What are Buying Signals in Sales Intelligence?

Buying signals fall into several categories, each offering different levels of predictive strength. First-party signals — like repeated visits to your pricing page, downloading a technical whitepaper, or requesting a demo — indicate direct interest in your solution. Third-party intent signals — such as a surge in search activity around your product category or visits to competitor review sites — suggest the account is actively evaluating solutions. Contextual signals — like a new round of funding, a CTO hire, or a regulatory change affecting the industry — indicate that circumstances are ripe for a purchase even if the account has not yet shown direct interest.

The challenge with buying signals is not collecting them; it is separating meaningful signals from noise. A single pricing page visit might be a curious employee rather than a qualified buyer. Effective signal intelligence requires correlation — combining multiple weak signals into a composite picture that is more predictive than any single data point. A pricing page visit by someone from a company that just raised a Series B, recently hired a VP of Sales, and is showing third-party intent for your category is a vastly different signal than the page visit alone.

Timing is the other critical dimension. Most buying signals have a decay curve — a funding event is most predictive in the first 30-60 days, a job change in the first 90 days. Sales teams that act on fresh signals dramatically outperform those working stale data. The best signal-driven sales organizations have systems that detect, score, and route buying signals to reps within hours rather than days or weeks.

Prospectory continuously monitors and aggregates buying signals from 50+ data sources across the web, including company news outlets, job boards, SEC filings, technology detection services, social media, review platforms, and third-party intent data providers. These signals are categorized, time-stamped, and fed directly into the P2B scoring engine so that every account score reflects the most current buying context.

Beyond scoring, Prospectory surfaces individual buying signals as actionable alerts. When a target account raises funding, hires a key executive, adopts a complementary technology, or shows a spike in category intent, reps receive a notification with full context and AI-generated talking points tailored to that specific signal. This turns raw data into immediate sales action — reps can reference the exact trigger in their outreach, which drives the 45% average reply rates Prospectory customers see on AI-personalized campaigns.