11 Buying Signals to Make Prioritizing Outreach Easier

Say someone at a target account signs up for your webinar, posts a job opportunity on LinkedIn, or checks out a few of your competitors on Capterra.

What should a salesperson actually do with that intel?

That's the problem with most buying signals: reps have tons of different signals coming in from various sources, but not all of it is necessarily actionable.

So, which buying signals should SDRs and AEs actually pay attention to? And what should they do with them?

First-party signals are those that you collect from your owned assets, such as:

• Behavior on your website
• Engagement with your ad or email content
• Webinar sign-ups and attendance 
• Product usage data

The general consensus among revenue leaders is that, compared to their third-party counterparts, first-party intent signals are more reliable, more actionable, and stronger indicators of intent to purchase.

Sales reps should give more weight and attention to these buying signals. Here’s how to put them into action. 

Engagement with your ads can tell you a lot about what your prospects care about.

At Influ2, we use contact-level ads to reach specific buying committee members (across LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Google Display, and other networks), then track their engagement with each ad to gather buying signals.

Each click tells us something about that buyer. 

If they click on an ad about making intent actionable for SDRs but scroll past our ads about increasing meeting attendance rates, that tells us that pipeline generation might be a bigger priority for that prospect right now.

Of course, the strength of the information as a buying signal depends on what they clicked.

An ad click to a top-of-funnel article is a sign that the prospect might connect with the problem you’re proposing to solve in the article, but it doesn’t mean they’re ready to buy. 

But if that person clicks an ad about a specific value prop for your product, there’s more of an indication of product interest, especially if you combine that signal with other relevant signals on this list.

Website visitor deanonymization software can help you collect buying signals from site visitors.

While this software can’t reveal every single visitor (usually it can tell you what company they’re from, but not which specific person within it), you can still use it to track engagement signals like:

• Which pages they visit
• How long they spend on a page
• How far they scroll
• How many times they return to a given page 

This is all valuable intel for shaping sales outreach. 

Here’s how the SDRs at Common Room do it:

• Focus on visitors who land on high-intent pages like pricing or integrations.
• Enrich visitor profiles with detailed context, tracking what they viewed, how often they visited, and relevant role or contact info.
• Trigger instant Slack notifications when priority contacts from owned accounts interact with key site pages, so SDRs can move quickly.
• Auto-segment contacts into lists using filters like job title, on-site behavior, and CRM ownership.
• Score and rank contacts based on engagement patterns, such as volume of visits or company size, to surface top prospects.
• Aim to follow up within 15 minutes of a high-intent visit to stay relevant and top-of-mind.
• Push qualified contacts straight into relevant, prebuilt email sequences inside Outreach.
• Use AI to auto-personalize outbound snippets using firmographic and behavioral data.

You can track engagement with the content you share to get actionable first-party buying signals.

Different levels and types of engagement tell us different things about the buyer. 

For example, downloading an ebook could be a sign that the person is interested in a particular use case for your product, or they could just be searching for information for a LinkedIn post they’re writing.

But if that same prospect also signs up for a webinar, clicks on three of your outreach emails, and spends ten minutes experimenting with your demo tool, then the ebook download is a much more relevant buying signal.

The point is that context matters, and not every webinar registration or ebook download deserves a phone call.

Engagement with your events (whether in-person or online) can be a buying signal, but context is important.

Consider ZoomInfo’s event calendar.

Someone showing up to the ZoomInfo x Google Cloud dinner might be an interested buyer, but there’s an equal chance that they’re just there to network. The event itself just isn’t specific enough.

However, a prospect registering for the online event “Transforming Marketing Growth with the Power of Data” shows very specific intent. They are signaling that:

• Marketing growth is important to them.
• They’re open to using data as a growth driver.

The Sales team at ZoomInfo could use engagement with this event as a buying signal, using varying degrees of intent to trigger different playbooks. For example:

• Event interest: Anyone who clicks on the event page, but doesn’t sign up, receives a personalized email invitation. 
• Event registration: Those who register for the event but don’t show up, receive an email with the event recording and a LinkedIn InMail with a summary from the SDR.
• Event attendance: Prospects who come to the event receive a personalized thank-you email from the SDR and an invitation to explore how ZoomInfo’s data offering could support that specific prospect’s goals.

Pro tip: Marketing can support the SDR’s goal of booking a meeting with contact-level ad air cover, helping them cut through where email inboxes are noisy and overcrowded.

Product engagement data, such as commonly used features or overall engagement during a trial period, can be an important buying signal.

Say a new account is trialing Mailchimp.

They have access to the full suite of features, but during the trial, they’ve primarily adopted the Email Marketing and Social Media Marketing tools.

The AE’s pitch, then, should be focused on the long-term value of these features. They could also tie in how Mailchimp’s Marketing Automation function builds on those two features, using the alignment between these features to drive an upsell motion.

Pro tip: Marketing can help increase engagement during a trial period by targeting lesser-engaged users with contact-level ads, pushing them back to their product during the trial period.

Understanding how current customers get value out of your product can inform upsell and cross-sell motions, especially when combined with additional signals.

Take Zapier.

Their GTM team combines product usage data with other buying signals to identify and engage the right stakeholders and capitalize on account growth opportunities.

They look at how individuals within the account engage with their product, and marry that data with intel from:

• CRM records, such as notes from original sales conversations 
• Social engagement, such as commenting on a competitor’s LinkedIn post 
• Customer support messages, such as previous feature requests

Although first-party signals should be prioritized as stronger predictors of interest, third-party buying signals do have their place.

They add breadth to the intel Sales has on buyers’ interest, and can help reps send more personalized outreach.

Here’s how.

Insights into a prospect’s online search activity can be a mixed bag:

• Problem-aware search behavior (e.g., searching for “how to increase email open rate”) usually isn’t very actionable for Sales, though Marketing can use it to personalize their pre-outreach lead warm-up programs.
• Category research (e.g., searching for “sales engagement tools”) is generally a better intent signal and more useful for Sales to act on.
• Pricing research (e.g., looking at competitor pricing pages or searching for comparison content) is an indicator that the buyer is evaluating a purchase decision and is further along in their buying journey.

In most cases, these signals aren’t strong enough to act on solo, but they can provide additional context alongside other first- and third-party buying signals.

Review sites like G2 and Capterra are another important source of buying signals that can add context to outreach.

For example, a salesperson at Vendr could track review site intent data and learn that a prospect has been reading Procurify reviews on G2. 

Knowing that there is a competitor in the prospect’s consideration set, the rep could focus their email outreach on the areas where Vendr is demonstrably stronger, and point the decision-maker back to their comparison landing page.

Pro tip: Marketing could support this by distributing a case study from a customer who made the switch from Procurify to Vendr.

A prospective account releasing a funding announcement isn’t always a strong signal on its own. Just because they have money doesn’t mean they want to buy your thing.

But it is an indication that they have a budget available. If you can combine this with other buying signals, such as recent category research, this can be useful data.

As Eric Nowoslawski, founder of Growth Engine X, notes, you can’t just look for companies that have raised new funding and use that as the basis for outreach. You need another compelling reason to reach out.

This one also depends a bit on your ICP.

If you sell enterprise FP&A software for growth-stage companies, learning that a company raised a Series B round could matter. It still doesn't mean they have buying intent or even a use case, but it's a more helpful signal in this context.

Technographic data (intel on what software tools the account is already using) is generally used to confirm ICP fit, but can also be a useful intent signal.

For instance, if the company just purchased a complementary tool, your pitch could be built around how your tool creates additional value.

Or, say the company just uninstalled a competitor’s tool. You could combine this with a negative review on a site like G2 to gain more context on why they churned, then run a sequence focused on how your product steps up where the competitor fell short.

Engagement with content on social media can also be a useful buying signal.

If people are engaging with LinkedIn posts about your product or product category, you have insights into what topics interest them. 

That doesn’t mean you should follow up with everyone who likes a post about your product. But it gives you a list of people who may be worth connecting with.

Pro tip: A good way to automate this is to use social listening tools to monitor for and surface posts related to key topics, as well as posts demonstrating negative sentiment toward a competitor.

There are a few different job change signals to pay attention to, each giving us different insights into potential intent:

• New leadership: When new leaders come in, they often overhaul systems. This can be an opportunity to get in while the tech stack is open to change.
• Employee growth: This is an important growth signal. It means the company is scaling and is more likely to have a budget to invest.
• Hiring announcements: Job openings are a growth signal as well, but this is particularly important if the openings are in your industry (like a CFO or Office Manager for QuickBooks), as it tells you they’re actively investing in the particular function your tool serves.

A past champion moving to a new company is also a good opportunity for Sales to leverage that existing relationship.

If someone who loved your product moved on to a new role, you can add them to a designated cohort within your ABM program and reach out with a relevant ad, like this one.

First-party signals provide actionable intent data, while third-party signals add context and breadth.

But just collecting buying signals like Pokémon cards isn't going to help move the needle—knowing how to act on them is.

Combine intent signals to get a better understanding of your buyers, and use it to make outreach more relevant and intentional.

If you’re interested in learning more about using ad engagement as an intent signal, let’s talk.