Buying signals are one of the most reliable ways to identify warm leads without relying on direct connections or recommendations from people who know you. The conversion rate from cold campaigns targeting people who recently showed a buying signal drastically outperform any other type of cold campaigns, yet almost all teams I talked to don’t know how to turn them into a consistent sales machine because of the inconsistency of their emergence. Sometimes, you’ll track hundreds of buying signals in a week, and other times it will feel like a wasteland. This post aims exactly to solve that - how to set up your campaign and turn buying signals into a consistent sales machine, even when the drought hits. Below is the recommended setup I built from scratch, step by step, from deciding which signals count to what the first message should say. The advice is based on my 10+ years of experience in sales and over 4 years of leading GTM for sales automation platforms. 1. Determine which signals count Not every signal should count, and the first mistake that often appeared in the campaigns I analyzed was not understanding where to draw the line. Make the scope of signal-hunting too wide, and you’re reaching out to people who are likely a worse fit than an average cold lead. Make it too narrow, and you’ll end up with inconsistent campaigns. So, the general rule of thumb is: a signal is only worth acting on if the person fits your ICP AND the action tells you something about their timing/buying intent, because a like from someone who will never buy from you is just a like and should be treated as just a like, not buying intent. Before anyone writes a message, I'd sort signals into three buckets: Act within a day: someone in your ICP comments on a post from you or a teammate, especially if they ask a question. The same goes for one person visiting your profile a few times in the same week. And for someone moving into a role that owns the problem you solve, since the first months in a new seat are usually when budgets get reshuffled and new decision-makers have to prove their worth. This is when you should strike with a clear offer, a proper value proposition, and no fluff. They need to add value and they need to do it fast, but they don’t have time to waste on long conversations or 3 layers of discussions before deciding. Make that journey as short and as informative as possible, and you’ll see success. Act within the week: a visit to your company page, a like on your content, a registration for an event in your space, or engagement with a competitor's post on a topic close to yours. Track your competitors and the general conversations on the topics you cover, too. There are many, many discussions on LinkedIn happening every day, events where people go to learn about the exact things you’re offering, problems they post about, that you solve. Don’t waste these opportunities just because you don’t want to expand beyond your network, this is how your signal machine becomes inconsistent. Of course, not every buying signal comes from a high-value ICP, but that’s why you add a layer on top of this that filters all the leads pulled in on the basis of how good of an ICP fit they are. Then you split them into tiers based on the lead quality and prioritize the highest tier leads. Ignore or just watch: a single like from outside your ICP, follows from people who sell to you, and most profile views from recruiters, students and job seekers, who make up a much bigger part of the "who viewed my profile" list than you’d expect. “Ignore” bucket matters more than it seems at first glance, because the teams that treat every view as intent end up spending their time, effort, and often best messages on people who were never going to buy, and then conclude that signals don't work. Don’t be that team. 2. Get every signal into one place On LinkedIn, signals are scattered by default. Profile views sit in one rep's account and post engagement sits with whoever posted, while company page visits are in the page admin's analytics. Job changes only show up if someone happened to save that person, and website visits live somewhere else entirely. This is a mess that has to be streamlined and organized, or many high-value signals will be lost. You don't need an expensive setup to fix this, but you do need one list that everything lands in and a fixed time every day when someone checks it. For a small team a shared sheet is probably enough, and once you're past a handful of reps, most outreach tools and CRMs can pull post engagers and profile visitors automatically. Which tool you pick matters because some are better than the others (wink wink), but having that one place all the leads are brought in and one person who pays attention and manages that sheet matters the most. Pro tip: Allocate 30-60 mins of each SDRs day to just going through the signals and making sure each one is caught and tracked. Set this as a recurring task, and train them to treat this as something natural and almost subconscious - like brushing your teeth. 3. Decide who owns each signal before it arrives This is the step I've seen skipped the most, usually because everyone assumes it will sort itself out once the signals start coming in. Surprise surprise, they don’t, and you need to organize this properly in order to make it work or half the leads will be lost. These are the four rules to manage signal ownership: Owner: the signal goes to whoever owns the account, not to whoever saw it first, and accounts nobody owns yet go to a rotation instead of a free-for-all. Collisions: only one person contacts a lead at a time, because a prospect who gets two friendly notes from the same company in one week cools down faster than one who got nothing (yes, this happened at least several times to the teams I talked to, and no, don’t be that team). Response time: each bucket gets a window and the team sticks to it, since a "within a day" signal that gets touched next Thursday is a cold lead again. This is why you create a flag for each lead with 3 options (See rule number 1 above). Record: the signal and the touch both get logged against the account in the CRM, so the context doesn't disappear into someone's LinkedIn inbox the day that rep leaves. I know, everyone hates more copy-pasting, but if you want to do it properly, this is the way. 4. Connection request: note or no note My rule here depends on whether the prospect knows you saw what they did. They know (they commented on your post, followed you, registered for your event): send a short note that mentions what they did, something like "Saw your question under the post on pipeline reviews, happy to connect." No pitch and nothing else, the reference is enough AND the only needed thing. We did some research recently and saw that connection notes that refer to a personal connection (like the one here) outperform the salesy ones 2-3x. They don't know (a profile view, a company page visit, website traffic): send the request without a note, or with a neutral one tied to something public, like their role or a post they wrote. Mentioning a signal the person doesn't know you can see turns the conversation toward your tracking instead of their problem, and it's very hard to get it back from there. This also applies to the leads you found on competitors’ posts, through attended events, or who posted/commented/liked about the topics you cover. I can’t give you a hard yes/no connection note here, you’ll have to go by instinct. If it feels like the connection note will add some value and increase the chance of getting accepted, shoot it. If not, send a blank connection request. If you're already connected, skip the request and message them directly, following the same rule about what you mention. 5. The first message after they accept Keep it short and about their situation rather than your product, and end with a question that is easy to answer, which usually takes two or three sentences. For someone who engaged with a post about forecasting, it could be: "Thanks for connecting. You mentioned forecast calls turning into storytelling sessions, which I hear from a lot of sales leaders. Is that something your team is trying to fix this quarter, or more of a background frustration?" Now, to anyone who’s had experience with sales or gets a lot of messages daily, even this message could sound too salesy because the last part - “Is that something your team is trying to fix this quarter, or more of a background frustration?” - kind of reveals that you’re trying to get that info out of them. So, if you want to go even more organic and pose a neutral/friendly question instead - do it. Then sell through the conversation. If they don't reply, one or two follow-ups a few days apart are plenty. After that I'd stop and let the next signal from the same person restart the conversation, because a long sequence fired at someone who showed interest once tends to burn through the goodwill the signal gave you in the first place. Plus, 4-5 message-long sequences perform worse than 3-message sequences. 6. Make it repeatable If you follow up to this point, you should have a solid signal-based machine that generates high-quality leads who showed buy-intent, segregates them into tiers based on how good of a fit they are, and allocates them to the right SDRs. You should also have a good basis for writing a high-performing sequence. What you don’t have yet is self-improving repeatability, and that’s the cherry on top that holds this entire cake together. Start by setting up a weekly review of about 60 minutes. For each signal type you look at how many came in, how many got touched inside their window, and how many turned into an actual conversation. After a month or so you'll know which signals really produce meetings in your market, and then you re-shape the targeting to focus on these, and re-structure the tiers to favor the ones who have proven to bring the most meetings and put them into higher tiers. Just make sure to take conversions and how much revenue the lead group ultimately generated in account too. One lead group might have produced 30+ meetings, but most of them turned out not to have any budget to expand yet and “will keep you in mind for the future”, and only 4 turned into clients. On the other hand, another group might have produced 15ish meetings, but 6 of them turned into clients, and each client went with a larger package than the 4 from the previous group. Favor the second one. Closing thoughts I know this is quite a long read, but breaking down the entire process of setting up a proper signal-based sales machine takes a lot of nuance, and I wanted to cover it all. Thanks everyone for reading and hope you find what I shared here useful. For transparency's sake - all the data, information, and research for this post came from an internal knowledge database - I’m the GTM Director of Expandi (sales software), and I consistently do research on the campaigns run through our platform to figure out what works. Aside from that, I also advise friends and colleagues with sales campaigns. This is, actually, how I fleshed out sinal-based outreach and managed to turn it into a consistent lead-generation process. I had issues in the beginning too, with these signals being too inconsistent and random, but the value-per-lead was so high that I decided to double down and figure out how to do it at scale. This is my method, I’m sure there are many other, but this one works for me. If you have any questions or anything you need help with, I’ll be more than happy to answer in the comments! 😄   submitted by   /u/cosankov [link]   [comments]