What’s the most effective way to shortcut an unpredictable buyer’s journey? You’ll need more than tips, tricks, and hot takes. A truly efficient GTM motion is built on turning signals into action — at scale.
Here are the key buying signals anyone can use to focus their signal-based selling efforts and streamline their tactics to dial into the accounts that are ready to buy.
What Are Buying Signals?
Buying signals are data points that show when a target account may be in the market to purchase your product or service. (We’ll share a few examples later in this post.) These signals come in many forms from many different sources, and if used correctly, can simplify the notoriously complicated B2B sales cycle.
Signals:
- Identify key activities and trends in your customer base
- Guide you to prospects when they’re likely to listen
- Highlight changes that keep you up-to-date on current accounts
- Tailor recommendations for more personalized engagement with prospects and customers
This trail of data — and getting familiar with the multiple buying signals within it — helps sales and marketing teams align their efforts to the customer’s needs.
Why Are Buying Signals Important?
Understanding and using buying signals transforms how you approach current and potential customers. By tuning into these cues, you set the stage for a smarter strategy that’s significantly more effective.
Buying signals offer a unique insight into the customer’s journey, revealing their current position in the sales funnel. Whether it’s the timing of a follow-up call or the customization of marketing materials, responding to buying signals ensures your message hits home when it matters most.
In the complex world of B2B sales, recognizing and acting on these signals can mean the difference between a deal won and an opportunity missed.
Here are a few of the specific ways that signals can help you go to market better:
Expanded TAM Visibility
In addition to keeping you informed on specific target account activity, signals also give greater visibility into your total addressable market (TAM). Using signals, identify accounts both in and outside of your current target list that match your ideal customer profile (ICP). Keep on top of real-time signals to ensure you won’t miss potential opportunities with similar accounts.
Timely Engagement
Timely alerts on significant signals keep you ahead of the competition. Having access to buying signals ensures that you’re ready to engage with key decision-makers when it counts.
Easy Prioritization
Salespeople have limited time to engage accounts — so when they do have an opportunity, they need to make the most of it and connect with the accounts most likely to take action now. Signals paint a clear picture of the accounts that are in a prime position for next steps, making it easy for salespeople to prioritize their activities.
Examples of Common Buying Signals
Timing is everything in sales and marketing, and every lead counts. Signals give you reliable insights into every step of the customer journey and can mean the difference between a deal won and an opportunity missed. When you consistently identify and interpret B2B buying signals, you find and act on the most promising opportunities at the right time.
But this takes knowing what those signals actually are. Here’s a breakdown of common buying signals that will help you create and convert pipeline, at scale — especially when combined with a sales AI solution.
Personalization Signals
Sales teams today have all the data and tools necessary to find their target prospects. That means standing out is more important than ever — and signals that allow you to personalize your outreach with specific, relevant details are the key to doing it effectively.
Partnerships:
Does your solution integrate with a service provider that’s signing up major customers of its own? Capitalize on new partnership agreements to tailor your outreach as an opportunity to support that growth. Examples include:
- Service agreements
- Outsourcing
- Contract extensions
Podcast Mentions:
When a contact makes a guest appearance in a media interview or podcast episode, they’ll wind up talking about their business — and potentially disclosing ideas or initiatives that weren’t on your radar. Leverage these discussions to build a more up-to-date picture of what your target customer is planning.
Projects:
All news and internal insights related to department-specific initiatives that are planned, currently in-flight, or recently completed serve as extra information you can use to personalize your communication with an account.
Awareness Signals
A traditional profile of a target account — focusing on firmographics, technographics, key leadership, office locations — is table stakes. Awareness signals help your team stay up to date on an important account’s constantly evolving priorities: their market outlook, broad business strategy, and even their level of interest in solutions like yours.
Earnings Calls:
Publicly traded companies regularly disclose massive amounts of data through mandatory earnings reports. Mine these disclosures and the associated briefings to pull together valuable signals, including:
- Loans or liens
- M&A
- Stock sales
- Spending
- Planned investments
Hiring Plans
A prospect searching for a new leader or a significant number of frontline staff in a department you serve is obviously a strong indicator that they’ll need to spend to support growth. On the other hand, news of layoffs or planned labor savings is a great way to prioritize your outreach, or get ahead of a renewal conversation for existing accounts.
Submitted Forms
The core intent data signal of the B2B online sales model: a form fill. But consider what this information can reveal beyond specific interest from one person: are your prospects researching alternatives to a current solution, or are they more interested in trends about your market niche? Are there people from a single department, or are there cross-departmental trends you can see in form-fill interest? What about job title and seniority?
Having a broader picture of form-fill activity provides a potentially much greater level of awareness for your prospecting research.
Purchase Signals
The thing every GTM team wants to know, and know first: when their key accounts or best-fit prospects are ready to buy. These signals help you decode and respond to that buyer intent fast, when it’s most important to connect.
Account-Level Intent
Intent signals follow the data trail left behind when accounts demonstrate interest in a topic. Keep tabs on whether an account is researching one of your topic clusters — and whether their intent has spiked in the past day or week.
Website Visit Spike
When a target or good-fit account starts visiting your websites, it’s time to make the most of their attention. The specific pages they visit can help clarify a prospect’s interest and proximity to conversion:
- Low Intent: Visiting the homepage or blog
- Medium Intent: Visiting product/service pages
- High Intent: Repeated visits to pricing or contact pages
Understanding the level of interest helps your team decide when the account’s intent has become more than a moment of content consumption, and crossed into the category of legitimate purchase intent.
Account-Fit Score
Account-Fit Score is a signal unique to ZoomInfo Copilot that uses predictive AI to discover accounts with the greatest potential for success. This score is calculated using a combination of signals including:
- Firmographics
- Technographics
- Industry
- Company size
- Geography
- Your historical CRM data
How to Spot and Act on Buying Signals
Finding and tracking all of the buying signals that make up a modern B2B buyer’s journey was traditionally a specialized, complex task.
For a comprehensive view of your buyer’s signals, you’ll want to blend first-party data — like web page visits and form fills — with third-party data like aggregated intent activity. In most cases, all of these different signals are found in different software dashboards, and it’s up to you to hunt them down and piece them together to get the full picture.
Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be such a complicated, manual process. For instance, ZoomInfo Copilot takes hundreds of signals — including all of the ones we mentioned above — and combines them in a single platform powered by AI. Copilot then uses the insights from those combined signals to push the most relevant accounts straight to the top of your dashboard, highlighting the important information you’ll need to engage in relevant conversations.
The result? A 360-degree view of customer buying habits, problems, and needs, all in one easily accessible place.
How to Turn Buying Signals Into Action
Buying signals can apply throughout different stages of the customer lifecycle. By systematically tracking and responding to signals, sales and marketing teams can run more aligned motions that bear real results. The marketing team can use signals to inform marketing automation and social and display advertising while the sales team reaches out using email, phone, or social media messaging.
Even leads that went cold can be reactivated with buying signals. By monitoring their current activity, you can identify renewed interest and tailor your approach to re-engage them effectively.
Signals are useful for current customers, too. Keep track of what signals pop up for your existing clients — it’s a great way to identify upsell opportunities and stay ahead of any potential dissatisfaction with your product offering or services.
The Bottom Line: Buying Signals Help Close More Sales
When you tune into your prospects’ and customers’ signals, you position yourself to provide highly focused, personalized sales and marketing at the right time.
By leveraging the right signals at the right time, it’s easier to catch your prospect’s attention, predict their pain points, lower their resistance, and — of course — win the sale.
Build your signal-based sales motion today and start closing deals faster, with less effort.