Signals and prospects: how they relate

New users often expect the numbers on the Intent Signals tab to line up: a thousand signals should mean roughly a thousand prospects, and if it does not, something must be broken. Nothing is broken. Signals and prospects are different things, and the relationship between them runs in several directions at once.

Understanding this is what lets you read the funnel properly and fix an agent that is finding too few people.

Two different objects

	A signal	A prospect
What it is	Something a company did	A person you might contact
Attached to	A company	A person, at a company
Example	A company posted nine engineering roles this month	The VP of Engineering at that company
Where you see it	Intent Signals tab	Prospects tab
Can there be several?	Yes, many per company	Yes, many per company

A signal is company-level evidence. A prospect is a person. Everything else follows from that.

The relationship runs four ways

All four of these happen constantly inside a healthy agent.

Case	What is happening
A signal produces no prospect	The most common outcome. The company fired a signal but does not match your targeting, or no suitable decision-maker could be identified, or the intent was not strong enough to promote the company. The signal is still counted. It just does not become anyone.
A signal produces one prospect	The straightforward case. One company, one right person to contact.
A signal produces several prospects	A company hiring across two functions might yield the VP of Engineering and the Head of Talent. Both are real prospects from a single signal, and both may be worth contacting.
Several signals produce one prospect	A company raises funding, changes its technology stack, and starts running ads, all in the same fortnight. That is three signals pointing at one company, and possibly one person worth talking to. The signals do not create three prospects. They make the one prospect stronger.

That last case is the one that matters most for your results, because it is where the opportunity score does its work. Multiple independent signals from the same company are better evidence than one, and a prospect surfaced that way should sit higher in your list.

Why the funnel numbers do not divide

The four counters at the top of the Intent Signals tab each count a different kind of thing.

Counter	What it counts
Signals detected	Individual detections. If one company is picked up by three different signal sources, that is three detections, not one.
High-intent companies	Companies, not signals. Several detections at one company collapse into a single company here.
Identified prospects	People. One company can produce several, or none.
Pushed to outreach	People who also cleared your outreach threshold and entered a workflow.

So dividing one by another does not give you a conversion rate. Signals collapse into companies, companies expand into people, and people are then filtered by score. The number goes down, then up, then down again.

You can see the collapse for yourself. Below the funnel, Breakdown by signal source shows a detected count per category. Add those up and you get the headline signals figure, which means a company detected by three sources is contributing three times to the total and once to the company count.

A worked example

An agent reports 726 signals detected and 0 identified prospects. That looks broken. It usually is not. It means the sources are firing, plenty of companies are doing interesting things, and none of them are converting into people you could contact. The fix is in targeting or thresholds, not in the signal sources, which are clearly working.

The opposite pattern, very few signals but a healthy prospect count, means your sources are too narrow but everything downstream is well configured.

Why a signal produces no prospect

The company does not match your targeting. Wrong industry, wrong size, wrong country, wrong company type. The signal was real, the company is not yours.
The signals did not add up to high intent. One weak signal on its own may not promote a company.
No suitable person was found. The company matches and the intent is there, but nobody at that company holds a job title on your list. Small companies frequently have no VP of anything.
The prospect scored below your visibility threshold. They exist, they are just hidden from you.
They were excluded. Blacklisted, or a locked profile another of your agents messaged within the last 14 days.

Only the first four are visible in the funnel. Exclusions happen quietly, which is intended, but worth remembering when a company you expected never appears.

Reading the funnel to find the problem

Work down the four counters and stop at the first one that is near zero. That is where you are losing people, and it tells you which setting to change.

First low number	What it means	What to change
Signals detected	Your sources are too narrow or too specific	Add signal sources, or broaden their Customize settings
High-intent companies	Signals are firing but not on companies that look like buyers	Change which sources are on rather than how many
Identified prospects	Right companies, no reachable people	Widen Target Job Titles, or reconsider company size
Pushed to outreach	You found people and are not contacting them	Lower the outreach threshold. This is the most common cause of a busy-looking agent that sends nothing

Widening your results

When an agent is finding too few people, there are six levers. Pull them in this order, because they run from cheapest and most reversible to slowest.

1. Lower the visibility threshold

Settings, then Opportunity score. Drop from 75+ to 50+. This shows you prospects that already exist and were being hidden, so the effect is immediate and costs nothing. Look at who appears. If the new arrivals are people you would happily contact, your threshold was too high. If they are obviously wrong, put it back and move to the next lever.

Check scoring is switched on first. Opportunity scoring is off by default. If the toggle at the top of that section is off, neither threshold is doing anything and this lever will have no effect at all.

2. Lower the outreach threshold

Settings, then Outreach settings. This is the gate that decides who actually gets messaged, and it is set separately from visibility. If you can see plenty of good prospects and few are being contacted, this is your problem and nothing else is.

3. Rebalance fit against intent

The bar at the top of the Opportunity score section splits the score between how well a company matches your profile and how much live intent it is showing. The default is 60 percent fit, 40 percent intent.

Move toward intent if you are missing companies with strong timing that sit slightly outside your usual profile.
Move toward fit if you are getting companies doing interesting things that would never buy from you.

This changes the ranking rather than the pool, so it redistributes rather than expands. Use it when the volume is acceptable but the wrong people are at the top.

4. Widen your targeting

Settings, then Targeting. Adding job titles is usually the highest-yield change here, because it directly addresses the identified-prospects stage. If you are only targeting VPs, adding Head of and Director of will often double your prospect count without lowering quality, since at smaller companies those titles do the same job.

Widening company size and locations expands the pool further upstream, at the companies stage.

5. Broaden the Customize settings on sources you already have

Each signal source has a Track control that only appears once the source is switched on. If you set review velocity to negative reviews only, or ad activity to currently running only, you deliberately narrowed it. Loosening those is a gentler expansion than adding new sources, because you keep the signal types you already know work.

6. Add signal sources

The slowest lever, and the one most people reach for first. Adding sources expands the top of the funnel, but new sources take time to fire and the results are harder to attribute. Add one or two, not ten, and give them a fortnight.

How to change these without confusing yourself

One lever at a time. Changing the threshold and the targeting together tells you nothing about which one worked.
Give each change a few days. Some signal sources fire weekly rather than hourly.
Watch quality, not just volume. A prospect count that doubles while the reply rate halves is not an improvement.
Use the breakdown by signal source to judge. Reply rate per source is the only honest measure of whether an expansion helped.
Write down what you changed and when. Three weeks later nobody remembers, and the reply-rate change will be meaningless without it.

When you have too many

Reverse the order. Raise the outreach threshold first, since it costs you nothing to see prospects you are not contacting. Then raise visibility. Then narrow the Customize settings on your noisiest sources, which the breakdown by signal source will identify. Turning sources off entirely is the last resort, because a source producing few but good prospects is worth keeping.