glossary/Buying Signal (Intent Signal)
glossary term
Definition
A buying signal, sometimes called an intent signal, is an observable event that suggests a company is more likely to buy now than it was last month. It is the difference between a company that merely fits your ICP and one that fits and has a reason to move.
The strongest ones tie to a change that creates pressure or exposes a gap:
Fit tells you a company is worth talking to at all. Signal tells you now is a good time. You need both. A perfect-fit account with no live signal is a good addition to the list but not an urgent one. A company throwing a strong signal that does not fit your ICP is a distraction. The scoring job is to combine them, which is what lead scoring does.
Signals are what make signal-based outbound work. Ground every opener in a specific, observed event and its likely consequence. No observed signal means no strong reason to reach out, and honesty about that is what keeps the whole motion credible.
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The harder question
Knowing the concept is step one. Getting a working system shipped into your live stack, in weeks, is the job. That is what a fractional GTM engineer does: find the one lever, build the first working fix, hand you a system a hire can run.