The different families of Intent Signals

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If intent data is the compass of your Allbound strategy, then intent signals are the coordinates. And not all signals are created equal.

Some are obvious and high-intent, like someone booking a demo. Others are subtle, almost invisible—but when read correctly, they tell you just as much (if not more) about where a prospect stands in their buying journey.

Let’s start where intent becomes personal: individual behavioral intent.

Individual behavioral intent: spotting the hidden buying signals

What individual Intents should you watch for?

If you’re waiting for someone to fill out a form before you consider them “a lead,” you’re already behind.

Real buying intent starts way earlier with subtle, high-signal behaviors most teams overlook. These aren’t your classic lead gen moves. They’re small, frictionless actions that hint at curiosity, interest, or timing.

They might seem too minor to matter on their own. But that’s exactly the mistake.
Because the power of intent isn’t in one signal—it’s in the pattern.

Think about it:

A lead clicks a link in your cold email but doesn’t reply
A prospect who ghosted you months ago suddenly views your LinkedIn profile
Someone signs up for a LinkedIn Live about Outbound personalization
A founder likes your post on “Why Email CTAs Are Dead.”
A CMO comments “🔥” on your case study breakdown
A DevOps manager respond toz a poll about cold email tools

Are any of these actions a deal on their own? No.

Are they signals that someone is listening, learning, and leaning in? Absolutely.

This is what we call individual behavioral intent:

Digital actions taken by one person
Often light-touch, invisible to most CRMs
But incredibly powerful when aggregated or acted on fast

What makes them tricky is also what makes them valuable: they’re quiet but real.

The first step is to set up your Inbound strategy and create consistent content on LinkedIn to engage your leads. Once you’ve done that, you can capture those signals.

Ivan Escobar – Founder @ Enter Overdrive

LinkedIn: The Allbound goldmine (if you know how to use it)

Let’s be honest: 90% of B2B Intent is hidden on LinkedIn, but most teams treat it like a billboard, not a sensor.

The best-performing sales and marketing teams use LinkedIn not just to broadcast content but also to collect signals.

The process starts with you:

Is your profile optimized?
Do your posts offer tactical value or just opinions?
Are you speaking to your ICP’s real pain points, or flexing for likes?

Because here’s the thing: your content is bait, and every like, comment or profile view is a potential trigger for outreach. The more precise and consistent your editorial strategy, the stronger the intent signals it surfaces.

Want more signals? You don’t have to create all the content yourself.

Savvy teams scrape engagement on competitor posts, influencer threads, or niche event recaps. When a Head of Sales comments “Following this!” on a GTM teardown, that’s an intent signal, even if it’s not on your content.

You can track that. You can act on that.

Don't overlook the "quiet" signals

Here’s a short list of behaviors that may not ping your CRM but should activate your GTM radar:

Someone views your LinkedIn profile 2–3 times a week
A lead who went cold suddenly follows your company page
A Marketing Manager joins your ICP-specific LinkedIn group
A sales leader clicks your newsletter CTA but doesn’t submit the form
A founder who ignored your last campaign starts liking every post you publish

Each of these is a weak signal on its own. But when you layer them or time them right, they become your sharpest outreach angle.

And with tools like La Growth Machine, you can automate actions based on these patterns:

Profile view? Trigger a connection request
LinkedIn Live signup? Add to a warming sequence
X follow? Launch a DM campaign or invite to a relevant webinar

It’s not about stalking. It’s about being strategically aware.

This is the edge most teams miss: it’s not about finding more leads but activating the warm ones already circling you.

Product and usage intent: Reading between the launches

Spotting product signals that reveal buying intent

Let’s imagine your ideal customer. They:

Announce a new product.
Launch into a new market.
Promote a use case you solve better.
Push a feature aimed at a different ICP.
Share a dusty case study from two years ago.

None of this seems urgent at first glance. But dig deeper, and you’ll see the signal:

New product = new challenges = new tooling needs
Strategic shifts = new positioning = new vendors on the table
Old case study = potential churn = opportunity to wedge in

And if they’re trialing a competitor? Even better.

With tools like BuiltWith or Wappalyzer, you can track these shifts across the board, from new installs to dropped tools to entire stack reconfigurations.

What looks like a simple roadmap update might actually be a sign of purchase intent.

Turning product shifts into conversion-ready outreach

Let’s make it real:

Your target account just launched a new self-serve product. You pick it up through a Product Hunt alert. Their site quietly adds a Stripe integration. Two days later, a mid-level PM at the company started browsing Stripe docs on GitHub. Then, their Head of Sales likes a post about multichannel onboarding.

This is not a coincidence.

This is a buying committee aligning around a problem right now. And if you’re selling onboarding automation, product enablement, or integration-layer tech, this is your window. You don’t just send a message.

You lead with the insight:

“Saw you’re rolling out your self-serve flow—and looks like Stripe’s part of the stack now. I’m curious about how you’re approaching onboarding across teams. I’m happy to share a 5-step sequence we’ve seen convert 2x better in your market.”

No spam. No pitch. Just relevance, driven by intent.

Tech triggers: When the stack speaks

What intents to monitor?

Technology doesn’t just enable companies; it exposes them.

Every change in a company’s stock is a window into what they’re optimizing, struggling with, or transitioning out of.

Here’s what you should be watching:

When a company adds a new CRM, email tool, analytics suite.
When they drop an ad platform or tracking script.
When a key feature gets deprecated (and they need a replacement fast).
When they start shipping products more frequently on GitHub.
When their SEO visibility spikes (or tanks), hinting at content changes or a new GTM motion.
When they rebuild a high-intent page like pricing, integrations, or partner portals.

These aren’t just product updates; they’re sales triggers waiting for you to spot them. And yes, you can automate it.

The tools to do it:

BuiltWith lets you monitor what tech is being used on any site and see when that tech was added or removed. Want to know when someone stops using a competitor? This is where you look.
Wappalyzer: real-time detection of tech stacks. Lightweight, fast, browser-native, perfect for Sales and Marketing teams doing daily research without dev help.
Phantombuster: scrapes whatever the above tools miss. Want to monitor changes on specific product pages, event registries, or support docs? You can script Phantombuster to alert you the moment something shifts.

You don’t need 15 tools. You need one good source of truth per signal.

Why this matters for Allbound

Allbound isn’t about blasting everyone with the same sequence. It’s about context-based orchestration.

Intent signals like these give you the leverage to:

Time your outreach around real product behavior
Tailor your message to strategic shifts (not just job titles)
Spot buying windows before the RFP hits anyone’s inbox

And if you’re using LGM? You can plug these signals directly into a campaign:

New stack detected → trigger a tailored LinkedIn sequence
Product launch scraped → activate a relevant email sequence
Competitor dropped → notify Sales instantly with a custom pitch

This is how modern prospecting gets built: from signal to sequence to close.

Corporate triggers: Reading the room at the company level

What corporate signals should you track?

Not all intent signals come from the buyer. Some come from the business.

Before someone downloads a white paper or clicks your CTA, the company might be flashing loud, high-value signals that they’re entering a buying window.

We call these corporate triggers, and they’re essential if you want to prioritize outreach based on actual business momentum instead of just email open rates.

Capturing intent also means understanding the broader context the prospect is in.

Ivan Escobar – Founder @ Enter Overdrive

Some examples are prominent. A company raises a €10M Series A? You bet they’re in the market for new tools.

Others are quieter, like opening a new office, entering a new market, or making a strategic hire (think: VP of RevOps, Chief Revenue Officer, Director of Partnerships). These moves aren’t press releases, but they’re buying intent in disguise.

Here’s what matters most:

Company creation, M&A moves, spin-offs
Fundraising rounds (timing + investor type + team size post-fundraise)
Revenue jumps, territory expansion, and new vertical focus
Hiring key roles, especially in GTM, Ops, or product strategy
Strategy pivots or product launches mentioned in the press or public filings

Every one of these signals tells you something about where the company is going next. And your job is to figure out if you can help them get there faster.

How to track these corporate triggers

You don’t need a CIA team or a Wall Street Journal subscription.

Here’s how top-performing GTM teams keep tabs on the market:

Google Alerts for brand mentions, exec quotes, or partnerships
Feedly or Mention for monitoring industry keywords
LinkedIn Sales Navigator for the goldmine: job changes, leadership shifts, department growth, and public announcements—with filters, alerts, and custom lists

What makes Sales Navigator especially valuable is how easily you can layer it into your Allbound strategy:

Get alerts when someone in your ICP changes roles
Track who’s following your company page (but hasn’t converted)
Filter out current customers to avoid overlap
Pair filters with Boolean searches to find net-new opportunity pockets

This isn’t just for SDRs. CMOs and VPs of Sales should train teams to detect and act on these signals with discipline, not just reactively but proactively.

Making it actionable: Prerequisites for corporate signal activation

Here’s where most teams miss the mark. They see a company raise $20M… and immediately fire off a generic cold pitch. That’s not signal-based selling — that’s noise.

To activate corporate intent signals properly, you need four things dialed in:

1. A scoring framework

Not all signals are equal. You need a clear grid to prioritize based on the following:

Business potential
Timing urgency
Ease of access (do you already have warm paths in?)
Fit with current campaign themes

2. Precise outreach timing

It’s not about hitting “send” the day after a funding announcement.
The right moment is often:

just before a new GTM leader starts;
right after they begin hiring for key roles;
as the stack shifts, not once it’s public.

Timing is what turns a signal into an opportunity.

3. Clear value props by signal

Don’t pitch the same way for every trigger. A funding round ≠ a market expansion ≠ a reorg.

Tailor your narrative to the exact business context they’re navigating right now.

4. Smart sequencing playbooks

Your team should be equipped with templates, scenarios, and workflows tailored for each trigger, not winging it every time a Series B drops.

All of this gets even more powerful when combined with the next layer of signal: HR triggers.

HR Triggers: When people move, opportunities open

What are HR triggers?

There’s a reason recruiters are obsessed with job changes: they’re inflection points. The same is true in B2B sales.

HR intent signals give you visibility into:

Companies building new functions or scaling fast
Personas moving into new roles (and new budgets)
Alums who loved your product before and are now somewhere else with influence

This is where the line between GTM and Talent gets blurry and powerful.

These leads are gold. They’re more likely to promote your tool in their new company.

Nicolas Fernandez Le-Follic – Founder @ Pronto

How to detect HR signals that matter

It’s not just about checking job boards. Here’s how the best teams surface career-related intent:

Monitor job listings: not just the job titles but the tools, skills, and team structure they’re building for.
Track candidate journeys: who’s applying, what they’re clicking, what they’re downloading.
Use LinkedIn activity: profile views, connections, company follows, and post comments.
Follow alums: if a power user switches companies, follow up fast.

Want to automate this? Combine Mantiks and LGM. Mantiks lets you spot hiring surges in companies that are:

Recruiting for the tools you replace
Hiring your ideal personas
Scaling teams where your product is a fit

Then you plug those signals into LGM, filter by role, and deploy a multichannel sequence—before your competitors even notice the job was posted.

Example sequence:

Detection:

Mantiks flags a company hiring 3 RevOps managers, all with “HubSpot” in the job description.

Enrichment:

Filter by job title and check if anyone has used your product previously.

Outreach:

LinkedIn connection request → reference that the team is growing
Email follow-up → link to a use case aligned with their tech stack
CTA → short video or audit offer based on their current role

You don’t need 1,000 leads when you’ve got 10 high-fit prospects with timing and context.

Negative triggers: How to spot (and work with) cold leads

What’s a negative trigger?

It signals that your prospect isn’t ready to buy, at least not yet. And the worst thing you can do is force the sale.

Common signs?

A series of bad reviews on G2 or Capterra
Total radio silence mid-funnel, even after earlier engagement
Traffic drop-offs after a pricing or demo page visit
A prospect says they’re “pleased” with a competitor’s product

These aren’t dead leads. They’re delayed leads. And how you treat them now determines whether you close them later or lose them for good.

Step 1: Shift from pitching to nurturing

When a trigger says not yet, don’t push harder. Pivot smarter.

Nurturing is your go-to move here, but we’re not discussing dumping them in a generic newsletter. We’re talking about targeted re-engagement with content matching their behavior and mindset.

What works:

Gated white papers that address known objections or challenges
Webinars on common pivot points (e.g., switching stacks, scaling pain)
Newsletters with intent logic, so you’re not sending beginner content to C-levels
Podcasts with episode tracking to detect renewed engagement

Tip: Set up automated follow-ups for every download. Don’t just serve content—build journeys around it.

Use tools like LGM to:

Tag visitors based on interest
Score leads automatically (more on that in the next module)
Build workflow branches based on page behavior, email clicks, and inactivity periods

Nurturing works when it’s relevant and responsive. Not when it’s a drip campaign on autopilot.

Step 2: Add reassurance content to your sequence

Cold signals aren’t always about timing. Sometimes, they’re about trust.

Your prospect may not be convinced you’re the right fit. Perhaps they had a bad onboarding experience… with someone else. Maybe they’re just playing it safe.

Here’s where reassurance content enters the scene:

Share case studies that mirror their reality—not your flashiest logo, but your most relatable one
Use client testimonials that speak directly to their objections (“We thought switching CRMs would be painful—it wasn’t.”)
Offer to connect them to real customers in the same role, size, and situation.

This isn’t about convincing. It’s about removing doubt.

If they trust the context, they’ll trust the conversation.

Capturing intent isn’t just about knowing when to reach out. It’s knowing when to pause, rethink, and nurture purposefully.

Clotilde Marès – Lead outreach/scraping @ Deux.io

Takeaways

Every signal—no matter how subtle—could be the start of something. Here’s what to watch for so you can move early, move smart, and stay ahead of the competition:

Start with the quietest signals. A profile view, a post like, a poll vote—these are your early whispers of interest. Hear them
Look for patterns, not noise. One click is curiosity. Three signals in a week? That’s a warm lead knocking
Content is your radar. Every like, comment, or CTA click is social intent. Build content that draws them in—and tells you who’s leaning in
Monitor the stack. Tech changes are treasure maps. New CRM, dropped tool, Stripe integration? That’s not noise. That’s your trigger
Corporate shifts = open windows. Funding rounds, key hires, geo expansions—read the business, not just the buyer
People move, budgets follow. A happy user changes jobs? That’s not goodbye—it’s your next land-and-expand
Cold isn’t dead. Ghosted leads aren’t gone. Watch behavior, adjust your nurture, and earn the rebound

Let LGM do the heavy lifting. From scraping social signals to launching multichannel workflows—automate fast, act smart.