Signal-Based Outbound: Timing Over Volume

Decide which signals actually predict revenue for you

Pull your last 30 closed-won deals and ask what was true in the 90 days before the first meeting. Common winners: a champion changed jobs (3x more likely to buy), the account was hiring for the roles your product serves, new funding, or a leadership change in the buying function. Pick 3 or 4 signals with evidence in your own history; more watchers than that just makes noise.

Stand up the watchers

In Clay, create the signal tables:

• Job changes: import past champions and closed-won contacts, enable the job-change signal. When one moves, the row fires with the new company.
• Hiring: track open roles on named accounts with a jobs source, filtered to titles that indicate your pain (for CascadeGTM clients that is often RevOps, GTM engineering, sales leadership).
• Funding and news: Clay's company news signal on the target account list.
• Intent: schedule the Bombora or 6sense CSV or API import weekly; keep only accounts above your surge threshold.

Consolidate and score in the In-Market table

Each watcher writes matched accounts into In-Market via lookup (dedupe on domain, courtesy of playbook 1 hygiene). Score signal strength additively:

Start at 0. Add 40 for a champion job change into the account.
Add 25 for 3+ relevant open roles. Add 20 for funding in the last 60 days.
Add 15 for intent surge above threshold. Add 10 for each additional
distinct signal type. Cap at 100. Return the firing signals as a list.

Accounts at 60+ enter plays automatically; 30 to 59 go to a rep-review view; under 30 just accumulate history.

Suppress before you send

Nothing torches trust like a cold sequence hitting an account your AE is closing. Add CRM lookups and a suppression formula: suppress if open opportunity exists, OR any contact is in an active sequence, OR closed-lost within 90 days, OR the account is a customer. Suppressed rows stay visible with the reason, because AEs still want to know their deal just showed intent; that alert goes to the AE instead of a sequence.

Generate the why-now angle

A signal-timed email still has to name the signal well. Claygent column on play-eligible rows:

Account: {{Company}} ({{Domain}}). Firing signals: {{Signal List}} with
details: {{Signal Details}}. We sell {{Your Product, one line}} to {{ICP}}.

Verify the strongest signal from public sources, then write a 2-sentence
opening for a cold email. Sentence 1 references the verified signal
specifically (name the role they posted, the round they raised, or the
person who just joined; include the source). Sentence 2 connects that
moment to the problem we solve. Factual, specific, no flattery.
Return JSON: {"angle": "...", "signal_used": "...", "source_url": "...",
"confidence": 0.0-1.0}

Route to the matching play

Map signal type to sequence: job-change plays reference the new role, hiring plays reference the team they are building, funding plays reference the mandate. Push contacts to the sender with {{angle}} and {{signal_used}} as custom variables, and write the signal event to the CRM account timeline so every later touch has the context.

Review the misses, not just the hits

Monthly, pull closed-won deals that never appeared in In-Market and ask which signal would have caught them. That is how the watcher set evolves from your first guess into your actual buying pattern.