Knowing what not to automate is your new competitive edge in 2026

While the rest of the market is busy scaling noise with AI agents that "spray and pray" more efficiently than ever, the winners are doing the opposite: they are using automation to clear the deck so their reps can actually be human again.

The goal of this outbound reset isn't to send more emails, but to improve your Sales Velocity by focusing 100% of your reps' energy on high-value human interaction while AI handles the mechanical heavy lifting.

Increasing Activity Volume Won’t Save You

As sales leaders, it’s easy to follow the numbers and assign activity for activity's sake. We see a pipeline gap and instinctively pull the volume lever, encouraging BDR teams to increase outreach to combat falling conversion rates.

The problem is that only about 5% of your target market is actually in-market at any given time. When you force reps to manually plough through an entire ICP list, they end up wasting months on accounts that simply aren't ready to buy.

Making things worse, we’re experiencing the "Great Ignore" where buyers, flooded with low-relevance automation, have started filtering out any message that smells like a template. You can guess what happens if you react by doing more of the activity that led to this, so instead of burning through your TAM, we have a different proposal.

What Separates the Noise from Real Intent?

To fix this, your team must move from monitoring vanity triggers to acting on behaviour-based intent. Not all signals are created equal.

Surface-Level Signals:

• Fundraising news,
• general post engagements,
• following a competitor,
• hiring (generally)
• news mentions

These are often just noise that are easy to act on but don’t signal buying intent. Just think, by the time an initiative makes the news, the project is already underway, and you’re late to the party.

Real Intent Signals on the other hand are tied to behaviour relating directly to a persona's "job to be done".

• Job Changes: Especially executive-level hires who are often brought in to drive new initiatives.
• First-party intent signals: like Sales Navigator’s category intent data showing specific individuals are actively researching your product category, not just your brand.
• Actual tool usage: facts about whether they’re using a competing solution or a product related to your offering
• Strategic Initiatives: 10K or 10Q reports that explicitly mention challenges you help solve.
• Specific Persona Hiring: Identifying companies actively hiring for the specific roles you sell to, signalling an immediate capacity or skill gap.

Choose Your Approach Based On Sales Velocity

Your outbound strategy must change based on the digital footprint of the company you are targeting.

• SMB: These companies have a smaller footprint and fewer public signals. But because they are smaller, it is easier to identify the actual decision-maker. The fastest path here is often a top-down approach: building a sharp point of view and reaching out directly to the C-suite.
• Mid-Market & Enterprise: These segments have a large digital footprint, so you can rely on signal-led prioritisation, but expect the sales cycle to be more complex. Note the difference, though: while Mid-Market is often a single brand, Enterprise usually involves holding companies and conglomerates, creating opportunities for "expansion" through warm outreach among subsidiary companies. In these deals, start bottom-up to gather front-line insights so that by the time you reach an executive, you bring something to the table they haven’t already figured out.

How to Move Faster While Being Strategic

Even in a world of automation, a manual, relationship-led approach is the only way to crack strategic accounts.

At a previous company, I used a developer-focused blog post as a signal to enter one of my strategic accounts. Because that post shared their technical stack and processes, it provided "pre-discovery" context that I would normally have to spend weeks uncovering in meetings. By using that specific context to elicit curiosity rather than pitching a solution, I booked a call for the following week. And although we weren’t the right fit for them at their stage, I was able to qualify them out in one call rather than chasing them for months.

Whenever I’m targeting Tier-1 accounts, these are the three signals I look out for using LinkedIn Sales Navigator:

1. Saved Searches: Set these to notify you when a new prospect meets your outreach criteria. For tips on what triggers to look for, check out my top 30 Sales Navigator searches in this post.
2. Category Intent: Monitor who at your target accounts is personally researching your product/solution category.
3. Smart Links: Use trackable documents to identify who’s engaged and who isn’t, e.g. if a prospect opens and spends time on a resource, use that specific engagement to personalise your follow-up.

But What if You Wanted to Scale this Operating Model?

While strategic accounts require a surgical human touch, your Tier-2 and high-volume segments demand a scalable operating model.

No matter how badly AI SDR companies and lead gen agencies want you to believe that sending AI-personalised emails automatically is a good idea whenever a buying-intent signal is triggered, Jani Vrancsik from Growth Today recommends building modular systems that handle the heavy lifting involved in account research and qualification.

Their view is that effective automation should act as a filter rather than the reason for outreach.

For example, instead of an AE manually screening 10-K/10-Q reports or job descriptions, you can use AI agents to scrape specific keywords and summarise business initiatives in minutes. This automation provides your team with the "why" behind their outreach, enabling reps to focus on building connections and aligning the buying committee.

You can also sse automated workflows to qualify website visitors by matching them against your ICP and enriching their contact data instantly. By the time a lead is routed to a rep, an AI agent has already verified the account fit and highlighted the relevant signals. At this point, instead of enrolling contacts in a sequence automatically, we suggest putting a human in the loop to focus on crafting a timely, relevant message.

This modular approach ensures your team spends time only on the 5% of the market that is actually in-market, turning your outbound from a source of stress into a system for creating a predictable pipeline.

Where’s Your Human-in-the-Loop Threshold?

The winners in 2026 are finding a delicate balance and the specific hand-off point will depend on the company. What’s certain is that you should automate 90% of the mechanical work: list building, 10K screening, website visitor qualification, and initial enrichment.

However, the "hand-off" to the human rep should happen the moment an account is qualified, and the research is bundled. Provide your rep with a context package that outlines who the company is, its industry challenges, and how you specifically help them, then let your reps decide the best way in.

This is how you stop using AI to increase your volume and instead use it to amplify the human connection that can't be faked. AI gives your reps the insights to clear the deck; your reps must provide the relationship to close the deal.