How to Find Sales Alpha

Good Morning. It's National Let It Go Day. Try not to start humming that song from Frozen, or it will get stuck in your head all day. Or do, because it’s a good reminder. Prospect ghosted you for six weeks? Let it go. Got hung up on before you said your name? Let it go. Someone asks how you got their info, and it’s 2026? Definitely let it go. Now, let's get into today's Follow Up. (:

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Every time a company announces a funding round, the CEO's inbox gets blown up.

100s of cold emails, all with some version of "congrats on the new money in your bank account, I'd love to sell you something."

Same thing happens when someone gets promoted to a VP role.

These are real buying signals. The problem is that almost every other sales team on the planet has access to this exact same information at the exact same time.

On Wall Street, there's a concept called "alpha."

It's the return you get above the normal market. In other words, it’s when you ‘beat the market.’

If every investor buys the same stock at the same time, nobody beats the benchmark, and no one has ‘alpha.’ Sales can work in a similar way.

If your outreach triggers are identical to your competitor's, you have zero edge.

So today, I'm breaking down how to find sales alpha that your competitors haven't discovered yet.

Funding announcements, job changes, and new hires are the signals that everyone with a LinkedIn account can see (just like you).

Since everyone sees them the same day or week, speed isn't as much of a differentiator as it used to be. Especially when you have a long buying cycle.

So in order to find signals no one else has, you have to look for information your competitors either can’t see, won’t collect, or don’t know how to interpret. Now let’s talk about how…

Start with the signal you wish you had. Think about the thing that, if you knew it was happening inside a prospect's company right now, would guarantee they're about to buy.

The absolute best signal you can imagine, that would be unrealistic for you to know about. Then we work backwards.

Let’s say you sell cybersecurity software. If you knew a company had just failed a compliance audit, they'd be buying security tools asap. You obviously can't see audit results. But you can watch for companies suddenly posting compliance roles, hiring for security positions they've never had before, or updating their privacy policy pages for the first time in years.

Each of those is a breadcrumb that points toward a compliance scramble before they've told anyone about it.

Think like a trader trying to find alpha that no one else has.

Your own CRM is one of the most overlooked sources of alpha you have. Old call notes from two years ago might mention a contract renewal date, a pain point they weren't ready to address, or a competitor they were evaluating at the time. That intel is sitting in your own system that no competitor will ever have access to.

That’s the easiest place to start.

Here's the catch… because there’s always a catch.

Every signal eventually gets commoditized. The first rep who used funding announcements as an outreach trigger crushed it. Now it's noise.

Ramp was early to AI-generated cold emails in 2021. At the time, it stood out and worked. Now every team is doing it, and most of it looks like slop.

The best reps treat prospecting like a trader treats a strategy. Always testing, always looking for the next edge, and always willing to drop what stopped working three months ago.

Check out The Follow Up Guy on LinkedIn.