Intent signals: how to time outbound so it lands when the prospect is already looking
Hiring posts, funding, tech changes, website visits and content engagement — which signals predict readiness, where to get them, and how to turn them into a weekly list.
15 Dec 2025 · 2 min read · by HeiSyn
A company that fits your profile is worth contacting; a company that fits and just posted a job for the role your product replaces is worth contacting this week. Intent signals are the difference between those two lists. They are not magic — most are public events anyone can watch — but a system that watches them every day is rare, and a rep who sees the signal in the first line of the email is rarer.
Signals worth watching
Job postings that imply the pain (a second SDR hire suggests outbound is growing; an 'operations analyst' hire suggests reporting is manual). Funding rounds within the last ninety days. Leadership changes in the buying role. Technology adoption or removal detected by tech-stack tools. Website visits to pricing or comparison pages, identified at company level. Engagement with your own content or a competitor's. Regulatory deadlines in the industries you serve.
Where the signals come from
Job boards and LinkedIn for hiring; Crunchbase-style data for funding; LinkedIn and news for leadership; BuiltWith-type providers for technology; de-anonymisation tools such as RB2B or Clearbit Reveal for website visits; your own marketing platform for content engagement. Clay can pull most of these into one table on a schedule, and n8n can watch the rest through APIs and RSS.
Turning signals into a list
Each signal gets a weight and a decay: a funding round is strong for sixty days then fades; a pricing-page visit is strong for a week. Sum the weighted, decayed signals per account, add the fit score, and the top of the list is this week's outbound. The signal that put an account there should appear in the first line — 'you posted a second SDR role last week' — because that is the whole point of having it.
What not to do
Do not contact someone about a website visit you identified through de-anonymisation; it is unsettling and in some regions unlawful. Use those visits to prioritise and to inform, never to reveal. And do not let a strong signal override a weak fit: a well-funded company outside your profile is still outside your profile.
Questions people ask next
- Which single signal is most reliable?
- Hiring. A company posting roles that imply your problem is spending money on it right now, and the job description tells you their language and their stack. Funding is second — it opens budget — but it is noisier because not every funded company has the pain.
- How fresh do signals need to be?
- It depends on the signal. A pricing-page visit is stale in a week; a job posting in a month; a funding round in a quarter; a new executive in six months. Give each signal its own decay in the scoring so the list reflects what is happening now.
- Can small companies afford intent data?
- The public signals — job postings, funding announcements, leadership changes, technology detection — are cheap or free to collect with an orchestrator and a data tool. Paid intent feeds add website and content signals; they are worth it only after the free signals are being used well.
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