Modern GTM systems are broken. As GTM and RevOps teams juggle multiple tools and maneuver tasks manually, they end up losing time, effort, and valuable B2B buying signals in the process.
But the market today demands swift action based on real-time signals and intent data. Signals are the future of sales.
But before we get into what kind of signals are going to drive growth in the future, let’s ensure we’re all clear on some basics.
What are B2B buying signals?
B2B buying signals are behaviors or actions by a person that indicate interest and intent to buy a product like yours. Buying signals could include visits to your website or yours or your competitors’ social media handles, clicks on your ads, LinkedIn posts about your products or topics of interest, etc.
Why are buying signals important?
Of all the potential customers around you, only 5% actively show buying intent. The remaining 95% are typically passive buyers who could still be high-value leads, and they need to be nurtured.
Armed with real-time buying signals, your sales teams will be able to prioritize leads that are more likely to convert, personalize outreach, and spearfish leads with precision. Meanwhile, your marketing team will be able to nurture leads that are not ready to buy but will be high-value leads in the future.
Types of B2B buying signals
Website visits, ebook downloads, or ad clicks are some of the more common ones that most B2B companies track, but there are buying signals hiding in nearly every activity or every conversation your lead has.
Keeping track of the different types of B2B buying signals, and making use of each of them at the right time can help you engage with and nurture leads, and make a pitch at the right time to close the deal.
Buying signals can be categorized into the following types:
Behavioral signals
These buying signals refer to how your lead behaves with you and your competitors. Behavioral signals typically indicate high intent. Some examples of behavioral signals are:
- Website visits: who visits your website, which pages they visit, what they click on, how much time they spend on the page, etc.
- Email engagement: who opens your email, how regularly they open emails from you, replies and responses
- Competitor interactions: mentions of competitors and interactions with their content
Social signals
Nearly every person in the corporate world has a LinkedIn presence, and keeping an eye on a person’s social activity can provide signals on their buying intent and signals on where they are in the buying process. Social signals can include
ICP lead’s engagement with your company handle on social your competitor’s social handles your employees’ and teams’ social handles your competitors’ employeesInfluencers and thought leaders in your industry
- Posts on topics relevant to your business
- Announcements and updates about their attending events
High-intent buying signals
Intent signals are explicit, direct signals indicating a lead’s clear intention to buy a product like yours either immediately or in the future. They include:
- Sign ups to your product
- Scheduling demos or meetings with your team
- Form fills for pricing enquiries
- Visits to your products or features pages
- Clicks on important CTAs
- Participation in events you’re conducting
- Researching your product on review sites such as G2
Firmographic signals
These signals aren’t directly about your lead but give you insight into the accounts you’re targeting and indicate that the company is in a position to invest in a product you’re selling. For example, firmographic signals can be:
- Hiring announcements
- Fundraising news
- Product launches
- New office openings
- Financing information from earnings calls or other such corporate announcements
Technographic signals
As with firmographic signals, technographic signals give you data not about a lead you can connect with but the account you are going after. This is particularly relevant for companies in the technology space, as signals about the target account’s existing tech stack can help you pitch better. These signals can be:
- Job posts mentioning technology or tools in your category
- Posts on social media seeking input on products like yours
- Data on the increased use of your technology or other similar ones in your category
Custom B2B buying signals
In addition to these signals, you can also create and identify signals that are unique to your business. Highperformr, for instance, enables you to create signals and enrich your contacts/CRM with real-time signals. These custom signals could be anything relevant to your business like:
- A keyword or phrase mentioned on your lead’s LinkedIn profile
- An account hiring for a specific set of roles/functions
- A contact’s participation in a certain event
- A contact’s promotion or job change
You never know where a signal might be hiding and where relevant signals might come from. Something as simple as a prospect wishing your competitors’ employee for their promotion can serve as a buying signal that you can use to reach out to them with a relevant pitch.
With a tool like Highperformr, you can configure just any kind of signal you like, and use AI to enrich your contacts and CRM with real-time data and the custom signals to help you spearfish leads and outreach more effectively.
Key Categories of B2B Buying Signals
Each type of buying signal that we discussed adds value in its own way. Some buying signals help make the pitch at the right time, some are used to accelerate or reprioritize your sales outreach, and some others help with reiterating a lead’s interest in a product like yours even if they aren’t immediately willing to enter the sales process.
The buying signals add value at each stage of the GTM process, whether it is during the marketing phase, or as a lead progresses through the B2B sales pipeline. The different types of B2B buying signals can be categorized into the following buckets:
- Digital Engagement Signals
These buying signals come from a contact’s digital presence, unlike their physical presence at an event or tradeshow. These signals include website visits, social media engagements, form fills and content downloads, email responses and interactions, demo requests. This category of buying signals are not direct indicators of a person’s intent to buy your product immediately, but signal that they are high-potential customers that you could nurture until they are ready to buy.
- Company Event Signals
The second category of buying signals include all signals about a target account rather than an individual contact you’re prospecting. Company events that could be good buying signals include leadership changes, funding rounds, M&A activity, financial data and growth indicators, hiring patterns, etc.
- Direct Interest Signals
These are the signals your sales teams can use instantly, directly to reach out to prospects with a pitch. They are clear indicators that the person is aware of the product/segment and is in the process of evaluating options before they buy. Some high-intent buying signals include visits to the product page and pricing page, RFP submissions, demo requests, and social posts mentioning your product or others in your category.
How to Track and Monitor B2B Buying Signals
Buying signals are everywhere around you. Everything a lead or a prospective buyer does can be a signal of something, including the fact that they are not ready to buy your product now or in the future. They also respond to signals from the market and other brands. But identifying these buying signals in real time, and enriching your contacts and CRM with the signals can be a complex task.
Tools and platforms to track B2B buying signals
The easiest way to keep track of all the signals pinging around you is to use a sales intelligence tool and a GTM automation platform like Highperformr, Clay, or Apollo to not just identify the signals but also take action on those buying signals. To make it easier for you, we have compiled a list of sales intelligence tools that can help you with this.
Highperformr stands out as the best product to help you identify buying signals in real-time, enrich your CRM with these signals, integrate Highperformr with your CRM or other sales and marketing tools, and set up automated workflows to take action on each of the buying signals you gather on Highperformr.
In most cases, a sales person will use a combination of multiple signals to get a good understanding of the prospect, and prioritize outreach. Highperformr helps with this as well. You can bring into Highperformr leads or contacts from multiple sources, sort and filter them on Highperformr, enrich the leads with real-time B2B buying signals, and automate workflows for outreach.
Essentially, you can bring any contact into Highperformr, enrich them with contact information and other signals, identify if they’re a high-potential prospect, and even identify which communication channel/platform works best for them.
Best Practices for B2B Buying Signal-Based Selling
Signal-based selling is the future of sales.
Nearly every B2B company is reworking its go-to-market strategy to take the signal-based approach to selling. This is because it helps identify ICP leads that otherwise might have been missed opportunities, helps prioritize leads based on the intent signals, enables you to personalize their outreach messages, and plan follow-up efficiency to ensure you don’t lose an opportunity to a competitor.
And to make B2B buying signal-based selling easier, there are multiple tools and platforms available to assist sales teams with identifying and taking action on buying signals. However, before jumping into the signal-based approach, it is essential to strategize and follow certain best practices to ensure sales effectiveness.
Here are some of the best practices to follow:
Building a signal-based GTM strategy
While sales teams have been using basic intent data for a while now, putting B2B buying signals at the centre of the GTM strategy is still new. Every salesperson finds and uses signals it in their own way, but it is still quite fragmented and unstructured.
To bring about clear, tangible value, it is important to codify the process of identifying, interpreting, and taking action on buying signals.
Training sales teams
Give that the signal-based approach to selling is relatively new, it is essential to invest time in training sales teams to change the way they look at sales.
Moreover, this new approach to selling requires the use of AI tools and platforms. There will be a learning curve involved, in addition to costs, but investing in this right from the beginning will ensure that the buying signal-based sales approach will drive better results.
Common pitfalls to avoid
Buying signals are not hard numbers but pieces of information about a person that can be interpreted in multiple ways. So signal-based selling cannot always be hardcoded. It requires understanding certain nuances and interpreting buying signals as accurately as possible.
Here are some common pitfalls to avoid while taking a buying signals-focused approach to GTM.
- Ignoring certain signals – Dismissing signals as irrelevant or insignificant
- Misinterpreting B2B buying signals – Not all signals indicate intent; misreading them can result in wasted outreach
- Over-indexing on buying signals – Relying too heavily on signals without broader sales context
- Working in silos – Using buying signals in isolation instead of integrating them into the bigger picture
- Failing to act in real time – Delayed responses to buying signals reduce their impact.
- Focusing only on high-intent signals – Mid- and low-intent signals are valuable for long-term nurturing
- Lack of alignment between teams – Sales, marketing, and RevOps must collaborate to use B2B buying signals effectively
- Over-personalizing based on a single buying signal – Personalizing outreach messages without context can feel intrusive
- Treating all signals as equal – Some signals matter more than others; prioritization is essential
- Testing and optimisation – Not iterating based on outcomes could result in the buying signals approach failing
- Overloading sales teams with signals – Too much noise without filtering signals defeats the entire purpose of using signals
- Privacy considerations – not taking into account privacy concerns and regulatory or compliance requirements
The Future of B2B Buying Signals
B2B buying signals are, without a doubt, the future of sales. The market today demands real-time intelligence and sales teams can no longer afford to spend days validating leads before outreach.
Moreover, most GTM teams juggle multiple disconnected tools and are losing valuable buying signals lost in fragmented systems. It is essential to not just ensure signals aren’t lost, but make sure that sales teams take swift action based on real-time buying signals and intent data.
Highperformr provides businesses with real-time B2B buying signals and intent data, and also enables businesses to configure automated workflows to take action on the buying signals. To learn more about how Highperformr unifies B2B buying signals, sales intelligence, and automation, schedule a demo with our GTM engineer today!
