Buying signals are prospect actions, behaviors, or company events that indicate readiness to purchase a product or service. They range from direct requests like asking for pricing to indirect clues like a leadership change or a hiring surge. In B2B sales, they're how you separate accounts worth calling from accounts that will waste your morning.
Here's the problem: most sales teams treat buying signals as a checklist. Download a whitepaper? Signal. Visit the pricing page? Signal. Breathe in the general direction of your website? Signal. Everything counts, nothing gets prioritized, and your reps drown in noise instead of focusing on real pain points.
The average B2B deal now involves 13 decision-makers (Martal Group). The median conversion rate sits at 2.9%. Cold email reply rates average 8.5% (Autobound).
These numbers aren't improving because teams have more signals. They're getting worse because teams can't tell which signals matter.
This piece defines what buying signals actually are and breaks down the types that predict deals, with concrete B2B examples. For scoring models, signal stacking, and building a full signal-based program, head to our complete guide to buying signals.
What does "buying signals" mean in B2B?
Every prospect action and company event that hints at purchase readiness falls under this umbrella. In B2B, these signals carry more weight than in consumer sales because the buying process is longer, involves more people, and happens mostly in the dark. A buying signal is your flashlight.
B2B buyers complete 57-70% of their research before ever talking to a vendor (Cognism). That stat should bother you. It means your prospect has read competitor pages, watched demo videos, and probably built a shortlist before your SDR even knows they're in-market.
The purchase decision is happening. You just can't see it.
Buying signals exist because of this visibility gap. They're the traces prospects leave behind while they do all that invisible research and planning. Some traces are loud. Others are whispers.
The distinction that matters most isn't verbal versus nonverbal or online versus offline. It's explicit versus implicit.
Explicit signals are direct expressions of intent. A prospect fills out a demo request form. A decision-maker replies to your email asking about implementation timelines. A company's procurement team sends an RFP.
These tell you someone is actively evaluating. Confidence is high.
Implicit signals are indirect. They require interpretation.
A target account's VP of Engineering starts posting about scaling challenges on LinkedIn. The company announces a Series B round. Three new SDR roles appear on their careers page.
None of these say "we want to buy your product." But they tell you something is changing, and change creates buying windows.
| Signal type | Example | Confidence level |
|---|---|---|
| Explicit | Demo request, pricing inquiry, RFP | High |
| Implicit behavioral | Repeat website visits, content downloads, webinar attendance | Medium |
| Implicit firmographic | Funding round, leadership hire, product launch | Medium-high (with context) |
The firmographic signals often get overlooked, which is a mistake. A new CRO doesn't just mean someone changed their LinkedIn title. According to Cognism, new leaders spend 70% of their discretionary budget in their first 100 days (Cognism). That's a buying window with a timer on it.
Types of B2B buying signals
Explicit signals (direct expressions of intent)
These are the signals every sales team already tracks. A prospect asks about pricing. Someone books a demo. A potential customer responds to outreach with questions about your product or service.
Explicit signals are high-confidence because the prospect is telling you, in plain language, that they're evaluating.
The challenge isn't identifying them. It's speed. Harvard Business Review research by Oldroyd found that reps who contact leads within one hour are nearly 7x more likely to qualify them (Harvard Business Review).
Most teams respond in hours or days. By then, the prospect has moved on.
Implicit behavioral signals (digital footprints)
These come from how prospects interact with your content and digital presence. Repeat website visits. Multiple page views in a single session. Content downloads. Webinar signups. Social media engagement with your posts.
Each one is weak on its own. Together, they paint a picture of growing purchase intent.
The trick is volume and recency. One pricing page visit means curiosity. Three pricing page visits in a week from the same account, combined with a case study download, means someone is building a business case. Signado tracks these patterns across your target accounts and surfaces them when they cluster, so your reps see the pattern without manually piecing it together.
Implicit firmographic signals (company-level events)
These are the most underrated category. They happen outside your website and CRM, often outside your awareness entirely. Funding rounds. Leadership changes. Hiring surges. Product launches. Partnership announcements.
These are sales trigger events that create the conditions for a purchase, even if the company hasn't started looking at vendors yet.
A company that just closed a Series B has fresh capital and pressure from investors to grow. That's a strong buying signal. A company that just hired five account executives is building its revenue engine and will need tools to support that team.
These signals don't decay as fast as a website visit, but they do have a shelf life. Signado uses two monitoring cadences for this reason: Priority list runs daily for accounts in active buying windows, and Watchlist runs weekly for longer-term tracking.
For deeper coverage of how signals interact and compound, see our complete guide to buying signals.
What is an example of a buying signal?
A Series B company hires a new VP of Sales, posts four SDR openings the same week, and their CEO starts publishing LinkedIn content about "scaling revenue." That combination tells you their sales org is about to rebuild its tool stack, and you have roughly 90 days before decisions get locked in.
Here are concrete examples across categories:
| Signal | What it looks like | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Demo request | Form fill on your website or reply asking for a walkthrough | Direct intent. Highest-confidence signal you'll get. |
| Pricing page visits | Same account hits your pricing page 3+ times in a week | Someone is comparing costs and building a business case. |
| Funding announcement | Press release or Crunchbase update showing a new round | Fresh capital plus investor pressure to deploy it. 2-8 week window. |
| Leadership hire | New CRO, VP Sales, or CTO announced on LinkedIn | New leaders re-evaluate the tech stack in their first 90 days. |
| Hiring surge | 5+ new roles in sales or engineering posted in a month | Signals team growth that creates tool and infrastructure needs. |
| Competitor review | Prospect leaves a review of a competitor on G2 or Capterra | They're actively comparing. They want to hear from alternatives. |
| Content engagement | Downloads your case study, then attends a webinar the next week | Growing interest that hasn't converted to explicit intent yet. |
| Product launch | Company announces a new product line or market expansion | New operations create gaps that didn't exist before. |
| Executive social activity | CEO or founder posting repeatedly about growth or hiring challenges | Broadcasting priorities publicly, often before any vendor outreach. |
Each signal has a different weight and a different shelf life. A demo request matters today. Funding rounds stay relevant for weeks. Leadership changes give you months. The companies generating the strongest signals often don't realize they're sending them.
How to identify buying signals in your sales process
Buying signals come from two sources. First-party signals live in your own data. Second-party and third-party signals require external monitoring.
Your CRM, website analytics, and email platform already capture first-party signals. Website visits, content downloads, email opens, form submissions. The data is there. The problem is that it's scattered across tools, and nobody is connecting the dots between "visited pricing page" and "downloaded the ROI calculator" and "their company just announced a partnership."
Third-party signals require looking outside your own walls. Funding data from Crunchbase. Job postings from LinkedIn and Indeed. News from press releases and media coverage. Executive activity on social platforms. Intent data from providers that track content consumption across the web.
Monitoring all of this manually takes 30-60 minutes per account, based on what we see across Signado users. That's fine for your top 10 accounts. It doesn't scale to 200.
This is the signal-to-noise problem. More data isn't better when your sales team can't process it. A rep who gets 47 alerts in their morning will ignore all of them.
Signado monitors all seven trigger types across your target accounts, and when signals fire, your reps get context for outreach that references specifics instead of generic templates. The signal-based selling approach works because it replaces volume with timing.
Signal-based outreach consistently outperforms cold email. Backlinko found the average cold email reply rate sits at 8.5%, while teams using signal-specific personalization report 2-3x higher response rates based on timing alone. The lift doesn't come from better copywriting. It comes from reaching the right prospect at the right moment with a reason to reply. That timing advantage extends to cold email subject lines too — referencing a trigger event in the subject line is the single biggest predictor of open rates.
For scoring frameworks and prioritization models, see our complete guide to buying signals.
FAQ
What are the 4 buying behaviors?
The four buying behaviors describe how people approach a purchase, not the signals they generate. Routine purchases happen on autopilot with little evaluation. Limited decision-making involves some comparison but low emotional investment. Extensive decision-making requires deep research and multiple stakeholders, which is where most B2B deals land.
Impulse buying is rare in B2B, but it shows up in low-cost tools with free trials where a single user can adopt without approval. Buying signals are what you observe during the extensive decision-making process, when the stakes are high enough that prospects leave a trail.
Are buying signals different in B2B vs B2C?
The concept is the same. The signals are different. B2C buying signals are mostly behavioral: cart additions, wish lists, browse-then-leave patterns. They happen fast and they're tied to individuals.
B2B signals layer company-level events on top of individual behavior. A prospect attending your webinar matters more when their company also just posted a competitor review on G2 and announced a product launch. B2B purchases take months, pass through committee review, and hinge on organizational triggers that don't exist in consumer buying.
Buying signals tell you who's ready to have a conversation. Not who might be. Not who fits your ICP on paper. Who's ready right now. If you want to automate the monitoring and stop relying on manual research, that's what Signado does. See how it works.
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