Last week, the CEO of HubSpot, Yamini Rangan created a post that basically went LinkedIn Viral.
To summarize, she reiterated the importance of signals in outbound marketing. And when the CEO of one of the biggest B2B SaaS companies in the history of the world mentions anything on this topic, it’s gonna attract attention. (See full post below)
This goes back to the first-ever newsletter of this series. The 5% rule. Which states that, on average, only 5% of your ICP is in the market for your solution at any given time.
You can read the full post here
The conclusion we took from this is simple: 95% of your outreach is going to hit a brick wall, and then your CMO will ask why it’s not working, to which many first moves are to check inbox scores and modify copy only to eventually realize that it won’t change deliverability or response rates. So here’s your fix:
Solution 1: Be constantly top of mind by promoting valuable content so that when your ICP does need your solution, you’re the first they go to.
Solution 2: Follow signals.
A signal is essentially a ‘tell’, and as every poker player will tell you, ‘tells’ allow you to know what cards your opposition has.
The good thing about signals is you don’t need to be a master at NLP to find them. They’re on the internet for everyone to see.
It used to be, as Yamini said, a manual process in which SDRs would spend hours researching LinkedIn feeds and news articles.
Now, it’s done in seconds. Yes…AI.
Here’s a list of the top 3 signals you can follow to gain insight on whether your ICP is in the market for your solution, and how you can get this info without manual research.
Signals to look out for:
- New job listings: If a company is hiring for its sales or marketing departments, that’s your tell that it’s in scaling mode. If you’re a MarTech or SalesTech company, that’s your outbound queue.
- New executive hire: Lots of B2B products sell to the C-suite. When a new C-suite hire is made, they’re typically given an agenda and a budget to bring change.
- Funding: This may seem obvious, but if a company just secured funding, they’re most likely in vendor procurement mode.
So, how do you keep tabs on these signals?
Create clay tables. Shoutout to the most disruptive software for B2B marketers, Clay.
Here’s an example of a clay table that contains primary contacts in our ICP, and tracks new hires:
Every week, this auto-runs, and we get a full updated list of the recently open roles for our ICP. We have it set to notify us only for marketing-related roles.
But it doesn’t end there. We also track new funding and company news, so our team has the information they need to know when to act.
In other news
Last week was our first IRL event of 2026:
If you want to be added to a WhatsApp group exclusive to B2B founders and CEOs in South Florida, where we will announce similar upcoming events, just send me a DM on LinkedIn.