Buying signals and intent data: which ones are evidence and which are horoscopes
Most intent data is a guess about a company dressed up as a signal about a person. How to tell the two apart, and the four signals worth building a week around.
A buying signal is something that happened, with a date and a link. Intent data is usually an inference about a company drawn from an IP address. Both get sold as the same product, and only one of them survives being asked where it came from.
A buying signal is an observable event you can link to: a role posted, a thing shipped, a question asked in public. Intent data is a probabilistic claim that somebody at a company read something about your category. The first can be checked before you send, and the second usually cannot be checked at all.
The test that separates them
Ask one question of any row in your pipeline: can I paste the sentence, and does the link still open?
That is the whole distinction. It is the same evidence standard that separates a real lead from a plausible one, applied one step earlier.
A job post passes. A funding announcement passes. "Intent score 78 in the Sales Automation topic cluster" does not pass, because there is no sentence and no link, only a number produced by a process you are not allowed to inspect.
Where intent data actually comes from
The mechanism is worth understanding, because it explains exactly when it works.
A vendor has a network of publisher sites. Someone reads three articles about a topic. The vendor records the IP address, resolves it to an organisation, and reports that the organisation is researching that topic.
The weak step is the resolution. A person on an office network resolves to their employer. A person working from home resolves to their internet provider, and a person on a phone resolves to a mobile carrier. So the method is strongest for large companies with offices and weakest for exactly the small, distributed companies most early-stage products sell to.
That is not a scandal, it is a limitation. It is a scandal when it is priced at a hundred dollars a lead and sold without the match rate.
Before buying any of it: hand the vendor a hundred of your known customers and ask what percentage they resolve correctly. The answer is the product. A vendor that will not run that test has told you the answer.
The four signals worth building a week around
Someone asks in public. The strongest signal that exists, and the shortest lived. A person describing your problem in their own words, with a timestamp, in a place you can reply. Worth hours, not days. Finding where those questions get asked is its own piece of work.
A role goes up that describes the pain. Read the responsibilities, not the title. A post listing "reconcile weekly reports across four systems" is a description of the problem you solve, written by the person who has it, published on purpose.
They shipped something that creates the work. A second location, a new product line, a compliance certification. Each one creates downstream work, and the downstream work is sometimes yours.
They tried and stopped. Someone writing that they evaluated a category and built it in-house instead. Rare, and worth ten of anything else, because the budget conversation already happened.
What is not a signal
| Looks like a signal | What it actually is |
|---|---|
| Headcount grew 12 percent | An attribute, and usually from a source nobody inside the company recognises |
| They are in your target industry | A filter you set, reported back to you |
| Anonymous visitor from a company | An IP guess, often an internet provider |
| Technographic: they use a tool you integrate with | Real, but permanent, so it says nothing about timing |
| Opened your last email three times | Frequently a security scanner, not a person |
The last row catches people out. Corporate mail security opens links to check them, which produces a burst of opens from a message nobody read. Any tool presenting open rate as engagement is showing you a number partly generated by antivirus software.
A worked example
Say you sell scheduling software to veterinary practices.
Firmographic list: 900 practices, four to twelve vets, in your states. No reason attached to any of them.
Intent overlay: 140 flagged as "in-market". You cannot see why for any individual row.
Signal pass: 31 practices posted a receptionist or practice manager role in the last three weeks. Of those, 11 list appointment scheduling or phone handling in the responsibilities. Two have a recent public review mentioning hold times.
Thirteen accounts with a sentence and a link each. That list is smaller than the intent list by a factor of ten and every row can be defended, which is what makes it possible to write to them at all.
Storing a signal so it is still worth something next week
Most teams lose signals to their own CRM. The event gets recorded as a checkbox ("intent: yes") and the thing that made it useful is gone.
Store three fields per signal, always together:
The sentence. The actual words, copied. Not a summary. The phrasing is what you will quote back.
The link. So the claim can be rechecked, and so the person picking this up in three weeks can see it for themselves.
The date you found it. Not the date you logged it. A job post found on the 4th is a different proposition on the 25th, and without the date nobody can tell which one they are looking at.
A row with those three fields survives being handed to someone else. A row that says "high intent, score 78" does not survive being asked a single question about it, and that is the test any lead should pass before it gets a message.
What this does not fix
A signal is not a need. A company hiring a compliance manager may be about to solve the problem without you, permanently. The signal tells you the topic is live, not that a purchase is coming.
Signals are not evenly distributed. Some markets publish almost nothing. Dentists do not post changelogs. If your buyers are quiet in public, signal-based prospecting has a low ceiling and you should find that out in week one rather than month six, by trying to find ten signals by hand before you build any process around them.
And more signals is not better. Tracking twenty signal types produces a queue nobody works. Two well-chosen ones, checked weekly, beat a dashboard. Revtive's agents watch a small set on purpose and have to cite a source for each one, because a signal you cannot open is the thing this whole page is arguing against.