There's a moment in most GTM teams where an intent platform lights up on an account, someone drops it into a sequence, and everyone quietly hopes that will be enough. It rarely is. That's roughly the pattern our host Brendan Hughes, MarketSizer's Niall O'Gorman, and this episode's guest Leslie Venetz spent an hour pulling apart on Episode 2 of Intent, Decoded.
Leslie has spent a decade in outbound. She's a USA Today bestselling author, a LinkedIn Top Voice in sales, and has personally made a quarter of a million cold calls, which is either terrifying or admirable depending on your tolerance for phone calls. (I say that with affection. Both, probably.) The thread she keeps pulling on is a phrase she coined: earn the right. And once you sit with it, most of the mistakes GTM teams make with intent data become obvious.
A Signal Is Not Permission
The single strongest idea from the conversation is this: a signal is a piece of context, not a licence to sell. Someone clicked a webinar link seven times. Someone changed roles. Someone's company raised a round. None of that is an invitation. It's a data point about what might be relevant to them, if you can connect it to something they actually care about.
Leslie's litmus test is worth stealing: before you send an email, ask what you have actually done to earn the right to send it. To ask for a thirty-minute discovery call. To ask a stranger to spend their social capital pushing your product internally. To ask them for their money. Most outreach fails that test on the first line. Niall summed it up: "signals essentially create curiosity, but not necessarily the permission to reach out on them."
This connects to something we've written about at length: intent data mostly scaled the volume of bad outreach rather than improving its quality. When teams treat a signal as a starting gun, they end up sending faster, worse emails to more accounts. The signal was never the problem. The interpretation was.
ICP First, Signal Second (and the Move from Product to Problem)
The next move Leslie makes is order-of-operations. Firmographic and demographic ICP filters go first. Signals layer on top. Not the other way around.
"I try to build in firmographic and demographic filters to my list, and then layer a signal on top of that," she said. Meaning: don't scroll an intent tool looking for spikes and then work backwards to whether the accounts are a fit. Build the tight, well-defined list first, then use signals to decide who inside that list is worth reaching now.
Once you have the right list, the second failure mode kicks in: product-centric copy. Leslie runs a workshop she calls FABs (features, advantages, benefits) that pushes reps to keep asking "so what?" on every product claim until they land on something that actually matters in the buyer's day. It sounds simple. It's the thing almost no outbound sequence does. Most emails stop at the feature. A few push to the advantage. Almost none get to the impact on the person reading it.
The exercise is easy to run on your own team's cadences. Pull one sequence. Every sentence that describes what your product does gets a "so what?" written next to it. If you can't answer that in one line, the sentence isn't ready to send.
The POV Framework: Meet Buyers Where Their Awareness Actually Is
Leslie thinks about buyers in three buckets, which she calls the POV framework: problem-unaware, opportunity-aware (or option-aware), and vendor-aware. It sounds like a marketing model. It's really a sales operating instruction.
If someone is problem-unaware, they don't yet know they have a gap. A demo invitation is a rounding error. What works is education: a point of view, a piece of research, a benchmark they can compare themselves against. If someone is opportunity-aware, they know they have a problem and are scoping solutions. That's the moment for insight and shortlisting help, not a hard pitch. If someone is vendor-aware and looking at your pricing page, the play is different again: get to the qualified conversation quickly.
The same signal reads three different ways depending on which bucket the buyer is in. A visit to your pricing page from a vendor-aware buyer is a green light. From a problem-unaware buyer, it's just curiosity. The teams that get outreach right are the ones tuning their message to the stage the buyer is actually at, not the stage the sequence assumes.
This is also where signal-led ABX earns its keep. It's not more coverage. It's the right message meeting the right awareness stage at the right moment.
AI Belongs in Research, Not in the Send Button
The AI section of the conversation was the sharpest. Leslie is not against AI in outbound. She's used a sequence-generation tool called Reggie for four years. What she pushes back on is a specific pattern: outbound teams pointing an LLM at a prospect list and shipping the output.
Her framing landed hard: "LLMs are statistical average generators. Even if they're getting ranked 96 out of 100, they still sound like the same garbage everybody else is sending at scale." At scale, statistically average copy converges on identical copy, and the entire prospect universe starts receiving variations of the same email.
Where AI genuinely helps is upstream of the send. Understanding a persona. Mapping a buyer ecosystem. Pressure-testing whether your value proposition holds up in a specific vertical. Role-playing a discovery call before you dial. Niall's addition was that AI can be a fantastic prep partner for a human seller, and a terrible replacement for one. It's the difference between using a signal to sharpen your thinking and using it to skip thinking entirely.
Fundamentals Beat Sophistication: Deposits Before Asks
The moment in the conversation that surprised me most was when Leslie said she still finds sophisticated, well-tooled GTM teams missing basic hygiene. Companies with seven-figure tech stacks who haven't tagged their churned customers, don't flag when a past champion changes jobs, and give their reps no time to prep before they dial. The fundamentals are where the biggest signals often live, and they're the least glamorous to fix.
Her closing framing is one to write down: "How can I make deposits before asks, so that I am always putting more in the bank than I am ever trying to withdraw?" A deposit is a piece of custom research. A first-hundred-days plan for a newly-appointed CPO. An intro that costs the seller their social capital, not the buyer's. When you've made enough deposits, the ask lands as a natural next step. When you haven't, it lands as spam.
Niall's line at the end brings it all together: "All the sophistication means nothing if you're sending the wrong message at scale, at the wrong time, to the wrong person." That's the whole conversation in one sentence. The path from signal to trust runs through interpretation, order-of-operations, awareness, restraint, and effort. Not through automation.
Intent, Decoded is MarketSizer's podcast series on the mechanics of purchase intent and what it actually takes to use it well. Watch Episode 2 on YouTube, listen on Spotify, or catch the full LinkedIn Live recording here. Follow the show on Spotify or YouTube to catch future episodes, or visit the podcast hub for everything in one place.
Recommended reading
- Why Intent Data Made B2B Outreach Worse - the deeper argument for why signals need interpretation, not automation.
- Purchase Intent vs Intent Data - the definitional pillar behind the point that not every click is a buying signal.
- Most GTM Teams Use Intent Data at the Wrong Time - the Episode 1 recap and the piece this episode builds on.
- How to Build a Signal-led GTM Motion - the corrective playbook once you stop sorting on intent alone.