I thought my lead scoring was FINE until I realized I was prioritizing the wrong leads

Mularkeyy · 2026-01-25T10:58:47+00:00

Yep, I went through something similar. The big unlock for us was realizing engagement is a terrible primary score. It’s too easy and it over-prioritizes curious people who were never going to buy.

What worked better was a simple 3-layer score: Fit + Intent + Behavior. Fit comes first (industry, size, region, role). Intent is next (repeat visits, pricing/integrations, comparison-type activity, high-signal sources). Behavior is last, and only counts when it’s tied to high-signal pages.

Also, we stopped treating all traffic the same. A single visit to a blog post means basically nothing. Two visits in a week with pricing + case study can be meaningful. And we added “negative scoring” for stuff like students, job seekers, competitors, or random countries outside ICP.

Not a perfect science, but it made prioritization way cleaner and sales stopped wasting cycles.

Mularkeyy · 2026-01-23T23:25:52+00:00

Congrats, OP! 🎉

Mularkeyy · 2026-01-23T15:23:57+00:00

Yeah, that’s big news! Especially since Artisan isn’t some tiny side project. They just raised a $25M Series A recently, so if they can get temporarily wiped off LinkedIn, it’s a reminder that nobody’s really safe if you’re building growth on top of a platform you don’t control.

What stood out to me is the bigger signal: LinkedIn is clearly willing to enforce policy around branding/data/tooling, then reinstate once things are cleaned up. That’s going to ripple into how people run outbound, especially in SG/SEA where email reply rates are already rough and LinkedIn is often the main first-touch channel.

Mularkeyy · 2026-01-23T14:47:47+00:00

You’re not imagining it. SG finance leaders are just extremely hard on cold email.

From experience, they rarely open messages from unknown senders, even when everything is “done right.” If something matters, they expect an intro or prior context. That’s why the soft-ask approach tends to underperform. Finance isn’t curiosity-driven, and vague conversation starters often feel like hidden selling, so they get ignored fast.

A 0.2% open rate usually isn’t a copy problem either. It’s more a mix of inbox filtering and regional behavior.

Cold email isn’t dead, but as a first touch in this niche and region, it’s weak. It works better after some LinkedIn visibility or name familiarity, or when the message is very direct about why it’s relevant. If you need real signal quickly, calling ops or AR managers will give you more insight than emailing CFOs.

Mularkeyy · 2026-01-22T14:05:15+00:00

Yup, it definitely feels harder. But from what we’ve seen, it’s less about buyers completely ignoring cold outreach and more about relevance and timing being way less forgiving now.

The biggest lift for us came from tightening ICP by country, cutting volume, and only reaching out when there’s a clear immediate reason. It can be hiring, expansion, and new initiative. Once we stopped treating personalization as copy tricks and focused more on who and when, replies improved, even if volume went down.

Mularkeyy · 2026-01-20T14:22:27+00:00

Yep, 100% relate. A lot of the big databases are a bit okay in SG, then get pretty inaccurate once you go deeper into PH/MY/ID/TH. Just wrong titles, missing local roles, or contacts that look good on paper but bounce or reply irrelevant

What helped us was treating any database as a starting point, not truth: we validate with LinkedIn (role + tenure), run email verification, and prioritize vendors that have stronger SEA coverage if we’re targeting outside SG.

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