Guide to signal-based campaigns
Part 3 of 3 in "Shift to account-driven GTM" series
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There’s a lot of noise around “signals”, specifically using intent signals to send outbound campaigns to prospects.
And you might be thinking…“Is this really a new thing? Is it worth the hype?”
My answer: Kind of
The concept isn’t new, signals are just data points that show intent. As marketers, we’ve always tried to reach the right people, at the right time, with the right message—whether by identifying high-priority contacts via lead scoring, reaching web visitors through retargeting ads, and/or sending segmented nurture sequences.
But a lot has actually changed. We now have seemingly infinite and near real-time data about companies and people, better workflows for connecting the dots across tools and data sources, and the ability to create highly-relevant, personalized content faster.
We also have way more “signals” of intent than ever before. Instead of waiting for inbound leads to come to you or blasting spray-and-pray style outbound messages to static lists, you can now more easily send hyper-relevant, signal-based campaigns to your high-priority accounts.
In this newsletter:
This is part 3 of my 3 of my Account-Driven GTM series:
Part 1: Why B2B startups need to shift to account-driven marketing
Part 2: How to map your TAM and account tiers into your CRM
Part 3: How to run signal-based campaigns to reach your priority accounts.
A refresh on how signal-based campaigns fit into an account-driven GTM approach
Lots of examples of signal-based campaigns that actually work
Setting up account stages and rules of engagement
My take on “Are signal-based campaigns worth the hype?”
For paid subscribers in our template library:
List of 50+ tools to use in an account-driven GTM
50+ signal-based campaign ideas
Rules of engagement template for marketing and sales in an account-driven, signal-based world
Recommended products & agencies
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Section 1: Signal-based marketing primer
We used to rely on lead scoring to qualify prospects, moving them through a funnel without considering account-wide activity. When/if pipeline dried up, teams resorted to mass outbound and spammy outreach to hit targets. We don’t have to do this anymore!
As I shared in my last newsletter, the best GTM teams are shifting towards an account-driven strategy, which starts with tiered accounts, adding accounts and contacts into your CRM, and then systematically reaching those accounts at the right time across channels.
Signal-based campaigns are a big way to do that. But as with any marketing strategy or tactic, things can go very wrong when you start copying and pasting from everyone else. You need to find the signals that work best for your unique B2B startup to find success.
What are signal-based campaigns?
Intent signals are behavioral or data-driven indicators that suggest a company or individual—who fits your ICP—is actively considering or ready to buy a product like yours. These signals come from first-party data (e.g. website visits, product usage), second-party data (e.g. partner interactions), and third-party data (e.g. industry news, competitor research).
Tracking these signals helps you prioritize accounts, trigger marketing and sales activity, and create more relevant, personalized outreach. Signal-based campaigns are simply the outreach and engagement efforts triggered by these signals.
Are signal-based and firmographic-based campaigns the same?
No, but there are some gray areas. Firmographics and technographics help segment your audience and define account tiers based on ICP fit. Signals, on the other hand, indicate real-time intent. Whether you’re running a signal-based or firmographic-based campaign, follow these best practices:
All campaigns need fuel & engine alignment (the content needs to match the distribution channel)
The “fuel” should add value for the recipient(s), and the “fuel” should be be tailored to the “engine” you’re using (e.g. outbound, Linkedin ad)
Campaigns should feel relevant and personalized, and not just because you included {{lead.First Name}}
Campaigns are tailored to where an account is in their buying journey
Your outreach doesn’t feel generic, lazy, or spammy
Additional MKT1 reading: Fuel & Engine Framework | How to run high-impact campaigns
Are signal-based campaigns more effective than other campaign types?
Signal-based campaigns are typically more proactive: When you act on signals that just happened (e.g. recent job switch)…
And more targeted: Signals indicate a propensity to consider or buy your product…
And therefore higher-converting: Reaching contacts and accounts at the right time with the right content, leads to better engagement.
Is it worth it to set up signal-based campaigns? Is this an unnecessary level of complexity?
I like to think signals add sophistication, not complexity. Once you start tracking signals, you now have multiple variables for determining when/if a campaign should be sent and what content, messaging, and CTAs to include. You can now prioritize accounts and contacts based on more data:
People (lead or contact) stages
Account engagement stages
Account tiers (typically based on fit with ICP and potential value of customer)
Signals
⛔ 🐏 Avoid doing random acts of (signal-based) marketing. While I think signal-based campaigns can help you drive growth, like anything in marketing, figure out the right bets to make, then test, then scale them. Don’t jump in head first and try building campaigns for every signal you can possibly track. You’ll end up right back in the R.A.M. trap.
Still not convinced that signal-based campaigns are worthwhile? Jump down to the bottom for my take on whether signal-based campaigns are worth the hype.
Section 2: Examples of signal-based campaigns
Some reminders before my examples:
Signal-based campaigns can include many contents types and you don’t need to state the signal you observed in all of your outreach.
In fact sometimes it’s just creepy to say “We noticed you watched our interactive demo 5x.”
Signal-based campaigns can include one or many channels—not just outbound
Outbound: Personalized email, LinkedIn, and phone outreach
Paid media: Targeted ad campaigns on LinkedIn
Direct mail & gifting: Use tools like Sendoso to streamline gifting to high-priority accounts
Event invites: To dinners, webinars, advisory calls with your founder, or to be on your podcast
There are many ways to categorize signals, you can organize them by company-level signals or personal-level signals; 1st, 2nd, or 3rd party data source; account engagement stage, or whatever you so choose. I’ve used the 1st, 2nd, 3rd-party categorization for the list of examples below.
1st-Party Signal-Based Campaigns
These campaigns are triggered by engagement and intent data directly collected from your owned channels (website, product usage, emails, events, etc.) Here are some examples:
Product usage-based campaigns:
Example: A free user uses a feature for the first time → Trigger an in-app message + email + sales outreach to convert them to paid.
Example: 3 new users added to a free plan → Trigger an in-app message + email + sales outreach to convert them to paid.
Inbound: Web or content engagement:
Example: A key account visits your pricing page → Launch a LinkedIn ad campaign + SDR outbound sequence to drive towards a meeting.
Example: A contact fills out a form to watch an interactive demo on your site –> send a demo of a more advanced feature or a customer story (here’s how our customer DinoCo uses our product) and ask to schedule a meeting.
Example: A contact fills out a demo request form but doesn’t schedule meeting → Enroll them in an automated nurture sequence, starting with a virtual demo link.
Example: Multiple contacts from an account read a report you made → Send a follow-up email sequence with a link to a calculator to see how they compare against report benchmarks.
Social engagers:
Example: Scrape people who have liked or commented on your LinkedIn posts (try Phantombuster for this) → connect with them on Linkedin → send a follow up message with relevant content
Example: LinkedIn commenters → create lookalike audiences → promote LinkedIn post to that lookalike audience
Event/Webinar follow-up:
Example: Someone from account tier 1 registers but doesn’t attend → Send a recap email with a CTA for a 1:1 sales chat.
Example: Contact from an account that’s in evaluation stage attends your webinar → Sales sends a personalized follow up immediately after the webinar.
Inbound is a signal! Instead of treating inbound leads as the starting point of a buyer’s journey (like traditional lead funnels do), an account-driven & signal-based approach sees inbound as just one of many data points that help prioritize outreach. Inbound isn’t dead, it’s just one piece of a smarter, more proactive GTM motion.
I have an even longer list of signal-based campaign ideas for paid subscribers here.
2nd-Party Signal-Based Campaigns
These campaigns leverage your partner’s data or interactions with partners in your ecosystem. Here are some examples:
Example: A prospect follows a partner company on LinkedIn → Send co-branded content or have your partner make an intro.
Example: A prospect engages within a relevant Slack community → SDR reaches out with an interesting takeaway from that conversation and/or an invitation to an event on the topic.
Example: A prospect goes to an event you sponsored → get the list of attendees at your booth or side-party → Send a follow-up with takeaways from the event
Example: A prospect goes to an event you sponsored but doesn’t hit your booth or event → Send follow up email to tier 1 accounts who attended offering gift/swag from the event → Send gift using Sendoso
3rd-Party Signal-Based Campaigns
These campaigns are triggered by external data sources. For these signals, you’ll need to find a signal provider. Note for all of these, you are looking for signals from accounts you’ve prioritized into tiers in your CRM. Here are some examples:
Job switchers:
Note: If you track a champion leaving in your own platform or CRM, job switching could be considered a 1st party signal, but really it doesn’t matter how you classify it!
Example: A past customer or power user joins a new company → AE outreach congratulating them and offering them a discount if their new company switches over.
Example: A hiring manager posts on LinkedIn about building a new function (e.g. sales ops, RevOps, or demand gen) → Engage with the post and send a relevant resource.
Competitor or topic research campaign:
Example: A target account is researching your competitor on G2 → Trigger an outbound email highlighting your differentiators.
Example: A key decision-maker engages with a competitor’s LinkedIn post → SDR sends a LinkedIn connection request with a case study about someone who replaced the competitor’s tool with yours.
Example: A prospect starts searching for a relevant topic → Send hyper-relevant content + invite to a product demo.
Company or industry growth/changes:
Example: A company in your TAM raises a new funding round → Congratulatory direct mail (if in aware, engaged, or considering stage)
Example: A company expands to a new market (tracked via job postings or press releases) → Invite to an event in that location or send direct mail to a new office.
Example: A company hires a new VP of Marketing → Trigger an outbound sequence positioning your solution as a way to help them achieve their first-quarter goals.
Example: A new law or regulation affects an industry → Target companies in that sector with educational content on compliance best practices.
Web scraping → campaigns
You can gather web-scraped data from tools like Clay and BuiltWith, or using custom-built web scrapers. Sometimes this data is considered as a 1st or 3rd party signal, sometimes its considered neither, but it doesn’t really matter…so I’m giving them their own section!
Example: Your startup is a fit for companies that run a bunch of webinars → scrape for new event listings from priority accounts → follow up about your tool when they post a couple of new events and feel the pain most
Example: You write a report on a trending topic like “ABX” → scrape for social mentions of ABX from priority accounts → match with your priority accounts → send a report to them (Tools like Brand24 can help you monitor mentions)
To summarize, here are some of the most common signal-based campaigns:
These are great places to start—and you might even be doing some of these without realizing they are “signal-based” campaigns!
Inbound or web visitors: Follow up when someone requests a demo or visits the pricing page.
Job switcher campaigns: Target past champions who move to new companies.
High-intent content engagement: Reach out to accounts consuming your content.
Expansion campaigns: Engage existing free users or customers based on behavior.
For more signals and campaign ideas, become a paid subscriber to access my list and/or check out this LinkedIn Post
Section 3: How to set up & send signal-based campaigns
1. Set up your account-driven foundation
Before launching signal-based campaigns, you need to structure your CRM and data to ensure you’re tracking and engaging the right accounts. I covered these processes in detail in my last 2 newsletters. Here’s quick summary:
Define your TAM & ICPs: Use firmographic, technographic, and behavioral data to determine which accounts fit your ideal customer profile.
Segment accounts into tiers: Categorize accounts into three or four tiers based on fit, value, and potential deal size.
Add accounts to your CRM: Ensure every relevant account and contact is in HubSpot, Salesforce, or Attio (or even a data warehouse) for tracking and automation.
Enrich accounts with contact data: Pull in key decision-makers using tools like Clay
2. Define account engagement stages
In order to measure the success of your signal-based campaigns and account-driven strategy, you need to set up account engagement stages in your CRM. Without these, it’s hard to track progress, trigger the right GTM actions, and align sales and marketing on who owns the next step. These stages should update automatically in your CRM based on intent signals and GTM activity.
Think of these like lead stages (MQL, SAL, SQL) but for your accounts. You won’t throw away lead/contact/people stages, you’ll use that to determine the best person to reach out to within an account.
Define engagement stages: Create clear progression stages that indicate where an account is in its buying journey (e.g. identified → aware → engaged → considering → in pipeline).
Layer engagement stages onto tiers: Within each account tier, look at the engagement stages to figure out how to prioritize where marketing and sales should focus efforts.
Set rules for stage progression: Define what signals or interactions move an account forward (e.g. multiple contacts engaging in a short time frame, job title changes, specific content views).
Why use stages at all? Not all accounts are ready for direct outreach or a book a meeting CTA. Engagement stages ensure sales and marketing efforts align with actual buying interest, not just static ICP fit. They also make it much easier to set up rules of engagement and marketing to sales handoffs.
How is this different from using lead scores to trigger campaigns?
Quick note: Depending on your CRM, you may have people classified as “Leads”, “Contacts” or both. I’m using these terms somewhat interchangeably to mean the “person” in the priority account.
Even in an account-driven strategy, lead scoring remains critical—it just plays a different role. Account engagement stages help you prioritize which companies to engage, lead scoring helps identify the right individuals within those accounts to reach out to.
Lead/Contact scoring = Track activity and firmographics of individual contacts with a goal of qualifying contacts.
Account engagement stages = Aggregate engagement from all contacts at the same company.
Best practice: Use account scoring as the primary trigger for outreach, then refine at the contact level to target the right person within that account.
Marketing should track account-based engagement metrics, look at % of target accounts moving from Aware → Engaged → Considering and time between stages. You should adjust your KPIs to include these when using an account-driven strategy.
3. Define rules of engagement
Rules of engagement template for paid subscribers here.
Set clear guidelines on when and how sales and marketing interact with accounts to avoid gaps and overlaps in outreach. Here’s what to think about when coming up with rules of engagement:
Account tier
Tier 1: Sales usually owns the majority of 1:1 communications and account research for all engagement stages–with help from marketing on what content and campaigns to send.
Tier 2: Marketing usually owns 1:few communications until a certain engagement stage.
Tier 3: Marketing usually handles 1: many communication all the way through, especially if there’s a self-serve buying option.
Account engagement stage
Marketing often owns communication from identified to considering stages for tiers 2 and 3.
Note: Rules by engagement stage are highly dependent on how you define each stage, if you have SDRS/BDRs on your GTM team, and if you have a self-serve and/or sales-led buying motion.
Contact type & stage
It’s still important to know the status of each contact mapped to your account (i.e. contact is in buyer role and an MQL), this will help you prioritize who you reach out to within an account.
You can choose to reach out to the individual who triggered the signal, the most likely buyer, and/or the most engaged contact within the account (which might be 1 person with all those attributes or 3 separate people!)
Signal-type
Different signals might also lead to different rules of engagement. I.e. Certain signals might be so indicative of a company’s readiness to buy, that the account gets immediately assigned to a rep, and no marketing nurturing happens.
For 3rd-party signals, an account might be in-market but isn’t engaged with your brand yet, so it might make sense for marketing to nurture them first.
For 1st-party signals, an account has already shown awareness and interest (you know they definitely know you are!), so sales should likely engage immediately with a high-touch approach.
Here’s an example of how to use both lead/contact scoring and account engagement stages:
If multiple leads/contacts from the same company reach MQL → upgrade the account to “Engaged”, and set up alerts for high-intent activity.
If a contact books a meeting → Move the account to “Considering.”
If an account reaches “Considering” → Sales identifies and works engaged leads/contacts within the account.
Obviously, this can get complex quickly! If you’re not careful things can get ugly internally between teams when nobody knows who should be doing what. And things get spammy externally if companies get multiple sets of outreach that don’t feel coordinated. I recommend documenting your rules of engagement, sharing them with the entire GTM team, and making them easy to find and access.
We of course have a template for rules of engagement for paid subscribers here:
4. Set up signal-based workflows and campaigns
Once your CRM, account tiers, account engagement stages, and rules of engagement are set up, start tracking real-time signals to prioritize outreach.
While you can start tracking lots of signals, I think it’s best to take a more measured and step-by-step approach. Otherwise, you’ll risk sending too much outreach to prospects, degrading the quality of the outreach, and have a hard time measuring success.
Start with a long list of signals and campaign ideas (I have a list in my template library for paid subs)
Choose the highest pri signals to track and campaigns to run
Then prioritize these campaigns and start chipping away by testing, optimizing, and scaling
Test running these campaigns semi-manually at first
If certain signal-based campaigns are working, you can automate more of the workflows, but be careful when automating personalization or copy…keeping a human involved is especially helpful for tier 1 accounts.
Optimize and scale over time
Continuously analyze engagement data to refine campaigns and improve efficiency. Monitor performance by account tier and account engagement stage to understand where accounts are getting stuck and what campaigns are working best.
You’ll want to set up clear campaign tracking in your marketing automation tool and CRM, so you can look at performance by campaign too. Here are instructions for setting up campaign tracking in Hubspot & in Salesforce.
Then adjust workflows based on conversion rates and pipeline movement, try changing the campaign messaging, adding or removing channels, or adding new signals. You can also test campaigns on tier 2 and tier 3 accounts (lower stakes!) and scale what works to tier 1.
Section 4: Tech stack for signal-based campaigns
To do everything described above, you need data sources and tools to track signals, you need a CRM as your source of truth for all account and contact, and a tool (or tools) to send campaigns.
Here’s what I recommend you have in your stack to do this well:
A CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot, Attio): Stores account and contact data and the source of truth and all other tools to connect to it.
A marketing automation tool (HubSpot, ActiveCampaign): Command center for tracking marketing activities and running campaigns.
Account and contact enrichment tool (Clay, Apollo.io): Provides account and contact prospecting info. Most teams also auto-enrich accounts and contacts in their CRM after they’ve added an initial list.
Signal sources (Default, Warmly, PhantomBuster, Knock): Supplies intent data you can feed into your outbound email tool and/or CRM.
End-to-end signal-based campaign orchestration (Default, Pocus, Unify): These tools allow you to act on signals directly within their platform and give you more robust workflows and account prioritization, but syncing to CRM ensures alignment across sales and marketing.
An outbound email tool (Outreach, Instantly, SmartLead): For SDRs/AEs to execute sequences. While some companies may send emails from Hubspot, most teams use a separate tool for email outreach–ones that are great at warming accounts and helping reps manage multiple sequences.
Data warehouse instead of a CRM?
GTM tech stacks are evolving quickly and I think in the future we might just skip CRMs all together and connect our data warehouse to data providers and tools. In this setup, an ETL (e.g. Fivetran or Stitch) pulls data into Snowflake, Redshift, or BigQuery, and a reverse ETL (e.g. Hightouch, Census) sends enriched insights back into sales and marketing tools. For most late-stage companies a hybrid approach of CRM + data warehouse + reverse ETL is an ideal set up for tracking accounts and contacts today…but who knows what’s going to happen in a couple years.
Conclusion: Are signal-based campaigns worth the hype?
Campaigns (in general) are worth the hype.
I define campaigns as initiatives with both “fuel” and “engine”. But so many startups, despite having small teams, operate in silos. Their GTM efforts are disjoint. If you can flawlessly execute campaigns—whether they’re small, targeted plays or large multi-channel initiatives—it's a strong sign that your GTM teams are aligned. And you are way more likely to generate outsized returns on your GTM efforts.
MKT1 Newsletter on campaigns »
Account-driven GTM is worth the hype.
Startups that still rely on reactive, disconnected inbound and cold, spray-and-pray outbound motions are struggling to build pipeline. If you systematically map, enrich, prioritize, and engage high-potential accounts, you’ll have a much easier time driving growth.
MKT1 Newsletter on account-driven GTM »
“Spray-and-pray” campaigns are NOT worth it
Danger: Even signal-based campaigns can quickly fall into the category of spray-and-pray campaigns.
Just because you have more data doesn’t mean you should use it poorly. If you treat every signal as an automatic trigger for outreach, you’ll end up overwhelming your prospects (and your own team). A job change or website visit doesn’t always mean someone is ready to buy. Without the right guardrails—clear engagement stages, tiering, and thoughtful campaign execution—signal-based campaigns can become just another version of spammy outbound.
Signal-based campaigns are worth the hype*
*When combined with account-driven GTM and campaign best practices
Sending campaigns based on intent signals alone doesn’t usually work. But if you systematically use intent and firmographic data to prioritize outreach, create targeted messaging, and execute campaigns to the right accounts, you are more likely to drive growth.
Takeaways from this 3-part newsletter series
I’ve now written over 15,000 words on account-driven GTM over the last 3 newsletters. Let me attempt to summarize it into less than 300 words.
Let’s go back to a diagram from the 1st newsletter in the series…there’s a major shift happening in GTM strategy:
The most successful b2b startups now and in the future will take an account-driven GTM approach.
And no this isn’t just ABM at scale. It’s a shift in how go-to-market teams operate, using account data, tiers, signals, and automation to drive proactive, multi-channel efforts to the right accounts and contacts.
Implementing an account-driven GTM requires upfront work to build your foundation—it doesn’t happen overnight.
Define your TAM, segment into tiers, and add the right accounts and contacts to your CRM—then systematically go after them with smart campaigns. Simply mapping accounts isn’t enough; without the right engagement strategy, your CRM is just a database of names.
Don’t lose sight of first marketing principles: align fuel (content) with engine (channels) to send highly-relevant campaigns
Whether sending signal–based campaigns, sending firmographic campaigns, or building workflows off inbound, make sure you are systematically going after the right accounts with a valuable, relevant message on the right channels for your audience.
Measure success using account engagement stages and campaign reports, not just lead stages
Track how accounts progress from awareness to pipeline–make sure to look at this by tier and campaign as well. You won’t throw away lead/contact stages in this model, but instead use those to reach the right person within an account.
This shift isn’t optional. Net fishing is over. Spearfishing is the way.
The best teams aren’t waiting for inbound leads or blasting cold outbound; they’re taking advantage of the new tools and using data to engage the right accounts at the right time, across the right channels. Companies that don’t adapt will fall behind.
Thanks for reading any or all of this 3 part series. It got pretty dense, very tactical, somewhat technical, and I may have scared you just a little bit. But hopefully you feel more prepared to handle the shift in GTM strategy that’s happening. And remember, you can always take this step by step—Rome (or in this case account-driven GTM and signal-based campaigns) wasn’t built in a day. - Kramer
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Template & resource library (for paid subscribers)
(new) Rules of engagement: How sales and marketing should handle accounts and leads by account engagement stage and account tier.
List of 50+ tools to use in an account-driven GTM, recommendations for products to help you with account and contact prospecting, tracking intent and qualifying accounts, planning campaigns, and measuring performance.
50+ signal-based campaign ideas to help identify signals and craft campaigns for your target accounts
Additional resources: Fields list, account tiering methods, signal-type definitions