MCP

Research signals

TL;DR

  • Time-box it: three relevant facts in three minutes — the 3×3 method. Research past that point is procrastination with a dashboard.
  • Look in three signal families: role and priority, company motion, timing triggers.
  • A fact you can't hook to your offer is trivia. Research serves the message, never the reverse.

The 3×3 method

Find three relevant facts about the prospect in three minutes, then stop and write. The method was coined by Steve Richard of Vorsight — note that it is commonly misattributed to Justin Michael; the origin is Richard's [1]. (Kyle Coleman's 5x5x5, on Opening lines, is the same discipline with different numbers.) The time-box is the point: it turns research from an open-ended comfort activity into a fixed, budgetable cost per prospect, which is what makes the researched one-liner affordable at all (priced in Economics of personalization).

The three signal families

Role and priority signals. The person: a recent title change, their function hiring, a stated priority in a talk or a post. These tell you what the prospect is on the hook for this quarter.

Company-motion signals. The account: funding, growth, expansion, new tech appearing in the stack. Signal-driven outbound practitioners — Eric Nowoslawski's published playbook (~2024-25) [2] is the reference example — treat these as the primary raw material because they can be gathered per row rather than per hour (see Personalization at scale).

Timing and trigger signals. The moment: a leadership change, a new regulation, a public misstep. These are campaign-level triggers as much as prospect-level facts — choosing which triggers a campaign is built on belongs to Offer and messaging.

The hook test

Before a fact goes into the email, ask what it lets you say about the prospect's problem. Becc Holland's rule from Relevance vs personalization applies verbatim: an observation you can't hook to a value proposition is flattery. "Congrats on the funding" is trivia; funding means a hiring spike, and what hiring spikes break is a message. If none of your three facts pass the test, the list — not the research — is the problem: revisit Audience and lists.

References

  1. Regie.ai — 3×3 research 101 (explainer attributing the method to Steve Richard/Vorsight, n.d.)
  2. Eric Nowoslawski — The winning cold outbound formula (interview, ~2024-25)