What counts as a reason to write

The short version.

A reason to write is a change at a company that you can point to. It has a source the reader could open, it bears on what you sell, and it is recent enough to still be true. A company that fits your criteria has no reason yet. Neither does a score from a data vendor with no page behind it.

Our own software checks for a signal and a link to its source, and checks its age only when it has a date. On 29 September 2026, 230 of the 570 dossiers SYNC had marked ready rested on a cited signal without a date.^[5] We decided to keep that, and to show the reviewer that the date is missing.

Four tests a signal has to pass.

A change you can point to.

Something happened: a vacancy opened, a new manager started, the company bought another, opened a new office or rebuilt its website. A state of affairs is not a change. “Uses an old system” describes a company. “Hired a head of operations last week” describes a moment. The case for looking at change comes from a Gartner survey of business buyers:

The survey does not show that a message timed to a change gets a better answer. That step is ours.

A source you can open.

The reader should be able to check the claim in one click: the vacancy, the press item, the register page. A link is not proof by itself. In a study of search engines that answer with citations, only 74.5% of the citations supported the sentence they were attached to.^[2] Open the page and check that it says what the message says.

Relevant to what you sell.

The change has to touch the problem you solve. A new sales director matters to a seller of sales training, and not to a seller of office cleaning. Without that link a message can only repeat the news and then pitch. More material does not help the buyer either: an article in Harvard Business Review reported that answering buyers with more information and more options lowered purchase ease by 18%, in a survey of more than 600 business buyers.^[3]

Fresh enough to still be true.

A vacancy from last week is a reason. A funding round from two years ago is history. SYNC holds a signal that is older than 60 days, unless the workspace has set another window for that kind of signal. A freshness test needs a date, and that is where our own check is weakest.

Signals that are not reasons.

• 01A good fit. Fit says who could buy, not why now. Of the 268 researched companies whose best tier was A, 119 had a ready dossier (44%).^[5] Fit alone did not make the other 149 ready.
• 02A score with no page behind it. A rating that says a company is “in market” cannot be opened and checked, by you or by the person you write to.
• 03Something about the person, not the company. A post they liked, a holiday, a birthday. In a study of email advertising, people responded negatively when a firm was explicit about using their personal information, in that case a greeting by name.^[4] That study was about consumers.
• 04A thin mention. A company named in a list, or a press release that says nothing new. When the research grades a signal weak, SYNC holds the account.
• 05An old event told as new. A change from years ago, found today, is still old.
• 06A vacancy that asks not to be approached. Some Dutch vacancies state that acquisition in response to the vacancy is not wanted. When we checked the product on 29 September, SYNC did not look for that sentence. Whether it should hold such an account is a decision we have not made.

What our own check does.

SYNC judges every dossier in a fixed order and stops at the first test that fails. Once it knows there is someone it could reach, it asks three questions about the signal. Is there one, with a link to its source? Is it strong enough? If it has a date, is it inside the window?

The freshness test only works when there is a date. A signal without one can never be too old, so it passes.

So a ready dossier tells you that SYNC found a cited signal. It does not tell you that the signal is recent. This is a count of dossiers, not of messages. It does not show how many messages went out on a signal without a date, and we make no claim about that. The full count, with its limits, is in The accounts we left alone.

What we decided.

Requiring a date would have left most accounts waiting. We decided to keep undated signals: a cited signal without a date can still make a dossier ready. The review screen marks such a signal as undated, so the person approving the draft sees that the date is missing. The rule on this site now asks for a reason we can cite, not a dated reason. The argument for the rule itself is in Why SYNC refuses to write without a reason.