Signal-based prospecting is useful, but it’s been table stakes for years.
Intent data helps prioritize outreach, it doesn’t replace cold outbound.
If your emails don’t land in the inbox, nothing else matters.
Demand, deal size, and margins determine whether outbound economics work.
Most intent data only covers a small slice of your total market.
Execution, not tooling, is what turns intent into pipeline.
Recently, HubSpot’s CEO shared a post arguing that sales teams should stop reaching out simply because someone fits their ideal customer profile.
Traditional outbound, the post suggests, was built on guesswork—reps relying on firmographics and hoping timing worked out. The proposed solution is signal-based prospecting: engaging only when there’s evidence of intent, change, or activity.
On the surface, it’s a reasonable take. No one is arguing that blindly emailing static lists is a good idea. Context matters. Timing matters. Signals matter.
But for anyone who has actually been accountable for pipeline from outbound over the last five years, the framing feels disconnected from how modern teams already operate.
Signal-based prospecting isn’t new. It’s been standard practice since at least 2020 for teams that care about efficiency and ROI.
Tools like Bombora, 6sense, ZoomInfo, G2, and others have been widely used to prioritize accounts, identify buying windows, and reduce wasted effort. Long before platforms branded this approach, strong reps were already watching hiring trends, funding rounds, leadership changes, job postings, technology changes, and competitive moves to decide where to spend their time.
What’s being positioned today as a fundamental shift is, in practice, table stakes for any serious outbound program.
More importantly, the focus on signals distracts from the execution work that actually makes outbound succeed or fail.
Intent data can shrink the haystack. It does not solve the hard problems. Those problems are deliverability, demand, economics, messaging, and execution.
One reason the post drew so much pushback is that many experienced operators felt talked at, not spoken with. The implication—intentional or not—was that sales teams were relying on guesswork until recently, when signal-based prospecting arrived to fix everything.
That isn’t how outbound has worked in practice for a long time.
Since at least 2020, professional sales organizations and lead generation agencies have been using intent-based tools to prioritize outreach. Platforms like Bombora, 6sense, ZoomInfo, G2, and others have been core parts of modern outbound stacks for years. Before those tools matured, strong reps were already manually stitching together signals by watching hiring activity, tracking funding announcements, monitoring job postings, and following leadership changes.
The tools didn’t create a new philosophy. They scaled an existing one.
Effective outbound has never been about blasting everyone who fits an ICP and hoping for the best. It has always been about narrowing focus, improving timing, and increasing relevance—so activity turns into pipeline, not just logged tasks. Signal-based prospecting didn’t change that. It made the process faster, more systematic, and easier to operationalize across larger teams and external partners.
Which is why framing it as a fundamental shift feels disconnected from how serious teams have been operating for years.
After more than five years of running intent-based prospecting programs across multiple industries and use cases, a clear pattern emerges. When outbound works, it’s almost never because of a single tool or signal. It’s because the fundamentals are handled in the right order.
Miss the early steps, and nothing downstream matters.
This is still the most overlooked—and most critical—factor in outbound success.
If your emails aren’t landing in the inbox, nothing else matters. Not your intent signals. Not your offer. Not your copy. Not your timing. You can have the best data in the world and still fail before a prospect ever sees your message.
One of the biggest mistakes teams make is assuming silence means lack of interest. More often than not, it means a deliverability problem. Emails get filtered, throttled, or dumped into spam, and the team moves on assuming “bad timing.” Intent data can actually make this worse by creating a false sense of confidence—when someone should be in market, silence gets rationalized instead of investigated.
If you’re going to use your primary domain for prospecting, you have to be extremely careful with volume. You can’t go crazy sending outbound from the same domain your employees, customers, and partners rely on. That domain’s reputation matters, and once it’s damaged, it’s painful to recover.
If you’re prospecting into larger databases, you should be using a separate sending domain. Even then, volume needs to be controlled. The goal isn’t to blast—it’s to ramp. Ideally, you’re using a platform that sends low volumes from one inbox before moving to the next, rather than hammering a single inbox. Tools like Instantly or Smartlead exist for a reason.
Before you send a single prospecting email, those inboxes need to be warmed. You can’t stand up a new domain and start prospecting day one. That’s a guaranteed way to end up in spam. Warming should happen over a few weeks, with realistic send volumes and real engagement. Tools like Zerobounce and Mailreach help here, but the key is patience. There are no shortcuts.
Early outreach behavior matters more than most teams realize. Avoid hyperlinks and attachments in your first email. Don’t send identical subject lines and copy across hundreds or thousands of emails—filters catch patterns quickly. Even small variations help. Spintax isn’t about being clever; it’s about not looking automated.
Your messaging also needs to be clear and direct. Be explicit about what you’re offering and what you want the reader to do. Don’t leave them guessing. Confusion doesn’t convert, and it doesn’t help deliverability either.
Finally, be assumptive. The goal of outbound isn’t to convince everyone—it’s to quickly identify who’s actually in market. Strong outbound invites a response either way. A clear yes or a clear no both move the program forward.
No amount of signal-based sophistication can overcome poor deliverability. Weak sender reputation, burned domains, and aggressive sending behavior will sink even the best intent strategy. Inbox placement is the foundation. Without it, intent is irrelevant.
The second major driver of pipeline has nothing to do with tooling.
If you’re selling a product or service that isn’t in active demand, your chances of success are slim, no matter how good your targeting looks. Inboxes are too crowded to support outreach for things that are nice to have, exploratory, or hard to justify internally.
Intent data can tell you who is researching a category. It can’t tell you if that research will turn into budget, urgency, or real action. Buyers engage when the problem you’re solving is already painful. They don’t engage just because something is interesting.
This is why some outbound programs still convert with average targeting, while others struggle even with pristine data. Demand wins every time.
What usually gets left out of this conversation is the cost side of the equation.
Cold outbound is expensive. When you add up CRM costs, sequencing tools, data providers, intent platforms, inbox infrastructure, and the people running the motion, the numbers climb fast. By the time a deal closes, the cost of acquisition can easily reach tens of thousands of dollars over the course of a sales cycle.
That math only works if what you’re selling can support it.
If your average deal size is small, margins are thin, or customer lifetime value is limited, outbound becomes very hard to justify, especially when demand isn’t already there. No amount of targeting precision fixes bad unit economics.
This is why demand matters so much. When demand is real, sales cycles are shorter, conversations move faster, and fewer touches are needed to create pipeline. When demand is weak, everything gets harder. More emails, more follow ups, more people, more software, all to get to the same or worse result.
Outbound can still work in lower demand categories, but only when the economics make sense. You need enough annual value, lifetime value, or recurring revenue, and enough margin, to absorb the cost of reaching the market.
There’s a common assumption behind many intent-based outreach strategies that more context automatically makes a message more welcome.
It doesn’t.
Knowing that a company is researching a topic doesn’t mean they want a vendor in their inbox. Intent gives you a reason to reach out, not a free pass. What determines whether outreach works is still the copy.
Good outbound copy isn’t about sounding polished or consultative. It’s about eliciting a response. Any response.
The reality is that only a small percentage of any given ICP is actually in market at any point in time. You’ll hear different numbers depending on who you ask, but most estimates land somewhere in the 1 to 5 percent range. The exact number doesn’t really matter. What matters is that the majority of your ICP is not buying right now.
So the job of outbound isn’t to convince everyone. It’s to find the small slice that’s already in motion.
When budgets are limited and ICPs are large, time becomes the most constrained resource. You can’t afford long, drawn-out sequences that never get answered. You need to know quickly who’s in market and who isn’t.
That’s where copy matters.
Clear, direct messages that acknowledge what you believe is happening, explain how you help, and ask for a specific next step force a response. Sometimes that response is a meeting. Sometimes it’s a quick “we already solved this” or “we’re not looking right now.” Both are wins.
Silence is the enemy. Silence burns time and budget without giving you information.
Intent data should give you the confidence to be direct, not cautious. When intent-based outreach works, it’s not because the signal existed. It’s because the copy used that signal to surface the truth quickly and move on.
One thing that rarely gets talked about with intent data is how quickly it becomes commoditized.
If your competitors are using the same intent vendors, subscribing to the same topics, and feeding those signals into similar CRMs and sequencing tools, there’s a good chance you’re all working the same accounts at roughly the same time. From the buyer’s perspective, that often means a flood of near-identical outreach within a very short window.
So the question isn’t just whether you have intent data. It’s how you use it.
In practice, a few things tend to separate teams that generate pipeline from teams that just generate activity.
First is speed. How quickly are you operationalizing the signal once it appears? Some platforms surface intent in close to real time. Others lag by days or even a week. That difference matters. If five vendors are chasing the same account, the ones who show up first often have a real advantage. Being early doesn’t guarantee success, but being late almost guarantees you’re part of the noise.
Second is persistence. Sales teams often treat intent outreach as one and done. A single email, maybe a follow up, and then the lead is dropped. BDR teams that perform well don’t operate that way. They understand that breaking through usually requires multiple touches across email, phone, and sometimes social. That can mean a dozen or more touch points over time. Intent doesn’t remove the need for follow up. It just tells you where persistence is more likely to pay off.
Third is knowing which signals actually produce pipeline. Not all intent is created equal. There are countless topics you can chase, and most of them don’t go anywhere. Figuring out which signals correlate to real opportunities takes time, testing, and money. It’s rarely obvious upfront. Teams that have already done that work, and learned what to ignore, have a meaningful edge over teams starting from scratch.
Finally, there’s social proof. When buyers are getting hit by multiple vendors around the same time, credibility matters. Proof that you’ve helped similar companies solve the same problem cuts through skepticism faster than clever copy ever will. Case studies, recognizable customers, and clear examples of past work all help answer the unspoken question buyers are asking: “Why should I talk to you instead of the other five companies emailing me right now?”
When intent data is everywhere, execution is the differentiator. Speed, persistence, signal discipline, and proof of experience are what determine whether intent turns into pipeline or just more noise.
Intent data doesn’t magically turn cold outreach into something else.
If a company is showing intent, they still don’t know who you are. A funding event, a new exec hire, category research, none of that creates a relationship. You’re still reaching out cold. The signal just tells you who to start with.
There’s also the reality that intent only covers a small slice of your market. Pick whatever number you want, 10 percent, 15 percent, maybe 20 percent on a good day. The rest of your TAM isn’t showing third-party intent right now.
You can’t just ignore that group.
Some of your best customers aren’t actively researching today. They’re busy. They don’t have urgency yet. Or they don’t know there’s a better way to do what they’re doing. If you only work accounts that light up an intent dashboard, you’re only capturing demand, not creating it.
I’ve also seen this firsthand when comparing inbound leads to intent data. A lot of prospects who fill out a form and are clearly ready to evaluate never showed up in Bombora, 6sense, ZoomInfo, or anywhere else. The demand was real, the signals just weren’t there.
That doesn’t mean intent is bad. It just means it’s incomplete.
The teams that do this well use intent to prioritize, not to limit themselves. They work the high-signal accounts hard and fast, and they still run disciplined outbound across the rest of their market.
Signal-based prospecting has its place. If you’re running outbound today and not using some form of it, you’re probably behind.
That said, it’s not a shortcut, and it doesn’t change the fundamentals.
Intent data doesn’t fix deliverability problems. It doesn’t create demand where none exists. It doesn’t make weak unit economics work. It doesn’t replace good copy, disciplined follow up, or the need to work a broad market over time.
And it doesn’t eliminate cold outreach. It simply helps you decide where to focus first.
The teams that consistently create pipeline understand this. They treat intent as an input, not a strategy. They use it to prioritize effort, not to avoid the hard work of outbound. They focus on inbox placement, real demand, clear messaging, fast execution, and learning which signals actually tie back to revenue. They also accept that most of their market isn’t buying right now, and they design their motion accordingly.
That’s why the current narrative around signal-based prospecting feels incomplete. Not because the idea is wrong, but because it skips over the parts that actually determine outcomes. The hard parts of outbound haven’t changed. They’ve just been joined by more data.
If you don’t have the time, team, or appetite to build and manage this kind of outbound motion internally, this is exactly the work we do for clients. Our outsourced BDR team focuses on deliverability, signal-based prioritization, clear messaging, and disciplined follow up to turn intent into real pipeline.
You can learn more about our outsourced BDR services here:
https://smithdigital.io/outsourced-bdr-services