B2B Sales Signals: Which Ones Actually Work, and Which Don't

From Yu-Gi-Oh cards to Scalantec: Nicolas's path into sales

By his own account, Nicolas started selling back in elementary school: bundled packs of Yu-Gi-Oh cards at the flea market, later Japanese sweets and kitchen knives from the family business. He started his career in software in 2016 at SAP, working on finance-side client projects, then moved to Enpal and Celonis, doing plenty of hands-on selling himself, including up to 150 cold calls a day.

Before founding Scalantec, he first went independent: commission-based headhunting for sales reps, then lead generation for an AI voicebot startup, where he landed 75 influencers via Twitter outreach in roughly two months. Both worked, neither felt like the right path.

Scalantec launched in 2024, after Nicolas met his future co-founder Moritz Heininger at a sales conference. They started with three clients from Moritz's network, and the first campaign ran on Lemlist, completely unpersonalized, with the company name as the only variable. About a year and a half later, the team came across Clay, which has been the central tool in the stack ever since.

Scalantec today: around 25 clients, DACH-focused

According to Nicolas, Scalantec currently works with around 25 clients, roughly 60 percent of them in the DACH region, with a largely German team. 60 to 70 percent of the work is still classic, personalized cold outreach aimed at generating meetings with ideal customers. Increasingly, though, the focus is shifting toward full system automation for sales.

The typical onboarding for a new client starts with a status-quo analysis: which tools are in use (CRM, prospecting tools, research tools), what the current ICP looks like, and where the client's own assumptions diverge from the actual data. That's followed by a roadmap for sales over the coming years, from which concrete use cases get derived.

The service model, in modules

• List building: company and contact lists sourced from commercial registers, local registries, Google Maps, and industry directories.
• CRM enrichment: AI agents research relevant information on a contact ahead of a call and surface it in the CRM, via email briefing, or in Slack.
• Signal tracking: dynamic market signals like job changes, LinkedIn activity, pricing changes, or forum posts.
• Outbound: personalized cold outreach by email and LinkedIn.
• Inbound enrichment: incoming leads get automatically enriched and routed by relevance.
• Lead scoring: a fit score (does the lead match the ICP) and an engagement score (how actively has the lead interacted with the company) combine into a daily list of the hottest leads for sales.

Which B2B sales signals actually work

Nicolas runs the local Clay community in Berlin and Munich and has already dug into signals in a dedicated workshop of his own. His core take: signal-based prospecting was "the word of the year in 2025," but most of the widely cited signals barely move the needle on meetings in practice.

What still works, according to Nicolas:

• Tech-stack signals: when a company demonstrably adopts a new tool (e.g. Salesforce or HubSpot), that points to a problem worth addressing directly.
• Scraping portals and tenders: platforms where companies post project tenders deliver a very concrete, personalizable signal.
• Job changes among contacts you already know: when a contact already in your CRM switches companies, that's one of the most valuable signals there is, in Nicolas's view, because the person already knows and can judge the vendor.
• LinkedIn signal posts: lead-magnet posts following the pattern "comment X, I'll send you Y" convert above average, in Nicolas's experience. He cites one of his own posts with around 115,000 impressions that generated several client inquiries.
• Your own first-degree LinkedIn connections: systematically checking existing connections against relevant companies and titles often surfaces the easiest, least cold leads.

Common mistakes in B2B sales

Nicolas names four recurring mistakes he sees often in new clients:

1. Volume over strategy: companies want to email large batches of leads right away, without first validating the ICP through a closed-won analysis. His comparison: like Battleship, find the right audience with small test campaigns first, before launching the big campaign.
2. Fake LinkedIn profiles: a growing market that Scalantec deliberately avoids, for legal, ethical, and reputational reasons, even as some vendors now offer verified fake profiles.
3. Unmaintained data: duplicates in the CRM, incomplete enrichment, and historical leads that never converted and were never re-approached cost more revenue than missing new leads, in Nicolas's view.
4. Automating everything at once: instead of focusing on one use case, many companies try to rebuild all of sales simultaneously, which makes it harder to keep track and measure success.

Who Scalantec works with

According to Nicolas, Scalantec mostly works with established mid-sized companies or scaleups from Series A onward with proven product-market fit, typically starting at 30 to 40 employees. References and an already-working sales approach are important prerequisites, in Nicolas's view, especially for successful cold outreach.