounts in themed waves

For each wave, customize outreach messaging around the signals and personas identified in each wave. Assign each group a tailored messaging theme and value proposition that resonates with their unique characteristics and challenges. 

This approach ensures that your outreach is highly relevant and personalized, increasing engagement and the likelihood of conversion.

Step 5: Enroll prioritized accounts into multi-channel outreach with La Growth Machine or Instantly

Enhance deliverability

To enhance email deliverability, use Instantly.ai's warm-up features. These tools build credibility for your sending domains, increasing the likelihood that your emails land in inboxes rather than spam folders.

Email clients provider like Google are cracking down on outbound as a channel, alerting recipients of potential spam from suspicious domains and emails including links or pictures — so deliverability has never been more important. Some providers like Smartlead are even discouraging tracking open rates of emails because of this crackdown.

“We do track open rates. It leads to slightly worse deliverability, but we think the ability to retarget people who open an email multiple times is worth the trade-off.” - Stewart

Automate sequence enrollment

To streamline your outreach process, automate enrollment by pushing your prioritized contacts from GetCargo.io directly into La Growth Machine for cross-channel outreach on both email and LinkedIn, or Instantly for just emails. 

This integration automatically enrolls them into multi-touch email sequences, ensuring timely and consistent engagement without manual effort. 

Messaging is always paired to the most recent signal related to the contact or org. So if someone was recently hired into their role, we will reach out and congratulate them on the role. We're testing the combination of multiple signals in the email copy, like someone was recently hired and recently followed our linkedin page — there’s a ton of opportunities for stacking signals here.” - Stewart

Personalize messaging with AI

Personalization is crucial for capturing your audience's attention. 

Leverage ChatGPT within Cargo to craft compelling, personalized emails that address each account's specific pain points and potential use cases. This level of customization makes your messaging more relevant and increases the chances of eliciting a positive response.

“We personalize copy in Cargo and then send it to Instantly via an API.” - Stewart

Strive for simplicity and relevance in your outreach emails:

• Use first name in salutation

• Lead the opening with a tailored, relevant one-liner based on a recent signal or event

• Transition to a second one liner mentioning an alternative, or your value prop

• Close with a soft CTA, like “Can I show you a 15-min demo?” or “Can I share more info?

Avoid using links or images to hurt deliverability, especially on first touches with cold contacts. 

Set up automated nurturing by establishing follow-ups and touchpoints that guide prospects through the sales cycle. 

“We aim for a minimum of four touchpoints. If we see no engagement from someone in the first few touches, we'll remove them from the sequence. We keep follow-ups short and sweet — we're more trying to ‘bump’ the thread” - Stewart

Integrate notifications via Slack to keep your team informed of key replies or self-serve signups from specific high-score accounts, and update scoring attributes via Cargo right into your CRM to identify higher-potential leads.

Send physical letters or gifts via Sendoso

To stand out from competitors, add a Cargo step to send physical sales letter or gifts via Sendoso to the highest-value prospects.

“A tangible item can make a memorable impression, differentiating your approach and providing meaningful conversation starters.” - Loic

This combination of automated digital engagement and personalized physical outreach creates a multifaceted strategy designed to capture attention and drive sustainable growth.

Step 6: Monitor, analyze, and optimize your campaigns

Track key metrics

To maximize the effectiveness of your outbound campaigns, it's crucial to track key metrics diligently. Monitor:

• Open rates — mostly influenced by your list health, deliverability, and subject line

• Reply rates — mostly impacted by a combination of your list composition and messaging

• Meetings booked — again, influenced by list, messaging, and CTA, but also timing

• Opportunities logged — more impacted by their SDR/BDR meeting experience

• Pipeline value of total opportunities — a combination of all the above factors

Learn signal/messaging/persona fit

This continuous monitoring provides invaluable insights into how your campaigns are performing and where adjustments may be needed.

“Understanding the fit between signals, messaging, and personas is essential for success. Evaluate which messaging strategies, target personas, and engagement signals yield the best results.” - Loic

By analyzing this data, you can determine which combinations resonate most with your audience, allowing you to tailor your approach for maximum impact.

Testing

Iterate on your campaigns by testing new approaches, refining your targeting criteria, and adjusting your messaging based on data-driven insights. This proactive strategy ensures that your outreach remains dynamic and effective, ultimately leading to better engagement and higher conversion rates.

“We operate on two-weeks sprint cycles — we'll re-evaluate messaging after every couple of weeks, or when an experiment hits a stat sig level of volume. However, in the early stages of setting up the outbound motion, net-new list building is more important as volume is lower. The opposite is true for messaging — when you have larger list, you can focus on testing that.” - Stewart

Conclusion

By implementing a signal and intent-based outbound strategy, leveraging simple yet effective tools, and enriching your existing datasets with lookalikes, B2B SaaS companies can significantly enhance their outbound efforts. This step-by-step playbook empowers VPs and growth operators to:

• Execute a tactical, data-driven approach that targets high-potential accounts with precision.

• Personalize outreach and continuously optimize based on real-time feedback to improve engagement.

• Drive sustainable pipeline growth and gain a competitive edge in the market.

By focusing on these strategies, businesses not only improve engagement but also position themselves for long-term success in an increasingly competitive landscape.

The landscape of DevTools is undergoing a seismic shift — B2B DevTools marketers, grab pen and paper and take notes.

Traditional Developer Relations (DevRel) has long been the cornerstone of developer engagement. Focused on the 3Cs — conferences, community, and content — DevRel teams have excelled at building relationships and fostering developer ecosystems. These efforts have been crucial in creating brand loyalty and establishing thought leadership within the developer community.

However, a persistent challenge has plagued DevRel initiatives: the difficulty in measuring their direct impact on the bottom line. While DevRel activities undoubtedly add value, quantifying this value in terms of revenue or user acquisition has often been elusive. This lack of measurable outcomes has sometimes led to questioning the ROI of DevRel efforts, especially in more fiscally conservative business environments.

Enter Developer Marketing — the next evolution in developer engagement. This data-driven approach bridges the gap between community-building and measurable business outcomes. Developer Marketing takes the best aspects of DevRel — the deep understanding of developer needs and the ability to create meaningful connections — and combines them with measurable growth tactics that drive quantifiable results.

It's not about abandoning the community-centric approach of DevRel, but rather enhancing it with bottom-line-focused methodologies that resonate with both developers and business executives.

As we delve deeper into this topic, we'll explore how this shift is reshaping strategies, driving ROI, and creating new opportunities for meaningful developer engagement that directly impacts business growth.

In this post, we’ll specifically delve into the most largely untapped and hugely controversial opportunity for DevMarketing — Developer-Led Outbound. We’ll be sharing creative tactics on how you can effectively employ personalized outbound to bypass developers’ “BS sniffer”, add value, and drive meaningful conversations.

Let’s go!

From closed builders to key buyers

Last decades’ evolution of the developer's role in B2B SaaS has been nothing short of revolutionary. While developers were once viewed as siloed actors building products with internal tools, the landscape has dramatically shifted since the mid-2000s. 

The rise of cloud computing, SaaS, and now AI technologies has propelled developers into the spotlight as key influencers in the buying process.

Here's how developers have become pivotal in B2B decision-making:

• Growing influence: Though directors of engineering still hold the final say, developers wield significant power in shaping purchasing decisions.

• Technical expertise: Senior engineers can effectively argue for specific tools that impact project timelines and outcomes.

• Budget allocation: Engineering teams now have dedicated budgets for external SaaS tools.

• Early adoption: Developers are often the first to embrace and champion new technologies within their organizations.

While they may not hold the final decision-making power, their influence has grown exponentially. Today's developers wield significant sway in the procurement process, acting as key influencers who can make or break a deal. 

Consider this scenario: two senior engineers approach their director with a compelling case — "If we buy Product X, we'll ship Feature Y on time. Without it, we're looking at delays." 

In most cases, the director will heed their advice, recognizing the technical expertise and on-the-ground insights these developers bring to the table. Companies like Twilio, MongoDB, and Stripe recognized this shift early on, pioneering developer-centric approaches through:

•  Modular tech stacks

•  Engineering-focused content marketing

•  Robust Developer Relations (DevRel) programs

However, these trailblazers primarily focused on inbound and Product-Led Growth (PLG) strategies. The next frontier? Engaging developers through targeted, developer-led outbound. Controversial? Yes, but as the developer's influence continues to grow within the org, savvy B2B marketers must tap into this channel to effectively reach and persuade this technically-savvy audience across all channels.

Let’s show you how to do this properly.

The decline of DevRel and the rise of DevMarketing

Before we get into the weeds, it’s key to mention that the landscape of developer marketing is evolving rapidly.

Traditional Developer Relations (DevRel) strategies are giving way to more sophisticated, measurable approaches. While DevRel has long focused on the 3Cs — conferences, community, and content — its impact on the bottom line often remained elusive. 

And that’s when Developer Marketing emerged — a more data-driven evolution that bridge the gap between community-building and measurable business outcomes.

The evolution of DevRel into the more robust Developer Marketing approach is intrinsically linked to broader economic shifts. The era of zero interest rates fostered a climate where DevRel teams could operate without strict revenue-related KPIs, focusing primarily on community building and engagement. However, as economic realities have shifted, new times called for a more revenue-focused approach. 

Companies like PlanetScale and MongoDB recently restructuring their DevRel teams to re-align their focus on measurable growth goals are other tangible signs that reveal the decline of DevRel in favor of a more attributable approach to developer GTM.

Also, the latest tech advancements enabled DevMarketing strategies to leverage data created by developers interacting with products and websites, combining them with AI-driven personalization. This combination allows for outbound marketing efforts that are tailored and value-additive. Unlike the generic outreach of the past, modern DevMarketing can offer developers insights, solutions, and opportunities that are specifically relevant to their work and challenges — bypassing their BS sniffer altogether.

The result? Outbound marketing to developers is no longer a taboo practice but a powerful tool for delivering genuine, targeted value. 

By harnessing data and AI, companies can now create outbound campaigns that resonate with developers' specific needs and interests, transforming what was once seen as intrusive into a welcome source of personalized support and information. 

This shift marks a new era in developer engagement – one where marketing efforts are not just tolerated, but potentially eagerly anticipated by the developer community.

Developer-Led Outbound, Done Right

Developer outreach has entered a new era, demanding a delicate balance between attributable strategies and respect for developers' preferences.

While DevTools companies need measurable results, developers still possess a finely-tuned "bullshit sniffer" and favor touchless experiences. The key to successful outbound marketing lies in delivering genuine value. 

Below are few creative plays we’ve tested with our portfolio companies and proved to be successful.

1. Programmatically identify and flag bugs in GitHub open-source projects

One innovative approach is programmatically identifying and flagging bugs in GitHub open-source projects. This method is centered in showcasing technical expertise while offering practical assistance. It’s an hyper-targeted strategy provides immediate value, potentially opening the door for further engagement. 

This play could work specifically well for companies like Snyk that focus on finding vulnerabilities on projects and granting security.

1. Create a list of relevant GitHub repos with tools like Clay or Apollo

2. Write an AI prompt to scrape the code within these repos and identify “common” bugs

3. Extract emails of developers working on these repos

4. Craft an AI-generated message to flag the bug and offer a solution to developers

Bonus: tailor the prompt/flag based on the dev activity/contribution to the repo, or on their role within the repo (IC vs. manager)

Then, if developers respond positively, a follow-up message can introduce your product as a long-term solution to prevent similar issues. 

The crucial factor? Ensuring the identified bugs align closely with the problems your product solves. By focusing on relevant issues, you demonstrate not just technical acumen, but a deep understanding of the developers' specific challenges and how your solution addresses them.

2. Scrape Fortune500 company's T&Cs to identify back-end stack and suggest 10X better alternatives

If you’re targeting enterprise customers, some of their GitHub might not be open source, making the play above more challenging to implement at scale.

If that sounds like you, then another play to elevate your developer outreach is by tapping into an often-overlooked goldmine: a company's terms and conditions. This creative approach allows you to uncover valuable insights about the backend technologies used by the company (they have to display it by law!) and position your product as a superior alternative. Here's how to execute this strategy:

1. Compile a list of target companies from LinkedIn

2. Use AI prompts to analyze their T&Cs, returning their current backend stack

3. Write another AI prompt to identify competitors' tools within the identified stack

4. Source developer contact information from these companies

5. Based on the above, program the AI to extract how the target prospect is using their current alternatives product so that we can position and suggest specific use cases where our product is better

Bonus: Inject a programmatic case study from a similar company to showcase your industry expertise and credibility. 

This method not only demonstrates your technical research and acumen, but also your ability to provide tangible value from the very first interaction. By offering actionable insights based on their specific tech stack, you're not just selling a product – you're presenting a solution to challenges they may not even realize they have. 

This targeted, data-driven approach transforms cold outreach into a compelling conversation starter, setting the stage for meaningful engagement and potential sale.

3. Compare site performance with public tools like PageSpeedInsights

The last play we’re sharing is leveraging PageSpeedInsights to deliver competitive edge insights. This strategy transforms cold emails into valuable, action-oriented communications. This play was inspired by Vercel's successful tactic of measuring page load times and offering performance-boosting solutions, providing clear, tangible value from the first interaction. 

1. Depending on your target segment, you can build a target company list from:

   • Global 1000 API or LinkedIn, if you’re selling to mid-market and enterprise with an established social presence

   • Crunchbase API, if you’re selling to startups who’s recently raised a specific stage or amount

2. Use an AI prompt to identify each company's key competitors

3. Craft a specific API call that can deliver you PageSpeedInsights for both your target company and their competitor, returning both scores and areas of opportunities

4. Source developer contact information from target companies

5. Craft AI-generated messages presenting both sites' results and specific, actionable insights for the developer to action

By presenting a side-by-side comparison with competitors and outlining concrete steps for improvement, you position your outreach as a strategic asset rather than a sales pitch — something developers tend to appreciate!

Again, this personalized method not only demonstrates you’ve done your (technical) research) but also your commitment to helping developers achieve measurable improvements in their day to day. It's a powerful way to initiate meaningful conversations.

Conclusion

The future of developer GTM lies in the strategic integration of hyper-personalized data within developer-led communications.

This powerful combination creates a comprehensive approach that not only fosters community but also drives measurable business outcomes. By adopting value-additive outbound strategies, companies can effectively engage and convert developers, transforming traditional marketing efforts into welcomed, personalized interactions. 

Here's why this matters:

• Demonstrable ROI: Measurable, attributable marketing efforts provide clear insights into campaign effectiveness and contribution to business growth.

• Trust-Building: Value-driven outbound strategies, tailored to developers' specific needs and challenges, build credibility and foster long-term relationships.

• Conversion Power: Personalized, insightful outreach not only captures attention but also increases the likelihood of converting developers into loyal customers or advocates.

By embracing this integrated approach, B2B marketers can navigate the delicate balance between providing value and driving business results, positioning their products as essential solutions in the developer's toolkit while respecting the unique preferences of this discerning audience.

Delivering the right message to the right person at the right place is the holy grail for today’s GTM teams. The alignment between your audience and offer, which hinges on the demand and supply dynamics, is the core of modern marketers’ strategy.

Given that 75% of today’s B2B buyers prefer a touchless sales experience — without talking to reps — and one that is personalized to them, signal-based interactions are becoming increasingly important for reaching audience/offer fit, and building converting pipeline.

In this post, we’ll articulate an end-to-end playbook to use intent signals in your go-to-market, so you can maximize audience/offer fit, and drive pipeline with higher conversion rates.

1. Understanding signals — what and how they make your GTM motion “intelligent”

First off, let’s start with basic definitions.

• Signals: events that a user takes (eg. visited your pricing page, performed an action on your product, interacting with a social post, etc.). These are helpful for surfacing who is in the market for your product and their propensity to buy.

• Attributes: traits that distinguish high-intent users regardless of their signals (eg. their role, seniority, the funding or n. of employees of their company, their industry, etc.). Attributes tell us if they would be a fit to buy, even if they performed a high-intent signal (eg. can they pay us or are they an intern?).

Ultimately, the combinations of both signals and attributes make up the audience circle in the above Venn diagram. Gathering signals and attributes helps you align your offer with your audience's needs and expectations — that’s what makes your GTM “intelligent”. You sell only to people in the market, driving more pipeline, and increasing your focus and conversions.

To get the best results, you have to maximize the overlap between your audience (the signals generated by high-fit buyers and customers) and your offer (the relevance of your response to those signals). Capturing buying signals allows you to do three things:

• Capture: collect signals that are highly correlated with buying intent for your offer

• Identify: identify people who perform those signals across multiple channels

• Enrich: check whether these people match your ICP, revealing who’s in the market for your offer at this moment in time (or who’s about to be)

• Engage: depending on the signal — which corresponds to a specific intent stage and buying maturity — personalized your offer, the message you’re going to engage them with, to graduate them to the next buying stage.

2. Select Signals — Identify data source and related signals

Choosing the right sources for gathering signals is the first step to an intelligent GTM. 

There are three main signal categories:

1. First-party signals (contact level, owned) — data collected and owned directly by your product and SaaS. Examples include:

• Website (eg. visited case study or pricing page)

• Product (eg. signed up for a trial or activated) — especially relevant for PLG/PLS

• CRM (eg. booked a meeting, closed a deal)

• Email automation SaaS (eg. attended a webinar, subscribed to the newsletter)

• Support SaaS (eg. created a support ticket, filed a complaint)

• Chat SaaS (eg. interacted with a chatbot, left 10 messages in chat)

2. Second-party signals (contact level, unowned) — data collected by core platforms where your audience spends time on. Examples include:

• Employment data (eg. champion changed job and posted about it on LinkedIn)

• Social media activity (eg. reacted to a company or competitor's post)

• Community activity (eg. joined a Reddit community or Slack channel)

• Developer activity (eg. submitted a PR on a repo)

As you might have noticed, first- and second-party signals are almost always at contact level. That is, we can reveal the person — their email, name, company, or some unique ID — by enriching the signal.

3. Third-party signals (company level) — specific data identified by third platforms that, when combined with first- and second-party signals, can be highly indicative of audience/offer fit. Examples include:

• Job listings (eg. target role opened on job listing platform)

• Technographics (eg. new integration added, new SaaS acquired)

• News & Events (eg. new product launched, new key hire or fundraise announced)

• Keyword consumption (eg. content on related keywords consumed)

• Reviews site activity (eg. visited competitor page/pricing on G2)

The main difference between first-, second-, and third-party is that the first two categories happen at a contact level, whether third-party ones relate to miscellaneous news about their organization.

Knowing which signals are important and why they determine a high audience/offer fit goes hand in hand with your targeting strategy. Make sure you have that strategy intentionally laid out instead of just “brainstorming” a spray-and-paint approach to signals.

If your targeting strategy determines your ICP attributes, then your T-shaped funnel will inform which behavioral signals you need to capture.

3. Map Signals — The T-shaped funnel and divergence point

Now that we understand which signals are out there for us to collect, the next step is to map them out on the customer journey and prioritize how we collect them. Let’s do that by rebuilding our buyer’s funnel.

Modern SaaS buyers’ funnels are T-shaped — they’re multi-faceted when you’re in the nurturing stage, however they then become more linear.

• T-base layer: when a buyer is in the base layer of the T-shaped funnel, they perform events across multiple channels — examples include getting a new job, hitting a feature gate, visiting a pricing page, signing up for a product, attending webinars, engaging with competitors on social media, and more.

• T-bottom layer: when they request a demo, the journey starts to become more linear, with consequential steps like committing to an opportunity, a proof of concept, a procurement review, and then a signed agreement.

Divergence typically occurs when a buyer's interest is high enough to agree to a conversation, and they book a demo with the sales team. This is the key signal and inflection point — it causes the action to switch the funnel to fluid and horizontal to linear.

From that moment onwards, uncovering signals more signals becomes critical to converting pipeline into revenue. Before that inflection point, signals-driven GTM must prioritize the identification of who’s in market (audience), and nurture them to book a demo.

Here are key steps to get you started on this exercise.

1. Map out the stages from signal to close.

2. Identify your conversion point depending on your growth motion (eg. signup for PLG or demo for sales-led). 

This is the divergence point when the funnel goes from multi-faceted to linear. It's usually when a signal is acted on and the next step is a discovery meeting booked.

3. List all signals leading to this divergence point.

4. Note the volume, cost, and conversion rate of each signal.

5. Identify the top-performing signals.

4. Score Signals — Prioritize signals correlated to pipeline

Not all signals are created equal, and not all of them are indicative of the same audience/offer fit. Once you have identified the right signals across your T-shaped funnel that will help you determine your audience/offer fit, you need to analyze your historical data to pick which signals are more correlated to pipeline.

The goal of this step is to build a scoring system that weighs your signals based on:

• Volume/Frequency: how often a signal happens. The higher the frequency, the more likely that a specific signal is associated with a top-of-the-funnel buying stage.

• Impact on conversions: how predictable the signal is to getting someone to the next step of the journey, especially given that the linear stages of the funnel convert at similar rates. For example, pricing page visit or a job change might convert to a demo at different rates, but once they do, bottom-layer funnel conversion rates are more predictable.

• Signal difficulty: how difficult is it for you to execute this signal to personalize your outreach?

This scoring system helps you prioritize which signals are determining a higher audience/offer fit. Start collecting/analyzing high-conversion, low-frequency/volume signals. Then, work your way up on the higher-frequency/volume signals depending on your ICP targeting.

Then, group signals in the same category or data source together as they might be easier to collect and cross-check insights. For example:

• If you know that “workspace with enterprise integrations” and “workspace with 3 seats” are indicative of high audience/offer fit, then you might want to prioritize collecting these signals.

• Or, if your historical data shows that prospects that “followed a competitor” and also “reacted on your LinkedIn post” are more likely to book a meeting, then it becomes key to prioritize collecting these signals together.

By the end of this phase, you should have a model that informs your team which signals are linked with a higher audience/offer fit.

Use this framework to build your model and identify your magic quadrant

5. Execute Signals — Use signals to personalize your outreach strategy

Now that you’ve collected and scored the signals that have a higher correlation to conversion, you can use them to personalize your demand gen programs and send the most relevant messages to the right people at the right time.

Again, you need to prioritize creating these personalized plays depending on your targeting strategy and the signals that have a higher correlation to audience/offer fit.

For example:

• If your top signal is someone visiting an integration page on your website, your email may include a customer story that details how that integration is used.

• If the signal is product users hitting a usage threshold on their current plan, your outreach may include an offer to walk users through different plans before they lose access.

• If the signal is an economic buyer engaging with one of your competitors online, your outreach may include a comparison of your two solutions or user reviews that highlight the differences between your products.

6. Automate Signals — Progressively scale your signal-based outreach

Once you lock down your initial signal-based outreach plays, you can use them to progressively automate your outreach personalization.

A helpful framework to scale is the Paul Graham’s Crawl, Walk, Run

• Crawl: start manually

• Walk: progressively automate

• Run: automate the end-to-end process

This doesn’t just ensure that the messaging remains targeted, but also that you don’t over-invest. Let’s look at examples for each stage:

Crawl — manually capture, enrich, and engage

The goal is to first start scrappy and validate a hypothesis before investing resources for scale. Starting with just a spreadsheet, an internet connection, and an email client is often all you need at this stage. It's tedious, and it should be, because you need to go slow before going fast.

1. Find a LinkedIn influencer who covers content about problems your product can solve. Use tools like Taplio, Kleo, or just a good old LinkedIn search.

2. Manually review commenters that fit your ICP, and copy-paste them into your CRM.

3. Send them a connection request with a note, DM, or email leading your message with reciprocity about the influencer’s posts; then, layer your value prop as a segway

Walk — automatically capture and enrich, then manually engage

Once you’ve learned which signals are starting to work for you and you’ve defined 3-4 successful GTM plays, you can introduce automation to capture signals. You can still keep humans in the loop to review the personalized outreach before sending.

1. Taking the use case from above, we can the CommonRoom Chrome extension to automatically identify people who engage with a list of relevant LinkedIn influencers.

2. Automatically filter commenters that match your ICP, then enroll them in a specific segment that your reps can engage with.

3. Start from a custom template, then manually personalize your outreach message depending on their comment, topic, or specific influencer they’ve interacted with.

Run — automatically capture, enrichment, and engagement

When you achieve confidence and repeatability at the walk phase, your signal-based engagement can also be fully automated.

1. Use CommonRoom to automatically capture signals of people who engage with a list of relevant LinkedIn influencers

2. Automatically filter and enrich commenters that match your ICP, then enroll them in a specific segment that your reps can engage with.

3. Automatically push your tailored email messages to your email sequencer like Outreach or Apollo.

7. Stack Signals — Layer use cases for signal-based outreach

When you reach the Run stage across multiple signal-based GTM plays, you’ll eventually reach a plateau of pipeline growth. It’s not a bad problem to have, but when that does happen, you have two options:

1. Start running tests to optimize your messaging for existing plays

2. Creatively combine/stack multiple signals to uncover new plays

Example signal stacking A: LinkedIn post engagement + website visits

• LinkedIn post engagement and web visits — when stacked together — can signal a prospect's interest in your product or category.

• A LinkedIn post engagement, whether from an employee, advocate, or competitor, indicates that the prospect was compelled to check out your website.

• Stacking these signals suggests the prospect is beyond the awareness stage, either feeling a pain point acutely or actively looking for solutions.

Example stacking B: 10-k earnings initiative + job change

• A job change often signals upcoming changes in technology, team, or strategy within a company.

• An earnings report (10-K) provides insights into a business's financials, risks, priorities, initiatives, and investments.

• Stacking job changes with 10-K initiatives identifies individuals as change agents likely to make an impact on company objectives listed in the earnings report.

• Combining these signals in an outbound message shows that you have done your homework, understand the situation, and can help achieve company objectives.

Closing Thoughts

Signal selection, execution, scaling, and stacking are essential components of an intelligent GTM that drives a qualified pipeline while optimizing the focus of your resources. 

Aligning the right message with the right audience is the underlying principle of an intelligent GTM that every modern marketing and sales team should pay attention to.

A signal-based approach is the secret to enabling this alignment, leading not just to increased meetings booked, but also a more efficient pipeline and a better relationship across marketing and sales teams.

In the last three years as an Outbound GTM advisor, I've encountered numerous founders, and Marketing and Sales leaders convinced that outbound can be fully automated with AI or some automation tool, reducing the whole outbound motion to almost a mere numbers game. Doesn’t that sound all too easy and too good to be true though?

A recent announcement from Outreach — a leading SEP (Sales Engagement Platform) — about major email clients like Google and Yahoo tightening spam email policies, shook the reliance on AI for outbound sales and marketing, generating a wave of worries in all those who have been over-relying on the “AI outbound promise”. If AI truly was the outbound silver bullet, why the sudden tremor of uncertainty? Not to mention that many sales leaders and founders have also been concerned about lower-than-previous-years reply rates!

The reality is that AI and any automation software has its limitations, particularly in outbound. AI excels in data scraping, parsing, and organization, acting as a tool rather than a strategic mastermind. It’s a tool that is here to help optimize existing workflows upon being provided detailed instructions, but it’s still incapable of looking at situations from different perspectives, reading between the lines, providing heuristic guides, and thinking about things deeply.

Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, it lacks human traits that are essential in outbound sales and marketing — especially in B2B SaaS and technical software — the ability to connect, empathize, understand nuances and heuristics and creatively problem solve. These crucial skills can’t be replaced with AI yet. 

And, when it comes to high 5-6 figure deals, PLG alone won’t cut it — your customers will require human engagement over automated systems. 

This is all to reiterate two timeless points I’ve learned during my decade-long tenure in outbound:

• People buy from people, not from brands, and most definitely not from an automated email (even if AI and automation can assist in the process, it won’t seal the deal…yet), especially in enterprise and technical sales.

• Also, if you’re already at scale, AI can help automate manual and tedious tasks. But if you are kicking off the foundations of outbound sales and marketing, AI alone won’t take your business from 0 to 1.

So, how do we embrace the positive changes brought to us by AI and navigate outbound in 2024 and beyond? How do we effectively integrate AI and humans into a robust — and cost-effective — outbound GTM strategy? And last but not least, how do we empower SDRs, ABM, Demand Gen, and Growth marketers to be an AI-assisted team that is aligned and focused on a single goal: generating pipeline? 

First of all, Sales and Marketing need to be true allies — think two wings on a bird, two wheels on a cart. Without this mutual respect and understanding, gaps will widen over time. So it’s important to design your outbound strategy working back from that — an aligned team with a singular focus on generating pipeline.

In the age of AI and, productivity per employee is scaling, smaller cross-functional teams will be more common — think of them as linchpins.

In this two-part series, I will walk you through how to build a cross-functional outbound team that encompasses sales and marketing — a team made up of linchpins who know and understand outbound frameworks, design and execute on programs across teams, leveraging data, tech, and AI. And most importantly, to ensure a tight handshake between sales and marketing to build a pipeline. 

The good news is that it can be done — I know this because I built this outbound system and engine at Auth0. And I’ve also advised startups to do the same. if I did it and my clients are doing it, you can do it too! 

In part one, we’ll cover the fundamentals — your goals, vision, and team. And in part two, we’ll dive into your campaigns, data, and (AI) tooling you need to pull it off. Let’s!

Goals, Vision, and Team

It all starts with your goals and team. To build a successful outbound team, you’ll need to have clear goals and the right people in place to foster the relationship between sales and marketing (both of them are necessary!), design outbound strategies, and execute programs that are driving pipeline.

Here are some roles that are crucial when starting.

Demand Gen Leader — Goals, Vision & High-level Strategy

At the heart of any successful outbound team is a leader who can unite a team on a vision to achieve a common goal. In this instance, the vision is to generate pipeline as one team, aligning Marketing and Sales goals, and working together with one another.

Your Demand Gen Leader is crucial to: 

• Foster relationships between Sales and Marketing because this sets the culture and standard for how the rest of the team is to behave.

• Ensure every team is aligned — from paid ads to ABM to SDRs — and focused on creating pipeline.

• Hire the right people for the right role, and manage their execution.

• Nurture a culture of learning from mistakes and being bullish on experiments.

An effective Demand Gen strategy requires the practical application of outbound frameworks that are modular, scalable, and cost-efficient based on key customer traits, and equally as important:

• Process: Who does what and by when.

• Programs: Execution of tactics to generate pipeline.

• Data: Pipeline and attribution reports of programs. 

• Tools: Leveraging software to optimize the team’s output.

The core goal of each outbound campaign — across ABM, Paid, Events, Lifecycle, and SDRs — needs to be focused on identifying and accelerating sales opportunities for every customer buying stage.

Sales Strategy Manager — Cross-Functional Outbound Strategy

It may sound like I am beating a dead horse when I say this, but all effective outbound programs start with the fundamentals of prospecting. Otherwise, it’s like building a house without foundations.

And that’s what the Sales Strategy Manager’s role is about, more specifically:

• Identifying the target accounts, personas, and related buying intent and triggers.

• Developing the right messaging mix for each persona, account, and intent signal.

• Designing outbound campaigns, such as mapping out accounts and multithreading.

• Analyzing pipeline and attribution data to guide future strategy, programs, and campaigns.

In summary, the Sales Strategy Manager is a cross-functional role — a linchpin! — that ensures every outbound program supports pipeline creation; from what personas and companies are targeted to the messaging and approaches used by SDRs when prospecting — think core and secondary personas, multi-threading, direct mail, AMA sessions, webinars, courses, and more — as well as studying the related data.

ABM/Growth Manager  — Intent triggers, Campaign Execution

ABM Managers are also linchpins that operate across Sales and Marketing.

They’re responsible for setting up, running, optimizing, and scaling all your outbound campaigns — 1-to-many (eg. Virtual Hands-On Lab, Direct Mail, etc.) and 1-to-few (eg. executive dinners, direct mail, etc.). These programs will incorporate various prospecting tactics, such as multi-threading with core and secondary personas, all within target accounts (we’ll cover these in more detail in part 2 of this article). 

At its core, ABM is a framework that guides marketing teams to focus their effort on their specific Company’s Ideal Client Profile (ICP); often called target accounts. ABM shares similar fundamentals to outbound prospecting, which refers to deeply knowing your customers, identifying the right personas, accounts, and buying intent and triggers, and then engaging them with a mix of prospecting approaches alongside direct mails, executive dinners, virtual hands-on lab, ads (to name a few, as we’ll cover these in more detail in part 2 of this article), and many more programs to earn time on the calendar. 

Effective ABM/ Growth Managers will require deeper collaboration with the Sales and Marketing teams to access buyer trigger data and design a channel mix across webinars, virtual hands-on labs, paid ads, and direct mail to capture prospects’ attention and earn time on their calendars.

Outbound is a Team Sport

As you can see, you don’t need to hire 50 SDRs to pull off an effective outbound program. And most importantly, outbound is a cross-functional team effort, not limited to SDRs. Everyone in Sales and Marketing plays a vital role in creating pipeline. 

SDRs are on the frontlines speaking with prospects and getting real-time feedback; the Sales Strategy Manager works actively to provide new prospecting strategies and Account, Persona, and Buying data; and the ABM/Growth Managers design and execute programs that will pique the curiosity of our prospects, while assisting the SDRs in connecting with prospects. It’s a matter of leveraging each other’s strengths and collaborating closely with one another.

To win as a team it’s crucial to meet regularly — weekly to bi-monthly —  to discuss goals, transparently review what prospecting programs and approaches are working and what are not, and brainstorm ideas where Marketing can provide additional outbound support through their creative programs.

Closing Thoughts

As we’ve seen in this article, the true power of outbound begins with people being aligned on a singular vision and goal — generating pipeline. AI then enables them to focus on what they do best, which is empathizing with prospects, creative problem-solving, and building relationships based on trust and mutual value creation. AI saves us time on admin work while, but it won’t be able to replace the empathy and the creativity of the human mind.

In the next article of this series, we’ll come full circle and share our approach to how your newly-formed outbound “linchpin” team can build the 0 to 1 of your outbound programs. We’ll delve into key campaigns, channels, attribution data, and toolkits used, so don’t miss it!