If someone follows your competitor on LinkedIn, they are, by definition, interested in the problem your competitor solves. That is one of the cleanest intent signals in all of outbound, and almost nobody uses it.
Why it beats a title filter
Apollo filters find people who look like buyers. A competitor's follower list finds people who are actively paying attention to the category right now. Intent beats fit every time.
The workflow
Pick two or three direct competitors, pull their LinkedIn followers, and enrich for work email and company. Then open with the signal itself: "Noticed you follow [Competitor], guessing outbound is a priority at [Company]." It reads as observation, not a pitch.
On one campaign this exact approach pulled 75 qualified leads from a single competitor's audience, without any fake personalization. The relevance was already baked into the list.