Signal Plays

A list tells you who could buy. A signal tells you who might buy now. This reference turns signals into outbound plays: which signals to trust, how fresh they need to be, what to do when one fires, and how much effort each account deserves.

Signals are a timing and relevance filter. They don't replace ICP fit. A strong signal at a company outside your ICP is still a skip, and a great-fit account with no signal can still get a well-aimed message built on its situation.

Rank signals by how close they are to you

The closer the signal is to your product and your past customers, the better it converts. Work down this list and stop where you have enough volume:

Stack signals before acting on the weaker ones. Hiring a lifecycle marketer plus an ESP in the stack plus a fit score above your threshold is worth a sequence. Any one of those alone usually isn't.

Warm paths: your network is a signal too

Before buying a list, mine the relationships you already have. A warm introduction gets read when the twentieth cold email of the day doesn't, and AI-written outreach makes that gap wider.

1. Export your network. LinkedIn connections (Settings → Data privacy → Get a copy of your data), calendar attendees, and inbox contacts. LinkedIn's export includes emails only for connections who allow it.
2. Enrich and rank every contact: company, role, industry, headcount. Score them against your ICP like any other list.
3. Match against target accounts to find first- and second-degree paths into the companies you want.
4. Start with your calendar. Recent meetings show who is in a buying moment right now.
5. Find one connector per vertical: someone trusted by buyers who ignore cold outreach (an agency owner who knows every other agency owner). Pay them the way you'd pay for a qualified meeting, and disclose the arrangement.
6. Double opt-in intros only. Ask the connector, then the target, before anyone is introduced. Keep a human approving every intro, and never ask one contact to take intros for two vendors in the same week. Trust is the asset; spend it slowly.

Adapted from Cody Schneider's podcast with Chris of Super Connector (October 2026).

Freshness windows

A signal decays. Act inside these windows or downgrade it:

Record the signal date on every lead. A lead sheet without signal dates can't be prioritized.

From signal to play

Every signal you track should map to a specific play, so nobody improvises the angle at send time:

Write the angle as the problem the signal implies. "Saw you raised a Series A" is a fact everyone else sent. "Most teams that just raised are told to double pipeline in two quarters, and the site usually becomes the bottleneck" is a reason to reply.

Gap plays: a signal plus a gap you can see

The strongest services and tooling plays pair two things: a signal that the company is spending or growing, and a gap you can verify from outside that your offer fixes. The signal says they have budget and a reason to act. The gap gives you a specific, checkable opener instead of a guess.

Rules for gap plays:

1. Verify the gap; never assume it. Record what you checked, the date, and a screenshot or URL. An agent asked to find gaps will invent them unless every gap needs evidence. "No gap found" is a valid result, the same as "no hook found" in account-research.md.
2. Know what can't be seen from outside. Server-side tracking (Meta's Conversions API, server-side Google Tag Manager) doesn't show in page source, so a missing browser tag isn't proof of missing tracking. Ask, don't accuse. A homepage is also a normal destination for brand-name search ads, and an ad running for months may be the winner rather than tired. Ad longevity is a proxy, not proof.
3. Re-check before sending. Gaps get fixed. Re-verify within 7 days of the first touch, or drop the gap from the message.
4. The gap must map to your offer. Spotting a problem you can't fix is research, not a play.
5. Lead with the observation and a question, not a verdict. "Your Meta ads for the spring launch point to the homepage. Is that on purpose?" gets replies. "Your landing pages are wasting your ad spend" gets deleted. Offer the evidence, and the teardown, only after they say yes (see the cold-email skill's outbound plays reference).

Searching for these by hand is slow, which is why the plays used to be rare. Agents with web, ad-library, and X search access (Grok, for example, searches X directly) can build the list. A human still reviews the evidence for Tier 1 and a sample for Tier 2. Once a play gets replies, run it on a schedule with the signal-sweep loop in the marketing-loops skill.

Two worked examples

A services agency selling to B2B SaaS (for example, a CRO and landing page agency)

• Signals: funding in the last 60 days; a new VP Marketing or head of growth; open roles for growth or performance marketers; a redesigned site or new pricing page; paid search or paid social campaigns launching.
• Play: value first, built on a verified gap from the gap plays table. Offer a short teardown of their actual page. Send it only after they say yes. See the cold-email skill's outbound plays reference.
• Volume: about 50 well-researched accounts a week beats 5,000 generic sends. Agencies rely on depth.

A self-serve SaaS tool (for example, an email verification product)

• Signals: signups from company domains; credit or plan limits hit; large list uploads; team invites. Off-product signals include companies hiring lifecycle, RevOps, or SDR roles and cold-email tools appearing in their stack.
• Play: product-led outbound for usage signals, problem-led cold outbound for the rest. The outbound plays reference covers both.
• Volume: usage signals are few but hot. Cold lists can be larger, but every send has to model the deliverability the product sells.

Account tiers

Tiers decide how much research and how many channels each account gets. Assign the tier before writing anything.

Keep campaigns small. Several vendor and agency datasets show reply rates falling as campaign size grows, with campaigns of 50 or fewer recipients replying at roughly twice the rate of campaigns over 1,000.

Tools for detecting signals

See the tools registry for setup. A scheduled sweep of these sources is the signal-sweep loop in the marketing-loops skill.

Common mistakes

• Treating any funding round as a buying signal for everything.
• Opening with the signal itself ("Congrats on the raise"). Use it to choose the angle, then talk about their problem.
• Acting on stale signals. A six-month-old job change is just a job.
• Mentioning website visits that the prospect doesn't know were tracked. It reads as surveillance.
• Running every account at the same depth. Tier first.