How to automate a signal-based outbound motion

241024 SaaS Weekly Playbook - signal-based outbound motion

Welcome to the SaaS Weekly GTM Foundations series. Once a month, I write tactical resources covering growth strategies and foundational GTM operations.

Is outbound prospecting dead?

The short answer is no. Outbounding still works today, but not how it used to. Let me explain.

Outbound prospecting in isolation has indeed lost its touch (pun intended). Today, inboxes are being flooded with generic AI-generated emails that lack relevance and personality. We’re seeing an influx of modern GTM tools emerge that make sending high-volume campaigns easier than ever.

While I’m all for automation, the problem is that these mass emails are all ice-cold: the target company has had no prior interaction with the sending domain.

However, the good news is that there are GTM plays that follow a more methodical, multi-touch workflow. A system that’s designed to automate the personal touchpoints at the right time.

A better way to send outbound emails

intent-based-nurturing-overview

A more effective way to run outbound campaigns is to target companies that are already expressing some form of interest or intent to purchase.

Rather than building generic target account lists, you instead focus on companies that are potentially in the buying journey.

For example, as you drive traffic to your website through big marketing initiatives (e.g., ads, SEO, sponsorships), you then send automated outreach to this specific pool of companies and individuals.

The result is that your emails become more targeted, timely, and relevant. And the best part is that this workflow is entirely automated with a few GTM tools.

That way, you can focus on more strategic ABM campaigns and your sellers can spend more time crafting uber-personalized messages. Sounds pretty good right?

The focus of the content 
In this guide, I walk through how to set up this “signal-based” selling motion. I break things down into three sections:

  1. How to operationalize buyer intent signals: the different data points to collect 
  2. How to orchestrate your intent-driven motion: from the tech stack to the routing
  3. How to personalize your campaign: from granualr segmentation to AI-generated sentences 

The foundational elements: read before starting

Who this playbook is for

Before we begin, I want to set the expectation that this GTM playbook is not for every B2B SaaS company.

There are many ways you can build a signal-based selling motion. In fact, your GTM motion might not need these data points at all.

However, companies that pull their audience into the funnel rather than pushing them into the sales cycle (through teams of SDRs) will likely benefit the most from this motion.

This is due to the nature of the intent signals. Interactions with first-party properties (e.g., product, website, blog) are the main triggers to kicking off this flywheel. Without these initial triggers, you will need to find alternative intent data, some of which might not be as strong of signals.

Here’s an example of what type of company profile might benefit the most from this motion.

Company Profile

Stage

  • Series A or B+
  • < 200 FTEs
  • Has a Growth & GTM Ops person to lead the initiative
  • Laying the foundation for their GTM motion

Primary GTM Motion

Inbound marketing-led businesses: pipeline is generated from inbound demo requests

+ A strong self-serve motion that funnels into the enterprise motion

Drives traffic to the website from:

  • industry-recognized blog content
  • large SEO keyword profile
  • uses performance ads on social
  • influencer marketing

Inbound Motion

Lead to opportunity cycle: attracts the core audience with high-value content and nurtures them over time

While the focus of this content might not be for every growth team, it can offer a foundation for other GTM plays. Once the systems’ infrastructure is in place, you can adjust the setup to serve other or additive growth motions (ABM campaigns).

The foundational GTM elements you need first

If you check all the boxes above and have the team in place to execute the plays, then there is still one more thing you need to do.

You need to be sure you have the following foundational elements completed before you start building:

These elements are inputs to the GTM system. If you don’t have these components, I recommend completing them before moving forward. The good news is that I’ll write about these topics in upcoming posts – stay tuned.

Outcomes Analyses

ICP/ Account Score
A numerical score that ranks accounts within your CRM, used for account prioritization

Win Rate Analysis
A win/ loss analysis cut by attributes to determine which variables are predictive of weighted ACV [Contract value x win rate]

Core Target Personas
Identified title levels and departments to primarily target

Contact Title Analysis
A win rate analysis by titles to surface who you win deals with, who champions a deal, and who influences the buying process

Customer Journey / Lead and Prospect Funnel
A mapping of different interactions that leads and prospects have with your company before entering the sales funnel

Channel Conversion and Attribution Analysis
Stage-to-stage conversion rates by channel
& Historical activity analysis to see the touch points that are consistent with leads that convert into opportunities

Step 1: How to operationalize buyer intent signals

In this section, we cover:

  1. How to identify the types of signals and where to get them
  2. How to map the intent signals to the buyer’s journey
  3. How to build an intent classification and intent score

1. Identifying the types of intent signals and where to get them

Buyer intent signals have emerged as a core component in today’s GTM tech stack. These data points are helping marketers and sellers prioritize their targeting by who is more likely to be customers.

At a high level, intent signals are actions that indicate where a company or individual is in the buyer journey. These signals vary by source (first-party vs third-party) and by strength (pricing page visits = strong, blog page = weak).

In addition, we can source additional data points that help us build a target profile. These qualitative signals, or insights, help us classify who might have intent, even though no direct action was taken.

Here’s an example of the intent signals and insight you might track and how to collect them.

Group Intent Signals Data Vendors

First-party intent signals
(Actions taken on your own properties)

  • Product usage
  • Webinar and in-person events attendance
  • Email opens and clicks
  • Slack engagement
  • Website and tech docs visits
  • In-house data (product, emails, events)
  • Koala, Common Room, Rep.vue, Clearbit

Third-party intent signals
(Actions identified on other properties and provided by a data vendor)

  • Social media interactions
  • Public Github repo engagement
  • Review site page visits
  • Common Room, Rep.vue
  • G2

Insights & Triggers
(Qualitative data points that suggest there may be intent)

  • Recent news and product releases
  • Tech stack and tooling
  • Web scrapers / BuiltWith
  • Clay (scraper)

Not all these intent signals will be relevant to you. There are some I haven’t listed here that you might want to track.

If you’re looking for more signal ideas, I recommend checking out this comprehensive list of intent signals curated by CommonRoom.

 

2. Mapping the intent signals to the buyer's journey

Once you’ve identified the different intent signals, the step is to categorize them according to the buyer journey. This is the most important step when setting up your intent-driven motion. This classification powers your targeting, your messaging, and how you move prospects further down your funnel.

As a refresher, the general buying journey consists of three stages:

  • Awareness: buyers are educating themselves on the problem
  • Consideration: buyers are educating themselves on possible solutions and providers
  • Decision: buyers are actively evaluating different providers
what-is-the-buyers-journey_1
(Image from HubSpot Blog: What Is the Buyer's Journey?)

As a side note, adding a “Pre-awareness” stage might help track targets who may not be aware or have not yet encountered the problem you’re solving. These companies would get more thought leadership pieces rather than problem-specific content.

Here’s an example of how you might align different intent signals with your buying journey.

Buyer Journey Stage Intent Signals Intent Strength

Awareness

  • Interactions on Social Media
  • Visits to your blog posts
  • Engagement with white papers
  • Engagement with in-person, industry events
  • Engagement with thought leadership webinars and events

Low – Medium

Consideration

  • Visits to your product page
  • Visits to your competitor vs pages
  • Engagement with GitHub repos
  • Visits to your tech docs
  • Engagement with product-focused content
  • Engagement with product-focused webinars
  • Visits to G2 Pages

Medium – High

Decision

  • Visits to your pricing page
  • Visits to your demo/ talk-to sales page
  • High-product usage/ consumption

High

How do insights fit into all of this? Insights don’t inherently tie to a buyer’s journey since they are static data points rather than recent actions. However, they can signal what stage they might be in.

For example, you might want to classify a company using a competitor tool as being in the “Consideration” stage even though you haven’t captured direct intent signals from them.

This table won’t exactly match your buying journey, but it should provide a baseline on what type of signals are grouped in each stage.

It’s important to refer back to your customer journey/funnel mapping strategy. This exercise should tell you what properties your buyers engage with and which intent signal triggers them.

Tieing the signals to the stage
The end result is a framework to power the automated outbound workflow. The signal determines the stage, and the stage determines the type of content to send.

intent-signals-buyer-journey-content

Now we’re able to operationalize the intent framework by distilling it into a single field within your CRM.

3. Building an intent classifier and score

Once you’ve identified and categorized your intent signals, the next step is to create a system to tag the “Intent Classification” a company is in based on its recent activity.

The goal is to summarize the multiple forms of engagement, interactions, and signals all into a single segment.

This segment, or intent classification, informs which content type you should be sending to which target accounts.

The challenge we’re solving is when a company or individual takes multiple actions and each of those actions/ intent signals are aligned with different stages – how do you appropriately classify them?

Let’s walk through an example.

Building an intent classifier
If a company reads multiple blogs, lands on the product page, and then visits your competitor-versus page tied to that product, then are they in the awareness or the consideration stage?

intent-classification-base 1

Volume vs weighting
If we were to only look at the volume of intent signals, we might classify this company as being in the “Awareness” stage. While that might be an accurate picture, it would also be a disservice to the other signals we captured.

One solution is to introduce weighting.

intent-classification-base 2

If we revisit the same example, the company is now under the Consideration stage rather than the Awareness stage. You will likely need to adjust the weighting depending on your business needs and the volume of intent signals you receive.

The last step is to summarize the intent strength and the category into fields in your CRM.

CRM Fields Description CRM Objects

Intent Classification

Classifies the intent category

Account & Contacts/ Leads

Intent Score

Ranks the strength of the intent score (can be numerical OR text-values ranging from High - Low)

Account & Contact/ Leads

We need these two fields on an company and individual level. The company level field will help us prirotize accounts to target for ABM-stlye campaigns. While the inidival-level fields will help to prioritize leads to convert into opportunities.

Great – now that these elements are in place, we’re ready to start orchestrating the outbound engine.

Step 2. How to orchestrate your intent-driven outbound motion

In this section, we cover:

  1. How to set up your GTM tech stack
  2. How to build your target lists
  3. How to build the automated system

1. Setting up your GTM Tech Stack

The right tools enable your growth strategies.

Any GTM motion you design will likely miss its mark without the proper tech stack and data connection to power it. You will spend more time sourcing and joining data between systems than executing campaigns. Or worse, each system won’t be integrated, so you might sequence prospects in the wrong campaign or not at all.

So in this section, we cover the foundational GTM tooling you need to build your outbound motion.

Tech stack overview

gtm-tech-stack-market-map

At a high level, there are three main layers of your intent-driven tack stack:

  • Intent-data provider (identifies companies visiting your website)
  • CRM + Data Orchestrator
    • CRM (source of truth for your targets and engagement)
    • Data orchestrator (enriches and sources contacts and companies, and initiates workflows)
  • Campaign sender (sequences outbound emails over a period of time)

Intent-data + CRM setup
Your CRM should be the source of truth for all your target lists and engagement data.

With that said, the first thing we will want to configure is connecting your buyer intent data with your CRM.

To set this up, will need to:

  1. First, create a custom object within your CRM  –  called Intent Signals

  2. Create fields on the object for the intent action, the company (and prospect if identified), and the property that was visited (as a link)

  3. Then join the record with the Accounts and Contacts/ Leads objects using a LookUp field

With this setup in place,  you can now build target lists of Companies or Prospects within your CRM, filtering by your ICP Score and sorting by your Intent Strength.

These target lists are then handed to sellers as one-off outreach or piped into your data orchestrator where each target is sequenced automatically.

CRM + Data Orchestrator setup
The next foundational setup is to configure a bi-directional sync between your data orchestrator and your CRM.

Data orchestrators allow you to aggregate data across vendors or your own databases and kick off workflow jobs. As you source new companies or prospects, you can enrich them with data points before updating their records in your CRM.

Data Orchestrator + Campaign Sequencer
The last setup to configure is connecting your email campaign managers with your data orchestrators. This step will be pretty straightforward since most orchestrators have native integrations built into them.

Once you have your GTM tech stack configured, you can then build the various workflow jobs that run between them. And the first workflow we want to build is sourcing net new targets.

2. Building your target list

intent-driven-account-targeting

3. Automating the outbound nurturing motion

full-signal-based-outbound-motion

Step 3. How to personalize your campaign emails

Coming soon

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