Signal-to-sequence latency is a metric worth tracking
The time between a buying signal firing and your outreach landing matters more than most teams measure.
Most teams measure sequence performance: open rates, reply rates, meeting booked rates. Fewer measure the gap between when a signal fires and when the sequence starts.
That gap kills the edge of intent-based outbound.
A prospect hits your pricing page at 2pm Tuesday. Your SDR gets an alert in Slack at 3pm. They’re in a meeting. They see it at 5pm, start drafting a message, it goes into review, it lands in the prospect’s inbox at 11am Wednesday. By then the prospect has already booked a demo with a competitor who had automation running.
I’ve measured signal-to-sequence latency across several builds. The pattern is consistent: automated workflows that fire within 15 minutes of a signal outperform human-mediated processes that fire the same day by a significant margin. The lift disappears after 24 hours.
The practical measurement: log a timestamp when the signal fires (web visit event, intent score crossing threshold, job change detected). Log a second timestamp when the first email in the sequence sends. The delta is your latency.
If your median latency is more than an hour for high-intent signals, the workflow has a human in the loop somewhere that shouldn’t be there.
The signals worth fully automating (no human review, fires immediately): pricing page visits from ICP accounts, intent score threshold crossings at Tier 1, job change signals from champions, web form submissions.
The signals worth a human review step before sending: anything that requires real personalisation beyond a template, inbound from a known competitor, inbound from an existing customer.
The distinction is signal confidence, not signal type.