Intent signals: the ones worth calling on.

The traditional prospect list is a filter: this industry, this headcount, this region. It produces a long list of companies that could buy, of which a small and unknown number have any reason to buy now. Working it means calling all of them to find the few, which is why outbound has the reputation it does.

The better list is built the other way round. Start from what companies are doing, not what they are. A change in the business is a reason to talk, and a reason to talk is the difference between a call that is interrupting someone and a call they are half expecting.

For what we sell - pipeline, built by people on the phone - the signals below are the ones that put a company on the board. Yours will differ, but the shape of the reasoning is the same for any market.

Someone left, and nobody replaced them

An SDR or business development person leaves in July. By September the role has quietly not been backfilled. The founder or the closers have absorbed the prospecting, which means, as the previous post argued, that it has stopped. The pipeline has not thinned yet. It will in the new year.

This is a strong signal, because the company has already decided it needs the function - it hired for it once - and has a gap in it right now. The conversation is not about whether prospecting matters. It is about how they cover the gap.

Closers hired with nobody feeding them

Two account executives join in the same quarter. Somebody has decided to grow revenue, and has bought closing capacity to do it. What they have not always bought is the top of the funnel those two people need in order to be busy.

Within a couple of months, the new hires are prospecting for themselves, expensively, and the person who hired them is watching two salaries wait for a diary to fill. That is the moment a conversation about pipeline is welcome, and the job advert told you it was coming.

A rep moved off the phones

The person who was doing outbound gets promoted into account management, or moves to a customer success role. It is good news for them and it usually means the outbound work went with them - not to a replacement, but nowhere. Job titles on LinkedIn tell you this weeks before the results do.

A second office, or a new market

A company that opens in Manchester, or launches into a sector it has not sold to before, has the same problem twice over: the existing team knows the existing market, and the new one has no list, no references and no conversations yet. Expansion is bought with pipeline that does not exist on the day of the announcement.

Funding, with a caveat

A funding round is the signal everyone uses, which is exactly the problem. The week a round is announced, the founder receives more outreach than in the whole previous year, nearly all of it opening with congratulations. It is a real signal - the money is usually for growth and growth needs pipeline - but it is a crowded one, and the useful time to act on it is six to ten weeks later, when the noise has stopped and the hiring plan has met reality.

What to do with a signal once you have it

• Put it in the first line. The opener of the email, the first sentence of the call. "You hired two AEs in the summer" is a reason to keep reading. "I hope this finds you well" is not.
• Order the queue by it. The freshest, strongest signal is called first, while it is still true. A signal has a life, and a board that is not re-sorted every week is a board of things that were true last month.
• Verify it before anyone dials. A job advert can be stale, a departure can have been backfilled quietly. The research that confirms the signal is what stops the call opening on something that is no longer the case.
• Let it set the ask. A company that has just lost its SDR needs cover now; a company that has just raised needs a plan for next quarter. Same product, different first meeting.

None of this is secret, and none of it needs a tool with intent in its name. It needs someone whose job it is to watch for these changes, verify them, and turn each one into a reason to talk before it stops being true. That is the whole of the work, and it is done before the first dial.