Introducing Koala Plays: Turn signal-based sparks into scalable sales plays

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Sales and Marketing operations teams have made massive strides in surfacing leads for Sellers based on signals from product, web, and marketing events. Unfortunately, lists of leads sourced from different event types have become overwhelming to navigate, and manage, causing significant delays in how quickly they’re actioned.

Koala Plays helps teams centralize, enrich, and create specific action plans for their most meaningful signals. In this blog, we’ll share what Plays are, why they matter, and how to get started (for free!)

The problem with today’s lead lists

While it’s easier than ever to build signal-based lists, our recent RevOps survey revealed the top challenges for surfacing quality leads:

• 80% say the most painful part of getting qualified leads to reps is “managing multiple lists across multiple places.”
• 60% say it’s “ensuring those lists are actually worked, and reporting on progress.”

Both of these issues are indicative of a “noise” problem that’s been compounding for companies trying to find their best fit buyer. Contributing to that noise problem are three key factors:

1. Lead lists lack context beyond the event that triggered inclusion in the list. Basic scoring based on firmographic information doesn’t tell a rep how to best connect with their buyer.
2. Lists live in multiple places. The CRM, Slack, even floating spreadsheets. Making it difficult for reps to know what to focus on first, and nearly impossible for anyone to track progress.
3. Different lists require different follow-up tactics—and often drive towards different CTAs. Should a rep simply connect, or try and force more immediate action?

Together these factors mean the best leads often aren’t worked at all.

Even users of Koala 1.0 would have experienced some opportunity for improvement on follow-up tactics. Koala 1.0 provided teams with powerful tools to identify promising accounts and detect intent helping them identify who to target, and when to engage. But we also noticed that reps still undertook a fair amount of manual work after these steps. They would dig into an account page, view activity by key contact, reference CRM and call notes, conduct web research… and then manually synthesize all that information in order to write their own outbound sequences. This process was effective, but time-consuming and inconsistently executed across teams.

Meet Plays in Koala 2.0

Timing isn’t a “nice to have.” It’s the whole game. When someone hits your pricing page, or the EB finally checks out the POC—you have minutes, not hours. A play that lands three days later isn’t a play. It’s a post-mortem. Koala Plays are a codified outbound tactic that combines targeting criteria (WHO), intent triggers (WHEN), and AI-powered reasoning (WHAT) to enable teams to engage prospects with hyper-personalized messaging at the right moment.

Think of it as a strategic recipe that brings together all the ingredients needed for successful outreach:

• WHO: Targeted accounts and contacts based on specific criteria
• WHEN: The precise moment of engagement based on intent signals
• WHAT: A thoughtful thesis for engaging prospects with relevant context

Plays make synthesizing key information to inform outreach—10X more efficient. Whether teams decide to automate outreach or have a human execute it, Plays enable them to:

1. Define specific parameters for who and when to target
2. Collect and synthesize relevant context upon enrollment
   • CRM history
   • Past calls and emails
   • Product usage
   • Website activity
3. Leverage AI agents to research public information and add enrichment
4. Provide consistent, relevant messaging guidance based on all available context

The moment a top persona takes a high-intent action—like visiting the pricing page or re-engaging mid-trial—a Play is triggered, enriching the lead at the organizational and individual level with 30+ signal sources, AI research, and [if applicable] CRM information, before landing in the inbox of the designated rep.

Key Benefits of Plays

Plays are like GTM muscle memory—codified, scalable, and automated processes that take the manual effort out of monitoring your funnel and put high-signal actions straight in your team’s email, Slack, or Magic Inbox, with everything they need to take action. You never miss a moment, so more importantly, your reps never miss their window.

Plays transform your outbound strategy by:

• Standardizing successful tactics across your team
• Reducing manual research time through automated enrichment
• Ensuring consistency in qualification and messaging
• Improving response rates with more relevant, timely outreach
• Accelerating pipeline generation by engaging the right prospects at the right time
• Scaling personalization beyond what's manually possible

What’s Inside a Koala Play?

Every Play is built with six essential components that cut through noise for higher quality pipeline that converts:

✋1. Enrollment

The first step when setting up a Play is to determine who actually gets added to the Play, and based on what criteria. Whether you’re just working with a CSV from a recent webinar or field event, or want more granular, real-time triggers, like when a CTO at a target account visits your pricing page before abandoning a form-fill. Enrollment criteria can come from feature triggers, or signal triggers:

Features: Saved lists, Filter conditions, CSV lists, Prospector search, Social interactions, GitHub repo interactions, etc

Signals: Koala uses 30+ signal sources from your product and website, the open web, social media, and your own CRM data.

🧼 2. Exclusions

Play exclusions enable you to automatically filter out things like existing customers, open opps, competitors, partners, unscubscribes, non-ICP profiles, bad geos, and more. If you know what you’re not looking for, you can also exclude based on a saved filter list. Get rid of anything standing between a rep trusting your lists.

🔍 3. Enrichment

Once triggered, Koala enriches every lead automatically. We use true waterfall contact enrichment for the highest match rate, pull in additional contacts worth exploring from that account, and perform AI research.

🤖 4. AI Qualification & Research

Auto-qualify or disqualify based on enrichment, your rules, and AI research. These agents are especially useful for uncovering hard to find information like whether they’re hiring for the people you sell to, have recently been in the news for a problem you help solve, or have delivered any recent presentations on a topic relevant to your product.

Set to operate at the person or company level, choose your response type (boolean, string, picklists, etc), and even choose the model you want to run including those from Claude, GPT, and Perplexity (like Deepseek R1).

🔁 5. Routing

Send Plays to the right person via Slack and Koala, using rules based on territory, account owner, lead type—whatever logic you need. Build in back-up rules so you never miss a critical moment.

🚀 6. Koala Coach

Once Plays land in a rep’s workflow, Koala Coach provides full context, as well as suggested actions based the Play, your preferred sales processes, and even notes on your voice and tone!

Revenue-Generating Plays at Every Stage

Plays aren’t just for top-of-funnel leads. They work across the entire customer journey, from cold outbound to active upsell opportunities.

• Top-of-funnel (Pipeline Generation): Cold outbound plays to engage target accounts with no prior activity
• Warm Outbound: Plays triggered by specific intent signals for accounts showing interest
• Mid-funnel (Active Deals): Plays focused on moving deals forward based on engagement during sales process
• Bottom-of-funnel (Expansion): Plays for upsell opportunities and churn mitigation

Our product marketing team’s favorite Play is finding highly engaged accounts for potential case studies, while our CS team’s favorite play is ensuring they’re the first to know if engagement is dipping before a renewal. Other Play examples can be founding the following table, but there’s really no limit to what you can create!

Ready to Go from “Interesting Score” to “Booked Meeting”?

Koala Plays give you: ✅ One centralized workflow

✅ Real-time trigger + enrichment

✅ Full routing + codified rep next steps

✅ Reporting on every step

Stop chasing ghosts in Salesforce. Stop relying on fuzzy scoring models. Start catching real buying signals, and turning them into a repeatable sales motion for every opportunity, at every stage. Create a free account, then check out the docs for Plays!