Signal-based prospecting: a step-by-step guide for small B2B teams

In short: Contact a company only when a recent event makes your offer relevant, and say what it is in a short message. Pick one or two signals from your past wins, check them weekly, spend ten minutes researching each account, follow up a few times over two to three weeks, then stop.

Signal-based prospecting means you only contact a company when something has just happened that makes your offer relevant, and your first message says what that something is. It is outbound lead generation built around timing and relevance rather than volume.

For a small B2B team, this is often the only kind of outbound that is worth the time. You do not have the people to send thousands of messages, and you do not want your company’s name attached to messages nobody asked for. You do have the ability to notice a handful of good reasons to talk each week and act on them properly.

Here is the full process, from defining who you sell to through to handing a reply to your salesperson.

Step 1: Define your ideal customer in one paragraph

Before you choose any signal, write down who you want to sell to. Be specific enough that two people on your team would agree on whether a company fits.

Cover:

• Industry or type of organisation. For example, facilities management companies, or secondary schools, or construction firms that bid for public work.
• Size. Headcount or revenue band, roughly.
• Location. Singapore only, or the region.
• The problem you solve for them. In their words, not yours.
• Who owns that problem. The job title of the person who would feel the pain and approve a change.
• Disqualifiers. Companies you do not want: too small, wrong sector, already a competitor’s long-term customer.

Example: “Singapore companies with 20 to 200 staff that win government cleaning and facilities contracts, need consumables and equipment delivered to new sites, and whose operations manager or procurement lead chooses suppliers. Not companies under 10 staff, and not companies that only do residential work.”

Step 2: Pick one or two signals that fit that customer

A signal is useful if it does three things: it appears before a purchase, you can find it reliably, and you can find it soon after it happens.

The best way to choose is to look at your past wins. List your last 10 to 20 good customers and note what happened in the months before they bought. Our guide to buying signals explains this exercise and lists 15 common signals.

For the facilities example above, two strong candidates would be:

1. A GeBIZ contract award for cleaning or facilities work. Awarded open tenders, with supplier names and amounts, are published by the Ministry of Finance in the Government Procurement via GeBIZ dataset.
2. A job posting for a site supervisor or operations manager at a target company, suggesting new sites or a new contract.

Resist adding more. Two signals tracked properly beat ten tracked occasionally.

Step 3: Set up monitoring you will actually keep up

Monitoring does not need special software to begin with. It needs a fixed routine.

Put every signal you find into one simple sheet or CRM view with these columns: date found, company, signal, source link, fit (yes, no, unsure), contact, status. The source link matters. You will need it when you write the message, and you will want to check it again before anything is sent.

If you find you are not keeping up, reduce the scope rather than skipping weeks. A smaller, consistent pipeline is more useful than a large, patchy one.

Note on the GeBIZ dataset: at the time of writing (October 2026), the data.gov.sg listing shows coverage to March 2026, so for recent awards you will also need the GeBIZ website. Our guide on how to use GeBIZ contract awards to find B2B leads explains both sources.

Step 4: Research each account for ten minutes

For each signal that passes the fit check, answer four questions before writing anything:

1. What exactly happened? Read the source. For an award: what is the scope, which agency, how long is the contract? For a job post: what does the role say about tools, sites or plans?
2. Who owns the problem? Find the person whose job title matches step 1. Use the company website and LinkedIn. If you cannot find the right person, a general business address is better than the wrong individual.
3. What do they probably need next? Write one sentence. “They will need consumables delivered to a new site in Tampines from the contract start.”
4. Is there any reason not to contact them? An existing relationship, a recent complaint, a competitor connection, or an explicit request not to be contacted.

Ten minutes is usually enough. If you find yourself spending an hour, the signal may not be clear enough to act on.

Step 5: Check what the rules allow

Before sending, make sure the channel and contact details are appropriate. In Singapore, marketing messages sent to an organisation for that organisation’s purposes are excluded from the Do Not Call provisions, but the exclusion depends on the purpose of the message, and other rules still apply. Bulk commercial email is covered separately by the Spam Control Act. Read B2B outreach in Singapore: what PDPA and the Do Not Call rules allow before your first campaign.

Step 6: Write a message that references the signal

A good signal-based message is short and plain. It has four parts:

1. What you noticed, stated accurately, in one sentence.
2. Why it matters to them, in one sentence about their situation.
3. What you offer, in one sentence, ideally with relevant experience.
4. A low-effort question, not a demand for a 30-minute meeting.

Worked example

Here is an illustrative message for the facilities example. The company, names and contract are invented for the example.

Subject: Supplies for the new Bukit Batok contract

Hi Mei Ling,

I saw that Example Facilities was awarded the cleaning services contract for the Bukit Batok community buildings on GeBIZ last month. Congratulations.

New sites usually mean setting up consumables and equipment delivery before the start date, often with a supplier the team has not used before.

We supply cleaning consumables and machines to contract cleaners across Singapore and can deliver to each site on a fixed schedule.

Would it be useful if I sent our price list for the items you would typically need at a site like this?

Regards, Daniel Tan Example Supplies Pte Ltd, [phone], [email]

Why it works:

• The opening is specific and checkable. It names the contract and where the information came from. There is no pretence of a prior relationship.
• The second line is about them, not about you.
• The offer is concrete. It describes what you do in a sentence a busy operations manager can understand.
• The question is easy to answer. “Yes, send it” is a five-second reply.
• The sender is clearly identified, with contact details.

What to avoid:

• Fake familiarity (“Hope you are well, as discussed…”).
• Mentioning information that feels intrusive, such as personal social media.
• Exaggerated claims or statistics you cannot back up.
• Attachments in the first message.
• Long paragraphs about your company history.

Write for approval, not for volume

If someone else, such as an agency or a junior colleague, is drafting messages, have the person responsible for the relationship approve them before they go out. At FYAdvisers, nothing goes out on a client’s behalf without their sign-off, and that is a sensible rule for any team.

Step 7: Follow up a few times, then stop

Busy people miss messages, so a reply often comes after a follow-up rather than the first message. Each follow-up should add something, not just ask “did you see my email?”.

A simple cadence for a signal-based sequence:

Then stop. If there is no reply, mark the account and wait for the next signal. A company that ignored a message about one contract may be very interested when it wins the next one.

If anyone asks you not to contact them again, record it immediately and make sure everyone on your team can see it.

Step 8: Hand replies to the person who will sell

The point of prospecting is a conversation with a salesperson, not a reply in an inbox. When a reply comes in:

1. Route it the same day to the person who will handle the account.
2. Attach the context: the signal, the source link, the message thread and anything learned in research.
3. Agree the next step: a call, a quote, a sample, a site visit.
4. Record the outcome against the signal in your sheet or CRM.

Speed matters here as much as anywhere. A reply that sits for three days loses most of the benefit of good timing. Our guide on responding to enquiries faster covers simple alerting and routing; the same approach works for outbound replies. In one project, Jeff Learning Center, an enquiry workflow notifies the owner immediately when a lead supplies a phone number, and FYAdvisers reports the team got back to leads within five minutes after launch. That is a reported outcome, not a measured average, but the principle applies: make sure the right person hears about a warm lead at once.

Step 9: Review the signals every month

After a month or two, look at the sheet and ask:

• Which signals led to replies, and which led to real conversations?
• Which signals were hard to find in time?
• Which messages got answered, and what did they have in common?
• Were there companies that fit perfectly but had no signal? Is there a signal you are missing?

Drop signals that never lead anywhere. Double down on the ones that do. This review is what turns a list of ideas into a pipeline.

Doing it in-house or with help

All of this can be done by one person with a spreadsheet and a few hours a week. The hard part is consistency: checking every week, researching properly and following up on time while also doing the rest of the job.

If you are deciding whether to hire for it or bring in outside help, our comparison of a lead generation agency versus an in-house SDR sets out the trade-offs. FYAdvisers offers this as a done-for-you service: we track the agreed signals, research each account, draft messages for your approval and hand replies to your sales team.