Sales signals: 12 buying signals, who can see each one, and how long it lasts

A sales signal, often called a buying signal, is something a prospect does or says that makes a purchase more likely soon. A demo request is one. So is a pricing question in a reply, a job post that describes the problem you solve, or a public complaint about the tool they use now. Signals matter because they tell you who to talk to this week, not just who fits your market.

The most useful way to sort them is by who can see them, because that decides what you can do about each one. Some only show up on your own website or in your inbox. Some only come out in conversation. And some are public, which means you can find them before the prospect has ever heard of you.

The three kinds of sales signal

First-party signals happen on things you own: your website, your product, your inbox. A demo request, a pricing-page visit from a known contact, a trial account that hits its limit. They're strong and nobody else sees them, but they only exist once someone has already found you.

Conversational signals come out in a call or a reply. The buyer mentions a deadline, asks who else uses it, or brings a colleague to the second meeting. You can't search for them, only notice them, which is what qualification frameworks like BANT are for.

Public signals are on the open web: a job post, a funding announcement, a new executive, a question asked in a forum, a review complaining about a current supplier. Anyone can see them, so they're the only kind you can use to start a conversation with someone who hasn't contacted you.

There's a fourth thing that gets sold as a signal: third-party intent data, an inference that a company is researching a topic, usually based on which articles its employees seem to have read. It's a guess about a company rather than something you can open and check, and we've written separately about where it comes from and when to trust it.

12 buying signals, how strong each one is, and how long it lasts

Strength means how much more likely a purchase is when you see the signal, compared with a company that simply fits your profile. Shelf life is roughly how long it stays a good reason to get in touch. Both columns are our judgement from working with these signals, not a measured rate.

Three of these need a note.

A job post is only a signal if you read the duties. "Head of Sales" tells you very little. "Build outbound from scratch and own a list of 2,000 target accounts" tells you they're about to do the thing you sell, by hand, with a new hire.

A new executive matters because of their first few months. Someone new in a role often reviews the tools and suppliers they inherited. The window is real, but it closes, and by month six most of those choices have been made.

Funding is the most talked-about signal and one of the weakest. A raise means money, but it doesn't say what for, and every vendor in the category sees the same announcement on the same morning. It works best stacked on something more specific, like a job post that shows where the money's going.

Which signals actually turn up? What our data shows

Revtive's prospecting agents look for public signals and attach the source and date to every lead, so we can count which kinds turn up in practice. Between 13 and 27 October 2026, across four workspaces, the agents labelled 268 leads. 120 of them, or 45%, had at least one public signal attached. The other 148 matched the customer profile with no signal at all.

Here's what the signals on those 120 leads were. Some leads had two kinds, so the shares add up to more than 100%.

Hiring dominates, but not because it's the best signal. Job posts are simply the most published kind: companies put them on structured job boards on purpose, with dates, and leave them up for weeks. Where they come from is a practical tip in itself. Of the 665 job postings the same index collected between 30 September and 27 October, 296 came from LinkedIn's job listings, and nearly all the rest came straight from the hiring tools companies use to run their careers pages (Ashby, Workable, Lever and Greenhouse).

The evidence was also fresh. The 120 signal leads carried 163 pieces of evidence between them, 134 of them dated, and the median dated piece was four days old when the lead was saved. A quarter were more than about eight days old.

What this data can't tell you is which signal leads to a sale. None of these leads had been contacted when we pulled the numbers, so there's no reply data to connect them to. It does tell you which public signals you can realistically expect to find in a fortnight, and that the strongest kind, someone describing the problem in public, is also one of the rarest.

How to act on a sales signal

Mention the event, not the surveillance. "Saw you're hiring a head of outbound" is a normal thing to say. "Our tracking shows someone at your company visited our pricing page three times" isn't, even when it's true. Use first-party behaviour to decide who to contact and when, and give a public event as your reason.

One signal, one message. The signal is why you're writing, so the email should be about that and nothing else. A message that mentions a job post, a funding round and a podcast appearance reads like a file someone keeps on them.

And move at the speed of the shelf life. A public question is worth answering today. A job post can wait a few days while you check who owns the problem. A funding round can wait until you've found something more specific to say.

An illustration for signal 9, a job post:

Subject: the SDR role you posted

Hi [name], your SDR posting mentions building a list of 2,000 accounts from scratch. Most teams we talk to spend the first month of that hire on the list rather than on calls.

If it's useful, I can send 50 accounts that match the profile in your post, each with the reason it's worth a call, so you can judge whether that part is worth handing off. Either way, good luck with the hire.

How to combine signals

Fit decides whether a company could buy. A signal decides whether now's a good time. You want both, in that order, because a strong signal from a company outside your profile is just a well-timed wrong lead.

Two signals beat one by more than you'd expect. A company that's hiring for the role and has complained publicly about its current tool is a much better lead than either alone, because two independent events pointing the same way are hard to explain away. In the October data, 11 of the 120 signal leads had two kinds of signal.

Signals also expire, so score them down as they age. A job post from last week and the same post from four months ago aren't the same lead, though they'll look identical in a spreadsheet. The four checks we run before a lead gets a message put fit first and timing second for this reason.

What sales signals won't do

A signal isn't a need. A company hiring a compliance manager may be about to solve the problem without you, for good. The signal tells you the topic is live, nothing more.

Some markets are quiet. If your buyers rarely post jobs, rarely raise money and never talk about their problems in public, signal-based selling has a low ceiling, and your pipeline will lean on fit and referrals. The 148 leads with no signal in the October data are a reminder that this is normal.

And more signals isn't better. A feed of twenty kinds produces a queue nobody gets through. Two or three that fit your product, checked every week, will beat a dashboard. If you'd rather not check them by hand, Revtive's prospecting agents watch for the public ones and attach the link and the date to every lead, so you can open the evidence before you write a word.