Over the last almost two years, I’ve been working with several B2B startups on GTM strategy. The playbook changes depending on the company, the market, the maturity of the product, and the ICP. For some companies, inbound is the right foundation. For others, SEO, partnerships, founder-led content, paid experiments, or outbound make more sense.

But across almost every company I’ve worked with, one thing has become very clear: outbound cold email is one of the hardest motions to get right.

And honestly, it makes sense.

We all receive dozens of cold emails every week. Most of them are generic, poorly targeted, and disconnected from anything we are actually thinking about. The worst ones are the emails where it is obvious the sender did not make the effort to understand who you are, what your company does, or whether their offer is even remotely relevant.

That is why I’ve become increasingly convinced that cold outreach should not start with a list. It should start with a signal.

A title match is not enough. A company size match is not enough. Even a seemingly perfect ICP match is not enough if there is no indication that the person is actually thinking about the problem you solve.

The difference comes when you can see that a prospect is already engaging with the category, exploring the topic, or paying attention to conversations related to your solution. When that happens, the outreach feels very different. It is no longer a random message sent to someone because they happen to have the right job title. It is a message grounded in something they have already shown interest in.

That changes the quality of the conversation.

Depending on the business, there are different ways to find these signals. You can use tools like Clay or Apollo to enrich accounts and contacts. You can look at website visitors, job postings, funding announcements, hiring patterns, technology usage, or other forms of intent data. All of these can be useful.

But one of the best sources I’ve seen is hiding in plain sight: LinkedIn.

Not LinkedIn as a place to post content and hope people react. Not LinkedIn as a place to send generic connection requests. I mean LinkedIn as a live source of buyer intent.

Many of your best prospects are already engaging with content related to the problem you solve. They are liking posts, commenting on discussions, following competitors, reacting to influencers, and paying attention to conversations that are directly or indirectly connected to your category.

In many cases, that activity tells you more than a static database ever could.

The playbook is simple. Start by identifying posts that are relevant to your category. These could be posts from competitors, industry influencers, analysts, customers, or people discussing the problems your product solves. Then look at who is engaging with those posts.

Who commented? Who liked it? Who reposted it? Who showed enough interest to publicly interact with the topic?

From there, you filter those people against your ICP. Look at their role, seniority, company, industry, and whether they are actually the kind of person who would care about your solution. If they are a fit, reach out while the signal is still fresh.

That could mean sending a connection request, a direct message, or a well-crafted email. The important part is that the message should be tied to the signal in a natural way.

For example, instead of sending a generic pitch, you can reference the topic they engaged with and connect it to a problem you are seeing in the market. Not in a creepy or overly automated way, but in a way that shows there is a reason you are reaching out.

Something like:

“I saw you engaged with a post about [topic]. We’ve been seeing a lot of teams dealing with this same challenge, especially around [specific problem], so I thought this might be relevant.”

That is a very different starting point than sending a generic email to a random list of people who happen to match your target persona.

The reason it works is simple. You are not trying to create interest from zero. You are entering a conversation that is already happening in the prospect’s mind.

That does not mean every person who likes a post is ready to buy. Of course not. But it does mean they have shown some level of awareness or curiosity around a topic that matters to your business. And in outbound, that is already a much better place to start.

In a market where inboxes are saturated and buyers are tired of irrelevant outreach, the advantage goes to teams that can identify real signals early and act on them quickly.

So if you are doing outbound, my recommendation is simple: do not start with the list.

Start with the signal, then build the list around it.

This is one of the workflows we’ve been building into COR: helping B2B teams find relevant LinkedIn conversations, identify the people engaging with them, and prioritize the prospects that actually fit their ICP.

If you’re trying to make outbound more signal-based and less dependent on generic lists, happy to show you what we’re building.