Good Outreach Starts with EQ (And the Right Signals)

I’ve always had a soft spot for SDRs. So, when cold outreach landed in my inbox or LinkedIn DMs, I’d always take the time to respond.

Now, I just assume that every email I get is not from a person, because so many teams have turned outreach on autopilot.

Our emails are full of superficially personalized messages. Our LinkedIn DMs are filled with pitch-slaps. And yes, they’re saying all the right words, referencing signals like a job change or a website click, but they're missing an essential quality.

Personalized outreach run through automations and triggers has lost its humanity.

And reach and engagement rates are suffering for it.

So today, I want to talk to you about how a combination of EQ and the right buying signals can boost your engagement. This isn’t advice to help you scale your outreach—because the things that work aren’t always scalable.

In the not-so-distant past, personalization was a much more manual process. Sellers had to manually find intent signals, like job changes, company updates, and other events within the lives of their prospects. Then, they had to manually create outreach that referenced those signals.

Fast forward a few years, and it’s very simple to get signals that you can use to adapt your messaging. There are even apps that will automate the entire process of finding signals and creating “personalized” emails for your entire lead list.

So, what’s the problem? 

What used to make you unique is now something everyone can do (and is doing). Now, with every job change or company update, their inbox gets flooded with messages like:

• “Hey, congrats on the promotion! You’re probably in the market for X tool, and here’s why you should buy ours.”
• “Saw you downloaded our guide. Here’s why you should buy our product.”
• “Congrats to you and your company on the latest round of funding. I represent X company, and I’d like to share three reasons why you need it now.”

Logically, every new leader focuses on demonstrating their impact quickly, which means spending budget early to get fast returns. And stats show that companies who close a round of funding are typically spending 20-30% of that money on marketing. 

The problem is that you’re not the only one who thinks like that. The salespeople at your competitors’ companies are all thinking the same thing.

And when the same message is repeated by various companies, your prospects see them all as the same. Your personalized messaging didn’t make you stand out: instead, it made you invisible. 

And the second, possibly bigger problem lies in the automation itself. 

Triggered emails need to come from some kind of templated messaging. And when you use signals to trigger whole outreach sequences automatically, they miss out on nuance. Which can lead to irrelevant messages at best, or completely tone-deaf outreach at worst.

What none of this leads to is actual relationships with real humans.

Generic processes of signals = triggers to automated outreach aren’t as effective. So, here’s how to improve your process:

Your prospects are showing interest, intent, or hesitation without a word. We call this digital body language—the ad clicks, LinkedIn posts, hiring sprees, and podcast mentions that tell you what’s on their mind. 

When you pay attention to those signals and add a little empathy, you can understand what’s going to appeal to them (or whether this is even the right time to reach out).

For me, one of the most important lines in outreach is: 

“This is the reason I’m reaching out.”

That reason has to be personal and real, not something you could copy-paste to a hundred people. Here’s what it might look like in practice:

• “I see you used to work with these individuals that I met at an event last year. They’re now customers.”
• “Your CEO mentioned on a podcast how you’re facing X challenge. We just helped three SaaS teams make that move smoothly, so I thought I’d share what worked for them.”
• “Congrats on the Series B raise. I saw your hiring page; 10+ new SDR roles open. We work with companies after a funding round to help reps hit quota faster, and I thought it might be relevant now.”

The point: Put a little thought into what your prospects are saying with their digital body language. Then, your outreach can be more relevant to their situation.

People still enjoy human conversations. (Shocking, I know.) And maybe even more so now, with so many of us working remotely. 

But when GTM teams are so focused on volume that everything turns into a trigger, they’re taking too much humanity out of the prospecting process.

To be clear, I’m not against automation. Some teams, especially SMBs or products with a more transactional nature, need to play that volume game. 

But in other environments—for example, in a company with larger deal sizes—automated messages come off as robotic when a human approach would’ve made a difference.

My advice: don’t just check boxes. Connect with people. Build relationships that can lead to sales down the road.

You could analyze hundreds of signals per day. Some tools offer to analyze millions of signals from your audience. But unless you know which signals matter, it’s just noise. And your sales team won’t know how to turn those signals into sales.

If every signal is a priority, then none of them are a priority.

As a CRO, I don’t see “signals” as one conglomerate. I stack rank those signals against each other based on historical data and the level of interest they indicate.

To start, there are signals that always imply a higher intent: like filling out a form or requesting a demo.

But later, it’s up to each company to decide which signals matter more.

For example: historically, do our higher-paying customers come after securing funding? If so, how soon after? How many ad clicks indicate priority for our team? Do hiring initiatives affect how likely a company is to buy our product?

When you analyze historical data and get to know your audience better, you’ll see which signals align to your business. That gives your sales team a clearer focus when using signals to trigger outreach.

If Marketing and Sales aren’t aligned on what signals mean and who to target, you’ll be throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping something sticks.

This includes aligning on things like:

• A contact priority map
• Which signals we’re actively tracking
• The process for reaching out to new signals

Finally, make sure you can measure the impact that those signals are having. You may not close a deal because of a signal, but it’s a piece of the overall puzzle. Set up the processes to track how signals are used, and you’ll be able to prove their value.

When you track the right signals and add a dose of EQ, your outreach stops feeling like spam and starts feeling like something worth a response.

At Influ2, we give teams the technology to create contact-level ad signals, which has been a game changer for companies like Quantexa, StarTree, and others. 

For an inside look at how our own sales team uses signals for more relevant outreach, check out this article from one of our top-performing SDRs.

Or if you want to talk directly with our team, you can book a call with us.