The standard stack is good at the first half of the problem. Intent data finds accounts showing interest, firmographics narrow them, and orchestration sequences them. Every one of those steps is about the account.
Then the sequence goes out from an SDR nobody has heard of. The programme was account-based right up to the moment of contact, and at that moment it became cold email with better targeting.
1. Select the accounts. 6sense and Demandbase for intent; Clay for enrichment and research; ZoomInfo or Apollo for the contact records.
2. Decide which you can reach, and through whom. This is the layer that is usually missing. Orbb maps your company's relationships against the target list and returns ranked routes, naming the colleague who would make the introduction. Introhive does the analytics version inside enterprise CRM; Connect the Dots does it with a graph shared across its customers.
3. Run the play. Outreach, Salesloft, HubSpot for sequencing; Reachdesk or Sendoso for gifting; Crossbeam or Reveal for partner overlap, which is the company-level version of the same warm idea.
Two things, and the second is the bigger one.
The order changes. Accounts get worked by reachability rather than by score alone. A mid-size account with a strong path beats a large one with none, because the large one will not answer. Walnut used exactly this re-ranking across hundreds of prospects and reported a sharper outbound motion and better conversion.
The sender changes. The message goes from the person who has the relationship, not from whoever owns the territory. Your VP of Engineering to their CTO is a different event from an SDR to a title.
Intent tells you an account is researching your category. It does not tell you they will answer you. Teams routinely buy intent, see a spike, fire a cold sequence into it, and conclude the data was bad. The data was fine; the channel was wrong.
Pair the spike with the path. An account showing intent and carrying a warm route is the best opportunity in the list, and it is the one most programmes cannot identify because the two signals live in different systems.
You do not need the full stack to start. Take your current target list, map it for reachable routes, re-sort it, and have the top ten approached by the colleague who holds the relationship rather than by the rep. That is a week of work and it tests the whole thesis before you buy anything else.