I get a lot of cold emails. As a founder and CEO, my inbox is a battlefield. Most messages I skim and delete without blinking. I’ve gotten so good at it that the whole process takes maybe two seconds. Subject line, first sentence, delete. But a few months ago, something different happened. I received a […]
I get a lot of cold emails.
As a founder and CEO, my inbox is a battlefield. Most messages I skim and delete without blinking. I’ve gotten so good at it that the whole process takes maybe two seconds. Subject line, first sentence, delete.
But a few months ago, something different happened. I received a cold email that I actually answered. I got on a call with a person I had never heard of, from a company I knew nothing about. And I sat there afterward thinking: why did that work?
What was different about that one? Here’s what happened. The day before I received it, I had been in a deep internal discussion about a part of our product called Engage. Something we needed to solve. A real, urgent problem that was sitting at the top of my mind. Then the next morning, out of nowhere, an email lands from someone saying: “I have an engagement product I’d love to partner on.”
He didn’t have data on me. He wasn’t tracking my behavior. It was, honestly, just a fluke of timing. But it felt like the email fell from the sky. It felt like a solution, not a pitch. So I replied.
That experience stuck with me. Because it showed me something true about how buying actually works. And it has everything to do with what is broken in B2B sales right now.
Both sides are losing
If you work in sales, I want you to think about your average day.
How much of it do you actually spend selling? Really selling, where you’re in a conversation with someone who’s genuinely interested, where you can feel something real is happening? And how much of it do you spend building lists, writing sequences, researching accounts, updating the CRM, sending messages into the void? That feeling of smelling an opportunity, where you know this is a live one and you feel the energy of a possible close, how often does that actually happen in a week?
For most salespeople I talk to, that moment is rare. And it’s getting rarer. Not because you’re not working hard. But because the environment you’re working in has been poisoned by volume. Your quota expects you to send more. Your tools make it easy to send more. So you send more. And then you get less back.
The buyers on the other end are having the mirror image of this experience. Ten years ago, if someone reached out with something genuinely interesting, people picked up the phone. Some even said thank you. Today, anyone receiving cold outreach has developed a sixth sense for the generic. It takes about one second to recognize that an email was not written for you specifically. And the moment that happens, it’s gone.
Both sides are suffering. And the reason is the same: volume became the default strategy for almost everyone, at the same time.
This is not a temporary problem. According to Gartner’s 2024 B2B Buyer Survey of 632 buyers, 73% now actively avoid suppliers who send irrelevant outreach. Not ignore. Avoid. They make a mental note and close the door. And 61% say they would prefer a rep-free buying experience entirely, not because they don’t want help, but because the quality of outreach has gotten so bad that talking to no one feels better than what they’re getting.
The market is not immune to salespeople. The market is immune to noise.
The real problem: We got the order wrong
Here is what I’ve come to believe after years of building a company in this space.
Most sales teams operate in this order: build a big audience, automate the outreach, hope relevance happens by accident. Volume first, relevance as an afterthought.
The teams that are winning today do it in the opposite order.
When I reverse-engineered how the best GTM teams operate, I kept finding the same pattern. They start with signals. The question they ask before anything else is: what happened this week that tells me this company is in a moment where our product could actually help? And only after they can answer that well do they reach out. With far fewer messages. To far fewer people. And with dramatically better results.
I call this moving from Audience to Relevance to Action, rather than Audience to Action and skipping Relevance entirely.
The Audience layer is the broad pool: your ICP, your TAM, the 100,000 companies that technically fit your profile. Every tool in the market can give you this. Having a big, accurate audience is table stakes. It doesn’t give you an edge anymore.
The Relevance layer is where the real work happens. Of those 100,000 companies, maybe 300 are actually in a moment right now where something has changed. Someone just got hired into a key role. A funding round just closed. A competitor just churned out. Headcount is growing fast in exactly the department that buys your product. These are signals. And they collapse your universe from 100,000 companies to the 300 where you have a real reason to show up today.
The Action layer is the outreach itself. But now it comes with a why. Not “Hi [First Name], I noticed you’re a VP of Sales.” That’s not personal, that’s mail merge. Personal means: I know you just brought on 15 new SDRs last month. I know that usually means your sequencing tools are under pressure. Here’s why that matters for us.
When you start from a real signal, the conversation changes completely.
What buying signals actually look like
Signals are not magic. They are observable events that indicate a change in a company’s situation. And changes in situation are what create buying windows.
A few that consistently work:
- A company posts 10 new sales job listings in a short period. That means they’re building. They need tools to support growth. Their existing stack may not scale. That is a real conversation waiting to happen.
- A VP of Revenue joins a company from the outside. New leaders almost always audit the tech stack in their first 90 days. They bring new opinions. They want to prove they can improve things. A well-timed outreach in that window has a completely different quality than a cold email 18 months later.
- A company raises a Series B or Series C. Capital infusion means they are now under pressure to grow faster. RevOps and GTM tooling investments follow funding rounds. The timing matters.
- A competitor of yours just churned a customer from a specific account. That account just had a bad experience. Their guard is down and their mind is open.
None of these signals replace the need to understand your ICP. But they tell you when the ICP is actually ready to have a conversation. And that is the information most teams are completely missing.
As Nick Cegelski of 30 Minutes to Presidents Club has talked about in the context of signal-based prospecting, the best cold outreach stacks multiple signals. One signal makes the message relevant. Two or three signals make it feel like the sender has genuinely done the work. That feeling, that the other person spent time on you specifically, is what separates a reply from a delete.
What to actually do differently
1. Stop measuring activity. Start measuring signal coverage.
If the metric you’re tracking is the number of emails sent, you are incentivizing yourself, and your team, to create noise. Instead, ask: of the accounts in your pipeline right now, what percentage have a documented signal that explains why you’re reaching out this week? If the answer is “I don’t know,” that is your actual problem.
2. Build a signal stack before you build a sequence.
Before you send a single message to an account, you should be able to answer three questions: Why this company? Why now? Why me? If you can answer those three things with something real, something that came from an observable event in that company’s world, the outreach is ready. If you can’t, it is not.
The signals that tend to unlock the best conversations are job changes in leadership roles, company growth events like funding or headcount expansion, technology changes that indicate a shift in their stack, and intent signals that show active research in your category.
3. Treat relevance as a qualification step, not a nice-to-have.
In most teams, relevance is something that lives in the email copy. It’s a line about something you found on LinkedIn to make the message feel human. That is not relevance. That is decoration.
Real relevance is a qualification criterion. Before you put a company in your active pipeline, you should have a signal. If there is no signal, that company belongs in your broad audience pool, not on your calling list for this week. The list you work every day should be small, hot, and based on real events happening in the world right now.
4. When you reach out, lead with what you know, not what you’re selling.
The email that landed in my inbox and got a response did not open with “We help companies like yours with engagement.” It opened with something that told me, immediately, that the sender was operating in the same world I was. That is the whole game.
Before your product, before your proof points, before your ask, you need to show the other person that you understand their current reality. That you are aware of what just happened in their business. That you showed up now for a reason.
Less volume, better conversations
I’ve been saying this for a while now: the future of GTM is not bigger teams sending more messages. The best sales organizations in the next five years will be leaner, more precise, and operating with a completely different relationship to data. The ones that win will not use data to find more people. They will use data to find the right moment.
According to 6sense’s 2024 Buyer Experience Report, which surveyed more than 2,500 B2B buyers globally, buyers are nearly 70% through their purchase process before they ever contact a vendor. And 85% have largely established what they want before they pick up the phone. The shortlist is already built by the time you reach out cold.
That means the only way to be on the shortlist is to have been relevant before the formal buying process started. Not louder. Earlier, and more aware.
The cold email I replied to was a coincidence. The sender did not know I had been talking about engagement products the day before. But what that experience taught me is that relevance, even when it happens by accident, completely changes how a message lands.
The question you and every sales team need to be asking is: how do we stop waiting for relevance to happen by accident, and start engineering it deliberately?
The answer is signals. The discipline is relevance. The result is fewer emails, more conversations, and a lot less noise on both sides of the table.
Sources: Gartner B2B Buyer Survey, 2024 (n=632) — gartner.com | 6sense 2024 Buyer Experience Report (n=2,509) — 6sense.com | Kyle Poyar, Growth Unhinged, “An Outbound Playbook for 2025” — growthunhinged.com | Jared Fuller & Jill Rowley, Nearbound and the Rise of the Who Economy, 2024 — nearboundbook.com
