Introduction

Only a tiny slice of your market is ready to buy. This guide shows how to use signals to find them and win fast.

What's the problem it solves?

Most teams chase every ICP-fit account the same way and waste time and budget. Signal-based GTM helps you focus on the few who are actually in market right now and tells you when and how to reach them.

Quick Summary

Signal-based marketing and sales use real-time clues from buyers to spot who is ready to talk now. These clues include job changes, repeat visits to key pages like pricing, review site research, new funding, and more. The system has three parts: an intelligence layer to collect data, an orchestration layer to trigger the right play, and an execution layer to deliver the right message across email, ads, social, and more.

Start simple. Pick one high-impact signal and build a clear workflow around it. The best first move for most B2B teams is tracking past champions who change jobs. These leads convert far better because trust already exists. Once that play works, add more signals, align sales and marketing on shared dashboards and SLAs, and keep tuning based on weekly results. Use decay rules and fatigue guards so you do not act on old signals or spam buyers with duplicate outreach.

Key Takeaways

• Less than 5 percent of your ICP is buying at any given time, so timing beats broad reach
• Three layers power the system: intelligence, orchestration, execution
• Combine first-party, second-party, and third-party data to see real intent
• Champion job changes are a top early signal and often convert 3x better than cold
• Orchestrate signals into plays with clear owners, SLAs, and next steps
• Prevent overload with suppression, priorities, and decay rules
• Run a 90 day pilot, measure weekly, and scale what works

What to do

• Define your ICP and personas, and clean your CRM data
• Pick one starter signal - champion job changes - and set a 4 step workflow: detect, enrich, route, act
• Write simple playbooks: who gets the alert, what message to send, what asset to share, what outcome to log
• Pipe signals into tools your team already uses like CRM, Slack, and sales engagement
• Set SLAs: champions in 24 hours, funding signals in 72 hours, website surges in 48 hours
• Add context to every alert: role, tech stack, past history, competitor use, renewal dates
• Prevent noise: one message per account per 14 days, merge overlapping signals, pause after replies
• Add decay rules: champions expire in 90 days, website intent in 30, competitor research in 45, funding in 180
• Meet weekly to review conversion by signal and tweak copy, timing, and routing
• After 60 to 90 days, layer more signals like review site activity or pricing page visits and repeat the cycle

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