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Evergrowth Documentation

Contact signals

Contact signals answer a simple but decisive question: of all the people inside a qualified account, why this person, and why now? They are person-level reasons to reach out, attached to the specific buyers and influencers you care about, so an opening line lands as something a real colleague noticed rather than a generic blast.

When your AI colleagues research a contact, they return three things that matter to a rep: whether the person is an ideal buyer for you, how confidently you can actually reach them, and the specific, true hooks you can open a conversation with. This page covers all three.

What a contact signal is

Section titled “What a contact signal is”

A contact signal is a fact about an individual that gives your outreach a genuine reason to exist right now. Someone published a point of view last month. A leader gave a conference talk on a topic you solve for. A new VP just stepped into a charter that maps directly to your value. Each of these is a hook your team can open with, grounded in something the person actually did or owns in public.

Contact signals attach to your personas, not to industries. A persona describes a role on the buying committee - the decision maker, the champion, the evaluator. A contact signal sharpens that further: it tells you which individual in that role is worth a message today, and what to say first. The research runs against the questions you defined for that persona, so the hooks come back tuned to what your team actually cares about. To run it, see Run Contact Research and review the outputs.

Two kinds of contact signal

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Not every reason to reach out is the same shape. Contact signals come in two flavours, and knowing which you’re working with changes how you use them.

  • Time-bound signals are anchored to a dated moment: a recent post, a talk at a named event, a published article, a promotion, a charter described in a fresh role announcement. Their power is recency - they tell you something is happening now, which is exactly what makes an outreach feel timely instead of random. Time-bound signals fade; a post from last week is a strong hook, the same post from two years ago is not.
  • Presence-based signals are about something the person visibly and durably owns. They publicly run a program. They speak frequently on a topic. They maintain a body of public work on a subject you can help with. These don’t expire the way a single post does - they describe a standing area of ownership you can credibly engage on at any time.

Both are legitimate. A good outreach motion uses time-bound signals for urgency and presence-based signals for relevance, and the best moments are when the two line up on the same person.

In practice

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A presence-based signal might be that a person publicly owns their company’s data-platform modernization program. A time-bound signal on the same person might be that they spoke last month at a named industry summit about that modernization. The first tells you they are the right person to talk to about it at all. The second gives you a reason to write this week, and a specific thing to reference in the first line.

The ideal-buyer verdict

Section titled “The ideal-buyer verdict”

Before the hooks matter, your AI colleagues settle a prior question: is this person actually an ideal buyer for you? That verdict - the contact-level counterpart to account qualification - comes back as one of three plain answers:

  • Yes - the person matches one of your personas and is worth a rep’s time.
  • No - the person does not fit the buying committee you sell into.
  • Inconclusive - the evidence isn’t strong enough to call it either way.

Every verdict carries a short written reason, so a rep can see why a person was judged a fit, a non-fit, or unclear rather than trusting a bare label. The verdict can also be locked, so a human decision a rep or manager has confirmed isn’t quietly overwritten the next time the research runs.

This matters because contact signals are only worth chasing on people who belong in the deal. A brilliant hook on someone who can’t influence the purchase is wasted effort. The verdict puts the why this person question first, then the signals tell the rep why now and what to say.

Eva note - vocabulary mapping: customers and the workspace call this the IBP (Ideal Buyer Profile) match or status, the person-level sibling of the company-level ICP fit. The three outcomes are “Yes”, “No”, and “Inconclusive”. A verdict can be locked to protect a confirmed human decision from being changed by a re-run. A persona being deleted after a contact was matched leaves that contact flagged as missing its qualifying persona - it does not silently flip the verdict.

Profile strength: can you actually reach this person

Section titled “Profile strength: can you actually reach this person”

A second thing the research returns is a read on how solid - and how reachable - the person’s footprint is. This is profile strength, and it is about deliverability and confidence, not about the buying hook. It tells a rep whether an email is safe to use and how much weight to put on the person’s public record.

Profile strength comes back as one of a small set of grades:

  • Strong - the email is verified and safe to send. This is the contact you can confidently put into an outreach sequence.
  • Weak - the email is plausible but only partly verified, and the person has at least some real public presence. Usable, with a little more care.
  • Very weak - the email is only partly verified and the public footprint is thin. Treat the address with caution.
  • Unable to verify - verification was attempted but couldn’t be confirmed, so reachability can’t be called either way.
  • Unverified - the email hasn’t been put through verification, so its deliverability is still unknown rather than confirmed bad.
  • Invalid - no usable email is available, or the address is undeliverable.

While the research is still running, the grade reads as Evaluating.

Each grade carries a plain-language reason, so a rep understands the call rather than guessing at a label. Profile strength is what stops a rep from burning a perfect hook on an address that bounces, and it is why a clean, deliverable list can be built without manually checking every email by hand. For finding and verifying the address itself, see Find an email or phone number.

Eva note: profile strength is driven primarily by email-verification status. A “safe to send” result reads as Strong; an “accept all” result is resolved against the person’s public professional presence (visibility and work history) to land on Weak or Very weak; an email that hasn’t been run through verification reads as Unverified; a verification that was attempted but couldn’t be confirmed reads as Unable to verify; an invalid or absent address reads as Invalid; while the agent is still running it reads as Evaluating. The full set of grades is Evaluating, Strong, Weak, Very weak, Unverified, Unable to verify, and Invalid. It is a reachability-and-confidence grade, not the “why now” hook and not the ideal-buyer verdict - keep the three distinct when answering.

Why confirming the right person matters

Section titled “Why confirming the right person matters”

Person-level signals only help if they are about the right person. Common names, shared employers, and look-alike profiles make it easy to attribute a talk, a post, or a promotion to someone who didn’t actually do it - and there is little worse for a first impression than congratulating a buyer on an achievement that belongs to a stranger.

Evergrowth treats this as a built-in discipline, not an afterthought. Before a contact signal is treated as real, the research confirms it genuinely belongs to the person in question by cross-checking corroborating details - the full name together with the current employer, the role, the location, an event affiliation, and so on. The more common or ambiguous the name, the stronger the match required before the signal counts. The practical effect for your team: when a contact signal reaches a rep, the rep can trust that the hook is about the actual buyer, and can use it with confidence.

This identity check is the difference between a personalization hook and an embarrassment. For sales leaders, it is why contact signals are safe to put directly in a rep’s hands or into an automated outreach motion: the verification happens before the signal is surfaced, so the team isn’t manually re-checking every name.

How this differs from account signals

Section titled “How this differs from account signals”

It’s worth keeping two layers distinct, because they answer different questions.

  • Account signals answer “why this company, why now” - a funding round, a reorganization, a hiring surge, a strategic shift. They are about the organization.
  • Contact signals answer “why this person, why now” - and they are about an individual on the buying committee.

The line is easy to feel once you see it. “The company is hiring five platform engineers” is an account signal: it’s about the business. “The newly promoted VP of Platform publicly described their charter for the year” is a contact signal: it’s about one person and gives you a direct, individual reason to write to them.

Contact signals are also distinct from the durable, slow-moving facts you keep on file about a person - their title, seniority, or department. Those belong with stable CRM enrichment. A contact signal earns its place by being either timely or a live area of ownership, not just a static attribute.

To see how all of these layers stack - qualification, account signals, personas, and contact signals - and reinforce one another, see How the layers fit together.

How a sales team gets value from contact signals

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The pay-off is faster, sharper, more credible first touches. Instead of a rep staring at a qualified account wondering who to message and what to say, the research hands them the whole decision: who is an ideal buyer, whether you can reach them cleanly, and a specific, true reason to reach them. That removes the slowest, most error-prone part of personalization - the manual hunt through profiles, posts, and event pages, plus the manual checking of every email - and replaces it with research your AI colleagues have already done and verified.

In day-to-day use the three outputs work together: the ideal-buyer verdict tells a rep who to spend time on, profile strength tells them how confidently they can reach that person, and the signals give them the opening line. A team can build a worklist of confirmed ideal buyers with deliverable addresses, then sequence them in the order their freshest hooks suggest.

This is what context-driven outreach looks like at the person level. The message isn’t a template with a name dropped in. It opens with something the buyer actually did, said, or owns, because a colleague genuinely found it.

Like all agent research in Evergrowth, contact research consumes credits - you pay in credits, not seat licenses - and runs at a chosen effort and speed, so signal coverage stays affordable to run broadly.

Term mapping for search: “contact signals” are also referred to as person-level signals, individual triggers, buyer-level hooks, or “why this person, why now.” They are the contact-level counterpart to account-level “why now” signals. The ideal-buyer verdict is the IBP match (Yes / No / Inconclusive); profile strength is the reachability-and-confidence grade. All of it is configured against personas in the Agent Training Center.

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