Which Intent Signals Are Worth Acting On, and Which Are Noise

Last quarter I pulled every intent signal firing across four client accounts and checked which ones actually came before a booked meeting. Eleven signal types were wired in. Three did the work.

The other eight kept SDRs busy and produced nothing I could point at.

That ratio has held on every account I've run since, which is why I now spend more time switching signals off than turning new ones on.

The short answer

Intent signals worth acting on share three traits: a named person, a date, and something that person actively chose to do. Job changes into a buying role clear that bar. So does active hiring for the function you replace, and repeat visits to a commercial page. Anonymous topic surges and funding news don't.

The three that pay

A job change into a role that owns your problem

A new head of sales spends her first ninety days deciding what to keep and what to rip out. She's got budget she didn't have to fight for and a mandate to change something. You will never catch her in a more open state than that.

On one HVAC campaign we ran a 6% reply rate across the whole list. Messages triggered by a job change inside that same list replied at close to double the blended number, off identical copy and the same warmed inboxes. Timing was the only variable.

This one ages badly, though. Reach her in week two and you're early enough to shape the shortlist. Reach her in month five and she's already picked.

Hiring for the function you replace

A job post is public, dated, and paid for. A company advertising two SDR roles in Manchester has admitted it has a pipeline problem and put real money behind fixing it.

You're not guessing at interest here. Somebody signed off a budget line and wrote the requirement down in public. For us this is the cleanest trigger in outbound, because the pain is stated in the buyer's own words and you can quote it back without sounding like you've been watching them.

Repeat commercial page visits from more than one person

One visit to your pricing page means nothing. Half the time it's a competitor checking your numbers. The rest of the time it's a candidate, or somebody who clicked the wrong link in a newsletter.

Three visits across two weeks from two different people at the same company is a different animal. That's a buying group forming. We only act on the repeat pattern, never the single hit, and the gap in meeting rate between those two is not close.

The five we switched off

Anonymous topic surges are the big one. This is the category most teams mean when they say they bought intent data. The honest description: somebody, somewhere inside a company that might have four thousand employees, read something loosely adjacent to your category, and an IP lookup guessed which company they belong to. You never learn who read it or whether that person has any say in a purchase. I've yet to trace a closed deal back to one of these on its own.

Funding announcements are the next to go. The problem isn't that the signal is wrong. It's that the signal is universal. Every vendor on earth runs the same play, so a company that raises a Series A gets buried inside the same week. And if your only reason for reaching out is that they've got money now, you've told the prospect exactly that.

Technographic matches come third. Knowing a company runs a competitor tool is a state, not an event. States are useful for building a list, but they tell you nothing about when to send.

Social engagement is the one people argue with me about. Someone liking a post is engagement with content, not interest in buying anything. We tested post likes as a trigger for six weeks and the reply rate landed below our cold baseline, which makes sense once you think about what a like actually costs a person.

Generic web traffic rounds it out. A blog visit from a company on your list is traffic. Treating it as intent is how SDRs end up opening with a line that makes the prospect feel followed.

Here's what most people get wrong

Teams buy intent data to decide who to sell to. That's backwards.

Intent doesn't build your list. Your ICP does, and if you haven't built that from your own closed-won data yet, start there instead. Intent decides when you touch a company that's already on the list.

Let a signal define the list and you end up emailing companies that were never a fit but happened to trip a keyword. Reply rates fall and spam complaints climb. Six weeks later somebody concludes outbound doesn't work, which is one of the more common ways an AI SDR pilot dies early.

Fit first, timing second. Never the reverse.

A three question grade for any signal

Before you wire a new signal into a sequence, answer these:

1. Is it attached to a named person, or only to an account?
2. Does it carry a date I can say out loud without sounding like I've been following them?
3. Did a human choose to do it, or did a tracker infer it?

Three yeses and you should act inside a week. Two yeses means the signal is good enough to prioritise your list but not to fire a send on its own. Anything below that belongs in a reporting dashboard, nowhere near your sequences.

Run your current stack through that grid. Most teams find they're paying for signals that score a one.

Why timing matters more every year

Gartner surveyed 646 B2B buyers in late 2025 and found 67% now prefer a rep free buying experience, with 45% saying they used AI during a recent purchase (Gartner, March 2026). Buyers are doing the work without you in the room.

Set that against John Dawes's research for the LinkedIn B2B Institute, which put roughly 5% of business buyers in market for a given category in any quarter (LinkedIn B2B Institute).

Put those two together and the job gets clear. Most of your list isn't buying today, and the ones who are will have done their research privately before you ever hear about it. A signal that tells you which week to show up is worth more than one that tells you a company exists.

What to do this week

Open your sequencing tool and list every trigger currently wired in. Grade each one against the three questions above. Switch off anything scoring below two, then watch reply rate for the next fortnight. On every account where I've done this, volume dropped and booked meetings went up.

Want a second pair of eyes on which of your signals are earning their place? Book a GTM audit and we'll go through your stack together. Pricing for ongoing work sits here.

FAQ

What are intent signals in B2B sales?

Intent signals are observable actions suggesting a company may be moving toward a purchase. They run from public events like job changes and hiring posts through to inferred activity like anonymous content consumption.

Is intent data worth paying for?

Depends entirely on the type. Signals tied to a named person and a date tend to earn their cost. Anonymous account level topic data rarely does on its own, though it can help you prioritise a list you already trust.

How accurate is anonymous intent data?

Nobody publishes independent accuracy figures, which tells you something. The mechanism relies on IP to company matching plus publisher co-op data, so at best it identifies the organisation, never the individual or their authority to buy.

Which intent signal converts best?

In our accounts, job changes into a role that owns the problem. Hiring posts are a close second, because the pain is written down in public and carries a date.

How soon should I act on an intent signal?

Inside seven days for anything person level. Job changes lose most of their value after the first month, once the new hire has already chosen their stack.

Can I mention a signal in my cold email?

Only if the buyer knows it's public. Quoting their job post or their funding round is fine. Telling someone you saw them visit your pricing page is not.

Do I need intent data to run outbound?

No. A tight ICP with decent timing beats a loose list with expensive signals every time. Build the ICP first, add timing after.

What about signals from several people at one company?

Those are the strongest available and also the rarest. Two or more people from one company taking separate commercial actions inside a fortnight is worth dropping everything for.