Signal-based selling: how to find the buyers who are ready now

Most startup outbound goes to people who are not buying. That is not a copy problem. It is a timing problem. At any moment only a small share of your market is in-market, and the rest will not buy for months or years however good the message is.

Signal-based selling fixes the timing. Instead of guessing who to contact, you watch for the behaviours that show a person or an account is moving, score them, and act the same day. This guide shows you what to track, how to score it in a model you can build in a week, and what to send when a lead qualifies.

What is signal-based selling?

Signal-based selling is a way of choosing who to contact, when and with what message, based on the actions buyers take rather than a static list. A signal is any small, actionable behaviour or engagement cue: a visit to your pricing page, a like on the founder's post, a vote in a poll, a new hire in the team you sell to.

The approach rests on two facts about B2B buying. First, most of your market is not buying right now. Peter Weinberg and Jon Lombardo, heads of research and development at LinkedIn's B2B Institute, put it plainly: only 5% of B2B buyers are in-market to buy right now, and 95% will not buy for months or even years.

Second, the buyers who are in-market decide early. In 6sense's 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report, buyers chose from one of the vendors on their Day One shortlist 95% of the time, and buyers initiated 79% of engagements with sellers. If you wait for the inbound form, the decision is mostly made.

Signals let you find the 5% while they are forming that shortlist, and keep the other 95% warm until it is their turn. The sequence is always the same, from signal to score to outreach to meeting.

What are buying signals in B2B?

Buying signals in B2B are the actions that show someone is researching a problem you solve. The strongest are first-party: behaviour on channels you own, such as your website, your content, the founder's LinkedIn and your product.

Start with these six groups of first-party signals:

• Site visits. Repeat visits, pricing and case study pages, and visits from several people at the same company count for more than a single blog read.
• Content engagement. Downloading a guide, registering for a webinar, watching most of a recording or replying to an email.
• LinkedIn engagement with the founder. Following the founder, liking or commenting on their posts, accepting a connection request or replying to a message.
• LinkedIn engagement with the company page. Following the page, visiting it or responding to a paid ad.
• Polls and newsletters. Voting in a LinkedIn poll or following the founder's or the company's newsletter. Both are explicit opt-ins on a topic you chose.
• Product usage. Sign-ups, activation, new users joining from the same account, or a free user reaching a plan limit.

Product usage deserves extra weight if you offer a free tier or a trial. Forrester's State of Business Buying 2026 found that more than 60% of business buyers now use a trial to evaluate solutions. A trial is a signal you own outright. In the agentic AI healthcare engagement, every account that closed had 5+ product users engaged, so the number of users per account became a signal in its own right.

Founder engagement is the signal accelerator founders underuse most. Your posts already attract the right people. Every like, comment and poll vote is a named person telling you what they care about, and most founders never write any of it down.

What is the difference between first-party, second-party and third-party intent?

First-party intent is behaviour you observe on your own channels. Second-party intent is another company's first-party data shared with you. Third-party intent is research activity collected across many sites you do not own and sold as a feed.

• First-party is the most accurate and the cheapest. You know exactly who did what, and when. Its limit is reach, because it only covers people who already found you.
• Second-party usually comes from a platform where buyers research your category, such as a review site or a partner marketplace, which tells you which companies viewed your profile or compared you with alternatives. It is strong because the context is your category.
• Third-party shows which companies are reading about topics linked to your category across a wide network of publishers. It covers accounts that have never touched you, but it is account-level and noisy. Use it to prioritise a list, not to trigger a message.

For an early-stage startup the order of investment is clear. Get first-party capture working first, because it costs little and it is the signal you will act on most. Add second-party data when buyers in your category use review sites. Buy third-party intent only once you have an agreed account list and someone who reviews it every month.

AI research makes owned signals more valuable. In Gartner's survey of 645 B2B buyers, 45% said they used GenAI during a recent purchase, mainly to gather information on vendors and products, and buyers used an average of seven information sources. Research inside an AI assistant leaves no trace you can see. The moment that buyer lands on your site or engages with the founder is the first signal you get, so be ready to catch it.

Which trigger events show a company is ready to buy?

Trigger events are changes inside a company that create a reason to buy, and the three most useful are funding, hiring and leadership changes. They do not show intent on their own. They show that the conditions for a purchase have just changed.

• Funding. A new round brings budget and a plan to spend it. Reach out about what the money is meant to achieve, not with congratulations.
• Hiring. Job posts in the team you sell to show where a company is investing and which problem it is trying to solve with headcount. A company hiring three billing specialists is telling you its billing workload is growing.
• Leadership changes. A new executive in your buyer's seat reviews suppliers and processes in their first months. They want early wins and they are open to new vendors.
• Other changes. An acquisition, a new market, a new regulation or a competitor leaving the market all reset priorities.

Trigger events work best combined with engagement. A company that just raised, and whose head of operations liked the founder's last two posts, is a far better target than either signal alone.

How do you know when a prospect is ready to buy?

You know a prospect is ready when several signals stack up in a short window, ideally from more than one person at the same account. One signal is curiosity. Three signals in a fortnight, across two channels, is a buyer doing research.

The simplest way to see this is a score. Codax's master workflow uses a plain rule: each signal adds one point to a lead's score. Followed the company page, one point. Followed the founder, one point. Visited the company page, one point. Engaged with a poll, one point. Liked or commented on posts, one point. Followed the newsletter, one point. When the score qualifies, sales reaches out immediately with an email and a resource.

Keep it this simple at the start. A one-point-per-signal model is easy to explain, easy to audit and easy to change. Add weights later, once you have enough closed deals to know which signals predict meetings. Use the table below as your starting map.

How do you build a lead scoring model at an early-stage startup?

Build your first lead scoring model in a week: the signals you already capture, one point each, and a single threshold that triggers action. You do not need a data team or a large budget. You need an agreed list, one place to log signals and a rule everyone follows.

Here is a worked example. A head of finance at a target account follows the founder (1 point), votes in a poll on month-end close (1 point) and visits the pricing page (1 point, plus 1 extra). That is 4 points inside a week, above a threshold of 3, so the founder sends an email that day with a short guide on the poll topic.

Two rules keep the model honest. Let scores decay, so a signal from three months ago stops counting. And score the account as well as the person, because B2B decisions are made by groups. 6sense's 2025 report found that buying groups average 10+ members.

What should you do the same day a lead qualifies?

Act the same day, with a personal message and something useful. Signals go stale fast, and the buyer is comparing options now.

1. 1Check the account. Who else from the company engaged? Who in the buying group have you not reached yet?
2. 2Send from the founder. An email or LinkedIn message in the founder's voice that refers to the topic they engaged with, not to the fact that you saw them engage.
3. 3Attach a resource. A case study, a guide or a webinar recording that answers the question the signal suggests.
4. 4Offer one clear next step. A short call, a trial or a place on a design partner waitlist.
5. 5Log the outcome. Replied, booked or ignored. This is the data that improves the score.

Same-day action is a habit, not a tool. In every Codax engagement, positive replies and signals reach sales the same day. Speed matters because warm signals rarely become meetings on the first touch. In the cybersecurity services engagement, accounts took an average of 5 touches before the first call, 8 in 10 opportunities were touched by three or more channels, and the median from first touch to first meeting was 41 days.

Signals also change which channels pay off. In the agentic AI healthcare engagement, retargeting people who had already engaged produced meetings 4x cheaper than targeting cold titles. For the messages themselves, read the founder outbound playbook.

How does Codax run signal-based selling for founders?

Codax runs signal-based selling as part of a growth department built around the founder. A growth department is one senior team that owns qualified pipeline end to end, from strategy to execution, under a single accountable lead. The founder stays the voice, the sender and the closer.

The master workflow is the same for every founder. Lead lists are enriched in Clay. Profiles are visited first as a warm-up, then connection requests, messages and post likes go out from the founder's account. Signal capture runs through tools including Common Room, RB2B and Phantombuster, with HeyReach for LinkedIn outreach and warm-up. Codax spends roughly $3,000 a month on foundational tools, so the founder does not have to build the stack. The GTM tool stack guide explains each category.

Warm leads come from LinkedIn poll voters, post likers and commenters, newsletter subscribers and paid ad responders. Always-on demand creation, from LinkedIn content and case studies to whitepapers, webinars and podcasts, keeps those signals coming. Demand capture, meaning signal scoring followed by alignment between sales and marketing, turns them into conversations. Copy is tested with the founder every round, what books calls gets more volume, and a monthly pipeline review sets the next round.

Signals shape the message as well as the timing. For an accelerator-stage revenue cycle AI company, outreach went straight to owners of independent billing and revenue cycle firms with a message about their future: succession, staffing, margins and the cost of keeping up with technology. That programme brought $8M ARR into design partnership across two acquisitions.

See how we work for the full model, the accelerator founders series for the rest of the playbook, and how the B2B buyer journey has changed for why timing matters more than it used to.