Reading intent signals without fooling yourself
A pricing-page visit, a new VP, a job post — some signals predict pipeline and most predict nothing. How to tell the difference with your own data instead of a vendor’s case study.
Intent data promises the holy grail of outbound: knowing who is in market before they raise their hand. In practice, most teams buy a feed, route every spike to reps, and quietly stop trusting it three months later. The problem is rarely the data. It is that nobody measured which signals mean anything for this business.
Signals are hypotheses
Every signal is a guess about behaviour: "a company hiring SDRs is about to buy sales tooling." Some guesses are good. Many are not. The only way to know is to check the guess against your own closed deals.
A simple backtest
- Export the last 12 months of opportunities, won and lost.
- For each, record which signals fired in the 90 days before the opportunity was created.
- Compare the rate of each signal among opportunities with its rate among a random sample of accounts that never became opportunities.
A signal that appears in 40% of opportunities and 38% of random accounts predicts nothing, however exciting it looks on a dashboard.
Signals that usually hold up
| Signal | Why it tends to work |
|---|---|
| New leader in the buying role | New leaders change tools in their first 6 months |
| Funding round in the last 90 days | Budget appears, and so do growth targets |
| Hiring for the function you serve | The problem you solve is getting bigger |
| Visits to pricing and integration pages | A late-stage, product-specific behaviour |
Signals that usually don't
Generic topic surges ("researching CRM"), a single blog visit, and social-media mentions tend to have low lift. They are real behaviour — just not buying behaviour.
Turning signals into action
Score accounts on the signals that passed your backtest, weight each by its lift, and route only the top band to reps. Re-run the backtest every quarter; markets change, and so do the signals that predict them.