Signals in practice: examples by business type

The hardest part of setting up an agent is the first decision: which of the signal sources actually mean something for what you sell. The catalog doesn't answer that, because the answer depends entirely on your business.

Below are worked examples across a range of businesses. Find the one closest to yours, or read a few and steal the logic. Each includes the specific sources to switch on, the Customize settings that make them precise, and what the signal lets you open with.

Turn on: Function Growth Momentum, GitHub Activity Intelligence set to Technology Adoption, Technology Stack Changes set to Added, Interpreted Job Postings.

The logic: Your buyer's problem is usually created by growth or by a migration. A team that just added three backend engineers has an onboarding problem it didn't have last quarter. A team that just adopted a new framework in public repositories has an integration problem. Both are yours to solve, and both are visible before anyone starts searching for a vendor.

Function Growth Momentum is the underrated one here. It tells you which department is expanding, not just that the company is, which matters enormously when you sell to one team inside a business.

Opens with: "Saw you've been adding to the platform team through the fall. Usually around the fourth or fifth hire, the local setup docs stop keeping up."

Turn on: Technology Stack Changes set to Replaced, Technology Fit set to Custom Technology naming your competitor, LinkedIn Competitor Engagement set to Custom Competitors, and the review source your competitor lives on set to Negative Reviews.

The logic: This is the most targeted configuration the product supports, and most people never build it. You're watching for three separate things: companies actively swapping tools, companies whose stack contains the thing you replace, and people publicly interacting with your competitor or complaining about them.

The negative review filter is the sharp one. A company whose G2 page is filling up with complaints has customers actively unhappy right now, and those customers are your prospects.

Opens with: Never by naming the competitor. Reference the problem, not the vendor. "A lot of teams running that setup hit a wall on reporting once they pass a hundred users."

Turn on: Hiring Demand Momentum set to 3M Growth, Hiring Velocity, Workforce Stability, Interpreted Job Postings, Funding Activity.

The logic: Your signal is the most legible on the whole list, because hiring is literally your product. The refinement worth making is Workforce Stability, which measures median employee tenure. Low tenure at a growing company means churn, and churn means roles that keep reopening, which is a different and often better conversation than a company simply expanding.

Interpreted Job Postings reads the wording of ads rather than just counting them, so it catches the companies describing a role they're clearly struggling to fill.

Opens with: "Noticed the same two roles have been open on your careers page since summer. Usually means the brief is fighting the market rather than the sourcing."

Turn on: Recent Google Ad Activity and Recent LinkedIn Ad Activity, both set to Currently Active, Website Change Intelligence, Social Reactivation on LinkedIn, Function Growth Momentum.

The logic: A company already spending on ads has a budget, an owner for that budget, and a number they're judged on. That's a far better prospect than a company you have to convince that demand generation exists.

Currently Active matters more than the 30 or 90 day windows here, because you want them mid-campaign when performance is a live question, not three months after they turned it off.

Social Reactivation is the quiet one worth including. A company that starts posting again after months of silence has usually just hired someone or decided marketing matters again.

Opens with: "Saw you've had search campaigns running since about September. Curious whether the LinkedIn side is pulling its weight, because that's usually where the cost per lead gets ugly."

Turn on: SEC Filing Intelligence set to Expansion & Investment, Relevant News Activity, Funding Activity, Hiring & Headcount Momentum set to 12M Growth.

The logic: Your buyer's problems come from scale and from change, and both are slow-moving. That means you want signals with a longer horizon than a hiring spike. Twelve-month headcount growth tells you a company has crossed a threshold where manual processes break. SEC filings tell you about expansion plans before they're executed.

SEC filings only cover public companies, so switch that off entirely if you sell to private ones. Otherwise it produces nothing and clutters your breakdown table.

Opens with: "You've roughly doubled headcount over the last year. Most finance teams find their close process stops working somewhere around that point."

Turn on: Function Growth Momentum, Workforce Stability, Funding Activity, Social Reactivation on LinkedIn, Podcast Signal Extractor.

The logic: You're looking for companies at an inflection point without the senior person to handle it. A company growing a function fast, with low tenure and a recent raise, often needs the leadership before it needs the headcount.

The podcast source deserves attention here. Founders and executives talk about their actual problems on podcasts in a way they never do on LinkedIn. If your buyer is someone who does interviews, this finds them describing your value proposition in their own words, which is the best possible opening you'll ever get.

Opens with: Whatever they said on the podcast. Quote them back, briefly, and connect it to what you do.

Turn on: Foot Traffic Spike, Google Maps Review Velocity Spike, Relevant News Activity, Hiring & Headcount Momentum.

The logic: Most of the 31 sources assume a digital-first company and produce nothing for a restaurant group, a clinic network, or a retail chain. These four are the ones that work, and Google Maps reviews are the pulse. Set them to Negative Reviews if you sell something that fixes an operational problem, and to All Reviews if you sell growth.

Relevant News Activity picks up local press, which is where multi-location businesses announce openings long before it reaches trade publications.

Opens with: "Saw the piece in the local paper about the third location. Usually the scheduling gets harder faster than the hiring does."

Turn on: LinkedIn Audience Engagement with keywords covering your topics, Podcast Signal Extractor, Virtual Event Activity, In-Person Event Activity, Social Activity Surge on LinkedIn.

The logic: Your prospects are people already investing in visibility. A company that just ran a webinar has content to promote and nobody to promote it. Someone whose posting activity just spiked is trying to build a presence and will notice if it isn't working.

LinkedIn Audience Engagement is your core source, and it does nothing until you add keywords. Set the keywords to the topics your clients want to own, and choose whether to track people posting about them, commenting on them, or reacting to them. Posters are the smallest and warmest group.

Opens with: "You've been posting about supply chain resilience pretty consistently since the summer. Are you getting anything back from it, or is it going into the void?"

Individual signals are clues. Combinations are cases, and the opportunity score is built to reward them.

A few pairings that work harder than their parts:

Funding plus hiring. A raise on its own is the most contested signal in outbound. A raise followed by hiring in the function you sell to tells you they've decided where the money goes, and it filters out the companies still sitting on the check.

Competitor engagement plus negative reviews. Someone commenting on your competitor's post is curious. Someone commenting while that competitor's review page fills with complaints is shopping.

Technology stack change plus GitHub activity. A stack change detected from the outside might be a trial. A stack change alongside public repository activity in the same technology means the team is committed.

Website change plus ad activity. A new pricing page and a live campaign in the same month usually means a launch, and launches create budget.

You don't configure stacks explicitly. You switch on the sources and let the opportunity score do the weighting, which is why leaving scoring turned off costs you most of the value here.

None of the examples above will fit exactly, and the method matters more than any of them.

The answer is usually narrower and less obvious than the list you'd assemble from theory, and it's often something you'd never have guessed. A company that sells warehouse software found its best signal was job postings mentioning a specific inventory system by name, which is Interpreted Job Postings rather than any of the hiring counters.

Start with three to six sources. You can add more once the breakdown table on your Intent Signals tab tells you which ones are producing replies rather than just volume.