Intent signals: which ones work and which ones lie

A signal is an event, not a trait

Profile attributes tell you who the product could suit. An intent signal tells you why to write today rather than in six months. A message without a signal competes with the entire inbox; a message with one competes with a single task the person already has open.

Where signals come from

Hiring. A posting for a support lead means support is about to be scaled. Five sales postings in a month means onboarding and CRM hygiene are about to hurt.
People moving. A new marketing director replaces vendors more often in the first ninety days than in the following two years combined.
Money. A funding round, a large tender, a public contract, a new branch or warehouse.
Product traces. A release, a new section on the site, an integration with an adjacent tool, a pricing change.
Your own data. Who visited pricing twice, who opened a message four times, who turned you down last year and came back to the site.

Separating signal from noise

Check three things. Freshness: the event is under thirty days old. Relevance: it explains why your problem just got more expensive for them. Verifiability: you can point to a source without inventing anything. A social post passes on freshness and almost never on relevance, which is why the "saw your post" opener died years ago.

Signal check prompt:
Company: [name]. Signal: [fact + date + link].
We sell [what] and remove the pain of [what].
1) Score it on three axes — freshness, relevance, verifiability — 1 to 5 each.
2) If the total is below 10, write "weak signal" and manufacture no rationale.
3) If 10 or above, state one hypothesis about the task now on the desk of [title].

Insight. Signals decay faster than people assume. For hiring and releases the shelf life is three to four weeks; after that the company has either picked a solution internally or parked the problem until the next budget.

Common mistake. Treating every fact you find as a signal. If you use all ten of the ten facts you found, those are pretexts, not signals, and the reader can tell from the first line.

Pro tip. Keep a table of signal type against reply rate. After two hundred touches it becomes obvious that hiring returns eight to twelve percent while a fresh funding round returns about three.

Cheat sheet

A signal answers "why today"; an attribute answers "who at all".
Three filters: freshness, relevance to your pain, verifiability.
More signals is not better — use only what clears all three.
Track reply rate by signal type or you will chase the loudest ones.

1. What turns a fact you found into an intent signal?

2. Why do reply rates often drop after a funding announcement?

3. What is the practical shelf life of a hiring signal?

Task — checked by AI

Take five companies from your current pipeline or call list. For each, find one intent signal from the last thirty days: a job posting, a leadership change, a release, a tender, or behaviour on your own site. Run each through the three filters — freshness, relevance to your pain, verifiability — and score them. Write down which companies came back with no usable signal, and state honestly what you will do about them: write anyway, park them, or hand them back to marketing. For the two strongest signals, add your one-sentence hypothesis about what is currently on the buyer's desk.

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