The short version:
- A signal is a specific, time-bound, observable event — a funding close, a new VP hire, competitor reviews spiking; a "category" is just who a company is
- Four signals worth acting on: funding round closed (act within 3 months), new VP of Sales or CRO (act within 60 days), competitor reviews on G2/Capterra, job postings that name the problem your product solves
- Website intent tools, old content downloads, and "in-market" tags are largely noise — they describe behavior models, not real events
- Stack two or three independent signals pointing at the same company in the same 30-day window — the relevance writes itself
- Timing matters as much as fit: a perfect-ICP company with no active signal is still the wrong target right now
A VP of Sales at a $15M SaaS company told me she had a great week of outreach. Her team sent 240 emails to companies that had "shown intent." When I asked what the intent was, she said: they had been tagged as "in-market" by a data vendor.
That's not intent. That's a category.
The word intent has been stretched so far in sales circles that it has stopped meaning anything. Every data vendor sells intent. Every list comes pre-flagged with intent scores. And yet most founders and sales leaders who buy these products can't tell you what specific event happened at a specific company that suggests they are ready to buy right now.
That gap is the problem. It's worth being precise about what a real buying signal actually looks like.
Signal vs. Category
The first distinction is between a signal and a category.
A category tells you who a company is: they're in the right industry, they have the right headcount, they're in the right geography. This is useful for building your ICP. It is not a signal.
A signal tells you something happened recently that changes the company's likelihood of buying your product. It is specific, time-bound, and observable.
The difference matters because categories are static. A 50-person B2B SaaS company in Chicago was that last month and will be that next month. Nothing changed. A 50-person B2B SaaS company in Chicago that just closed a $12M Series B and posted a VP of Sales job: something changed.
Four Signals Worth Acting On
Not all signals carry equal weight. Here's how to sort them.
Funding round closed
A company that just raised a Series A or B has money to spend and pressure to grow. The three months following a funding close are typically when new software gets evaluated and bought. A company that raised 18 months ago has already made most of those decisions.
If you sell anything that helps a company scale sales, marketing, or operations, a funding close is one of the cleanest signals you'll find. The window is real. It closes.
New VP of Sales or CRO
A new sales leader almost always evaluates the existing tech stack. This is not a maybe. It is standard operating procedure. They want to know what they inherited, what they would have bought, and what they're going to replace.
The time to reach out is within 60 days of the hire. After 90 days, they've either made the call or they're locked into a renewal cycle. You don't need to be clever. You need to be early.
Competitor reviews spiking on G2 or Capterra
When a company's employees start leaving reviews for your direct competitors, they are actively evaluating. Not "might someday buy." Actively evaluating right now.
This signal is underused because it requires monitoring, not just list-pulling. But a company that left three G2 reviews for tools in your category in the last 30 days is in a buying conversation with someone. It might as well be you.
Specific job postings: titles that reveal the problem
Not every job posting is a signal. A company hiring a customer success manager is not necessarily buying anything. But a company posting for a "Revenue Operations Manager" or "Head of Sales Enablement" is explicitly acknowledging a process problem they've decided to solve.
Look for job titles that describe the problem your product solves. A company hiring for the function you automate is telling you exactly where the pain is.
What's Noise
The signals that don't hold up:
Website visits from intent tools
Website intent platforms track visitors and tell you which companies viewed your pricing page. This sounds useful. In practice, a competitor read your pricing, a job seeker looked at your product, or a current customer was checking something. The company "showing intent" is often not a decision-maker doing research. It's noise with a credible-sounding label.
Content downloads from six-plus months ago
Someone downloaded a whitepaper in Q3. It's now Q1 of the following year. Either they made a decision without you or the problem dissolved. Either way, the signal is stale.
A signal decays fast. For most B2B software, a buying window is 30 to 90 days. Intent data older than that is a historical record, not a buying signal.
"In-market" tags from data vendors
These are constructed from behavioral models, not observable events. When a vendor says a company is "in-market for sales software," they mean: based on our model of past purchases, companies with this profile sometimes buy in this category.
That's useful demographic context. It is not a signal. Don't confuse the two. The distinction will cost you rep time and pipeline accuracy if you get it wrong.
How to Stack Signals
A single signal is a reason to watch. Two signals stacked together is a reason to reach out.
A company that just hired a VP of Sales: interesting. A company that just hired a VP of Sales, closed a $9M Series A three weeks ago, and posted a Revenue Operations job: that company is building a sales infrastructure from scratch. Right now.
When you have three independent signals pointing at the same company in the same 30-day window, you don't need a clever email opener. The relevance writes itself.
"Saw that you brought on [name] to lead sales and posted for a Head of RevOps last week. We work with a lot of Series A companies standing up their sales motion for the first time. Wanted to see if the timing was right to talk."
That's not a cold email. That's a warm observation. The signal did the work.
The founders who get consistent responses from cold outreach aren't necessarily writing better emails than the ones who don't. They're reaching out to different companies at a different moment.
The Timing Piece
The thing most people miss about intent signals is that they're not only about fit. They're about timing.
A company can be a perfect ICP fit and still be the wrong target right now. They're locked into a contract, their budget was spent in Q1, their team is heads-down on a product launch. Fit without timing is just a prospect.
Fit plus a fresh signal that suggests an open buying window: that's an actual opportunity.
The rep who spent $3,000 on a list of 5,000 companies in their target vertical and the rep who spent that same week reaching out to 40 companies with three stacked signals, they're not doing the same job. One is spraying. One is reading.
The reading takes infrastructure: you need something monitoring job boards, funding announcements, review sites, and leadership changes across your prospect universe every day. That's not a spreadsheet. But it's also not magic. It's just consistent signal collection applied to a defined ICP.
Once you have the signals, the outreach gets easier. You stop guessing who might care and start reaching out to companies who are already showing you that they do.