Signal Readiness Scorecard
Six questions on how you target, time, and personalize outbound today. The result is a plain diagnosis and the specific moves that would help, not a generic score. Free, instant, and honest even if the answer is "you're already doing this well."
2-minute assessment
Six quick questions on how you target, time, and personalize outreach today. Get a plain-language diagnosis and the specific moves that would help most.
We will email your result. No spam, ever.
Scoring is rule-based, not an AI guess: each answer carries a fixed weight and the result tier is looked up from the total. Nothing you enter is stored unless you submit your email. Curious what a real buying signal is and how often each type actually fires? See the Signal Index.
Most outbound advice is about who you contact. Build a tighter list, find better titles, buy cleaner data. That advice is not wrong, but it treats the hard part as a targeting problem when it is usually a timing problem.
The same message to the same person lands differently depending on the week it arrives. A note about integration support reads as noise to a company that is not integrating anything, and reads as useful to one that closed an acquisition on Tuesday. Nothing about the list changed. The moment did.
This is why a strong list sent on a calendar underperforms an average list sent on an event. The calendar has no idea what is happening inside the companies on it.
The assessment above asks how you target today. In practice the answers fall into four approaches, and they are not equally good at answering the question that matters: why this company, and why now?
The most common approach. It answers who might plausibly buy, and says nothing at all about when. Every company on it looks identical in week one and week forty, because the list cannot see inside them.
Cheaper and larger, with the same blind spot plus a decay problem. Contacts change roles, companies change shape, and the list does not notice until the next refresh.
A real attempt at timing, and a genuine step up. The limitation is what the score is made of: inferred behaviour, aggregated and modelled. It can tell you a company looks interested. It usually cannot tell you what happened, on what date, so you can say it out loud in a first sentence.
An acquisition, a senior hire, a new location, a filing. Verifiable, dated, and quotable. It answers why now in a way the recipient recognises, because they were there when it happened.
Two patterns come up far more than the rest. The first is a static list sent on a schedule, where nothing in the process is connected to anything happening at the target company. The second is more frustrating: the targeting is genuinely good, the firm knows exactly who it should be talking to, and the outreach still arrives weeks after the moment that would have made it land.
The second case is the one worth knowing about, because it looks like a copywriting problem and is not. The list is fine. The message is fine. It is late.
If you want to assess yourself without taking the assessment, these are the four things that separate a signal-timed motion from a calendar-driven one.
Not an industry observation or a compliment. Something that happened, on a date, that the recipient already knows about.
A senior appointment reshapes vendor relationships over roughly the first sixty to ninety days. Arriving after that window means arriving after the decisions.
Across 745 observed buying events, acquisitions and new launches made up about 59% of everything we saw, while funding rounds were near 1%. Building a motion around funding news means waiting most of the year for volume that is not there.
If the number of sends is fixed in advance, the motion will pad itself with companies that had no reason to hear from you this week.
Frequency figures from The State of Buying Signals 2026, our own aggregate study of 745 observed buying events, March to June 2026. Aggregate and non-identifying. The sixty-to-ninety-day figure is the window we work to, not a published statistic.