The Definitive Guide to Buying Signals - Part I

In a fast-paced, competitive environment, how can you build revenue teams primed for efficient growth?

While there's no silver bullet, converting buying signals into pipeline is foundational.

In Part 1 of this comprehensive guide, we'll provide an overview of buying signals: what they are, why they matter, and the types worth tracking.

Stay tuned for Part 2, where we'll review strategies to optimize capture of high-intent prospects.

What Are Buying Signals?

Simply put, buying signals are indicators that someone is interested, right now, in purchasing your product.

These intent signals can include actions like demo requests, phone calls to your sales team, or pricing inquiry emails.

But some actions are more subtle, like screenshotting critical content from your site or repeatedly visiting your pricing page.

Luckily, digital actions leave digital breadcrumbs. With the right tools, these data can be detected, interpreted, and seamlessly integrated into your outreach workflow.

Why Are Buying Signals Especially Relevant Right Now?

Traditional sales channels are getting saturated, while spray and pray outbound grows increasingly prevalent with the mass adoption of generative AI¹.

Meanwhile, customer data is more abundant than ever, unlocking the ability to reveal previously hidden opportunities unique to your business motions.

As a result, not only is it now possible to capture and execute on the best opportunities, it has never been more important.

Sending targeted messages to the right person at the right time is becoming table stakes for high-performing revenue teams. Check out Avina's Signals Guide for a detailed list of specific use cases your team can put into practice today.

Types of Buying Signals

Buying signals can be broadly grouped as follows: first-party engagement, third-party data, product usage, firmographic/technographic, and champion/leadership signals. Moreover, companies that clearly understand which leads convert best can benefit greatly from custom signals, though these are typically more challenging to implement.

1. First-Party Engagement Signals

First-party engagement encompasses actions taken directly with your marketing and/or sales content. They indicate a prospect is specifically checking you out.

Key signals include:

• Website visits and page views, especially visits to high-value pages, e.g., pricing, product feature, or demo request pages
• Engagement with marketing emails. High engagement – like multiple opens, forwards, or click throughs — can flag a warmer prospect.
• Content downloads (e.g., whitepapers, e-books) or webinar attendance
• Interactions with your paid ads
• Likes and follows on your company's social media pages

Ideally, your team should get alerts when high-value actions happen or set up automations (e.g., a Slack notification when an ideal-fit account is on your pricing page or clicks on a sales email link). This allows you to respond quickly with relevant outreach. Modern tools make this possible by capturing on-site behavior and pushing instant alerts to your team².

2. Third-Party Data Signals

Third-party signals indicate a prospect's interest in particular topics or products, often gathered from external actions taken by leads. Monitoring these signals can help you identify intent surges, i.e., when a particular company has greatly increased their research activity in a relevant area.

Key signals include:

• Social activity such as posts, likes, and comments (e.g., asking for recommendations on Reddit, Quora, or an industry-relevant website)
• New hires for a relevant role (e.g., just hired a new Head of Marketing)
• Viewing articles, blogs, or review sites related to your product category
• Searches using comparison keywords (e.g., "GTM automation tools comparison")

Intent data signals help you identify who is in-market right now even if those prospects haven't yet landed on your website. However, this data is often anonymous and broad – you might know some company is researching a topic, but not which individuals. That's why it's most powerful when combined with other signals (e.g., intent surge plus a key contact visiting your website).

3. Product Usage Signals

Product usage signals are gathered from engagement with your product itself. These signals can help turn prospects into customers (pre-sale), as well as boost customer retention and expansion (post-sale).

Key product usage signals include:

• Prospect engagement with free trials, demos, or freemium products
• Customer engagement trends, e.g., product inactivity can indicate customer dissatisfaction

These product usage signals are especially critical in product-led sales (i.e., where the product is driving the lead). We recommend SaaS teams utilize a Product-Qualified Lead (PQL) score that combines usage (e.g., number of invites on a trial account) and fit (e.g., companies with more than X employees) metrics to indicate readiness for a sales call.

4. Firmographic/Technographic Signals

Firmographic and Technographic signals indicate changes in a target company's situation.

Examples include:

• New funding rounds, indicating a company may be ready to consider new tools
• M&A (mergers and acquisitions), which bring in new decision-makers often looking to re-evaluate existing systems.
• Company expansion (e.g., rapid hiring or entering a new market) can also indicate a need for new business solutions.
• Started using a new technology (e.g. started using Stripe as a payment processor, or started using Rippling to manage payroll)

To leverage these signals, you can (1) pull news sources, press releases, and databases like Crunchbase and (2) set up alerts for key trigger events, relevant to your target accounts. There are also a variety of data vendors available that provide this kind of data typically through an API.

Even better: automate this process, so you can be ready to craft an outreach strategy, the moment a trigger event occurs!

5. Champion/Leadership Signals

Relationships matter. When key people move, crucial opportunities emerge.

Two scenarios stand out:

• When a champion (i.e., someone who has used or advocated for your product in the past) switches jobs, you have an internal advocate already in place at their new company. A perfect time for a warm introduction!
• New executives or department heads often inherit old pain points in need of new solutions. These signals create an opportunity to position your product as an easy win.

Don't underestimate these signals: a well-timed congratulations to a past champion can bypass a lot of the usual cold outreach hurdles. Even without a prior relationship, mentioning company developments to a prospect shows you are doing your homework.

6. Custom Signals

Sometimes you know exactly what your ideal customer profile (ICP) looks like, and it may be highly specific to your business. In these cases, it could be valuable to go out and get the right data on your own.

Methods: AI web search, web scraping

Examples:

• Any time a company launches a new AI product (can be found by scraping their blog, website, announcements on socials like X.com)
• If a company adds Intercom (or any specific tech) to their website
• When a company files a new 10-K and mentions a key term (scraped from SEC site)
• Any time a company upgrades their Shopify tier
• Whether a company is working on SOC 2 compliance (scraped from their trust page or privacy policy)

Tools like Clay offer the ability to quickly experiment with custom AI-driven signals, and tools like Avina offer a way to codify those custom signals so your sales team can continuously leverage them to generate pipeline.

Recap

Buying signals are powerful tools that enable proactive, intelligent selling. Recognizing, prioritizing, and responding effectively to these signals can transform your sales and marketing approach, enabling your GTM team to engage prospects at precisely the right moments.

With Avina, you're equipped to detect every meaningful buying signal and respond with precision and speed, ensuring you never miss a high-intent, high-fit lead again. Welcome to the future of B2B sales—signal-led, AI-driven, and always proactive.

Stay tuned for Part 2, where we'll go over actionable strategies to ensure you never miss a high-intent prospect again.

Footnotes

1. 71% of companies are already using generative AI, according to a McKinsey report in 2024.
2. Avina captures page views, clicks, every line of text the visitor read, and even what they screenshotted.

Avina is a signals-based GTM automation platform for B2B teams that uses cutting-edge artificial intelligence to convert data into revenue.

Ready to move from chaos to clarity? Book a demo.

Have questions, feedback, or ideas? Reach out to hello@avina.io — we would love to hear from you!

"Avina has completely changed the way I work. Before, I felt like I was shooting in the dark to get responses, but now I have the highest propensity buyers being delivered to my doorstep, and I can focus on closing those deals." — James, Director of Strategic Partnerships, Ingenious (Case study)

"In sales, it's all about getting more quality at-bats. Products that help do better cold outbound are faster horses - Avina's warm inbound alerts is a car." — Ethan Pope, VP Revenue Operations, Nitrogen Wealth