B2B Sales

Intent signals exploded in 2024, and that fire is only getting hotter in 2025. Clay, Trigify and similar tools are now in charge of tracking all the juicy actions and triggers.

The biggest issue? As more teams chase the same signals, their impact fades. 

That’s why it’s time to rethink how to use them to get the most out of it.

In this guide, we’ll cover:

• What intent signals are (with examples)
• Why common ones often backfire
• How to build a better scoring system
• Real-life use cases and tools to help you act on them

‍

What are intent signals?

Intent signals are external or internal indicators that a company may be ready (or getting closer) to buy your product or service.

As their name suggests, they help you detect intent even before you hear a word or see any reaction from the prospect.

‍

‍

You can split signals into two broad categories:

• Cold signals – used to detect interest from completely new leads.
• Warm signals – used to track leads you've already interacted with.
  
  

1. Detecting interest from the outside

When reaching out to leads who’ve never interacted with your brand, you can’t rely on first-party data. Instead, you look for external intent signals. 

Let’s go through some of the best signals used in cold outreach:

‍

Social signals

Using tools like Trigify and Common Room, you can track who’s engaging with content relevant to your space. 

For example:

• Someone comments on a LinkedIn post about AI in sales → they may be open to AI-based sales tools. If you have something relevant to offer, now it’s time.
• A founder likes your competitor's post → good chance they’re exploring options. Use this as your shot to stand out. Craft a sharper pitch, highlight what you do better, and give them a reason to look your way.

You can also monitor niche activity on Reddit – especially in B2B-focused subreddits like r/sales, r/msp, or r/startups. 

Set up targeted Reddit monitoring workflows in Clay to track relevant keywords or brand mentions, and pipe those into your intent scoring model.

‍

‍

Hiring signals

If a company is hiring for roles like “Sales Ops Manager” or “RevOps Lead”, and your solution replaces those roles, that’s a high-value signal. And you should react.

Clay is your right hand here again. It monitors LinkedIn job posts and you can also use it to assign scores based on job-title relevance. 

‍

‍

For example, if the company is hiring for a manager role, this may not be as promising as if they’re hiring for a director-level role, so you assign score 5 to manager role, and score 10 to the director role. That way, you can prioritise reaching out to companies with higher overall score.

‍

Company growth or change

External signals like:

• A new funding round (from Crunchbase or Google News),
• Expansion to a new market,
• Increasing headcount (tracked monthly),

...can all indicate growing needs. 

For example, if a company is expanding into the US, and your product supports go-to-market strategies there, that’s a perfect trigger. 

The best way to find these is to track mentions of the company in the news publications, and then analyze the contents of publications with AI. If the article mentioned expansion to new market, you can automatically reach with something like:

“Hey Rob, I saw you'll be looking to expand to a new market in 2026, and we could help with that.”

‍

Website visitors 

RB2B can deanonymize website traffic – around 30% of US-based visitors – showing you which individuals landed on your page. 

This information is super helpful because it lets you identify high-intent accounts and tailor your outreach based on the specific pages they visited.

A downside? Limited to US traffic only.

‍

2. Tracking intent after initial contact

Once a prospect has shown some interest (downloaded a guide, replied to an email, joined a call), your job shifts to monitoring their journey until they’re ready to buy.

This is where internal and more granular signals come into play:

‍

Engagement signals

A few nice examples in this category:

• Opened your email 3+ times?
• Clicked your pricing page?
• Asked a question in a reply?

This is where we suggest adding these leads to some type of newsletter platform, so you can track their behaviour.

At Peakflow, we also use Clay workflows to automatically analyze email replies with AI, track sentiment, and flag warm leads for priority follow-up.

Here’s what that looks like in action:

‍

‍

When someone replies to our outreach email, Clay automatically analyzes the sentiment of the response –  is it positive, neutral, or negative?

If the sentiment is positive, Clay goes further to tag what kind of positive it is:

• Did they ask for more info?
• Did they show clear interest?
• Did they request a meeting?

The best part? You can use Clay to push these insights straight to our Slack via integration.

‍

‍

Company-level tracking

For warm leads, you can also build a dynamic Clay table that:

• Tracks if they start hiring for roles linked to your service.
• Monitors if they appear in industry news.
• Scores each activity with weight (e.g., +10 for launching in a new market, +5 for hiring a relevant role).
• Automatically notifies your team when a lead crosses a scoring threshold (e.g., 30 points = high-intent).

After you have the most valuable signal in place, it’s time for the laser-targeted outreach, such as:

“Hey, I saw you’re expanding to the US and just hired a new Head of Sales. We spoke a few months ago – now might be a great time to revisit how we can help you scale your pipeline.”

‍

Why do “popular” signals often fall short?

Funding news sounds like a solid signal – the company has money, so they must be ready to buy, right?

Not always.

The problem is volume. As soon as a funding round hits the news, that company gets hit with hundreds of automated emails. Most say the same thing: “Congrats on the raise – let’s talk about XYZ.”

At that point, your message just blends in. Even if your offer is relevant, the timing and approach feel off.

Good intent signals aren’t just popular. They’re timely, specific, and connected to real buying behavior. Funding might be a starting point, but it’s rarely enough on its own.

‍

One signal vs. multiple signals

Single signals are useful. But multiple signals in combination are far more powerful.

For instance:

• Hiring sales reps → +1 signal
• Expanding to new region → +1 signal
• CEO liked competitor’s post → +1 signal

Now you have three aligned signals – a strong case for outreach. In Clay, you can track 10+ signals and assign custom scores. Once a company reaches your threshold, your team gets alerted.

This way, you avoid relying on a single signal and you’re looking at a fuller picture.

‍

Tool stack: How to operationalize signal tracking?

At this point, it’s already clear that manually tracking signals is impossible at scale. The heart of all this is automation. 

Let’s quickly go over the tools we recommend to help you get the most out of your signals:

‍

Clay - Central workflow builder for signal collection, scoring, and outreach automation.

Trigify - Tracks social engagement and interactions.

Common Room - Community insights, social behavior of leads.

RB2B - Deanonymizes website traffic 

‍

Pro tip: Even if you’re using Trigify or RB2B for signal detection, it's best to process and act on that data inside Clay. It becomes your control hub for every single signal.

‍

‍

Should you use AI SDR tools?

AI SDR tools sound great on paper and super tempting. 

Fully automated outreach, lead list building, messaging, and follow-ups, all for around $1,000/month. 

But in reality, they’re often too rigid. You have little control over targeting, messaging, or when to step in manually.

That’s why we give Clay a clear edge here.

Instead of full black-box automation, you can track meaningful signals (e.g. companies growing headcount by 20% in the last 3–6 months), assign points, and get notified when a lead becomes a fit. 

You’re still “calling the shots” in this case. You can analyze replies to your cold outreach using AI and tag them by sentiment and intent.

‍

Final thoughts

Quick reality check before we wrap up: signals are not magic bullets. But when layered and automated properly, they give you perfect insight into which companies are worth your time – and when.

For cold outreach, they help you find needles in haystacks. For warm leads, they help you re-engage with perfect timing. 

Either way, the future of B2B sales is no longer about “spray and pray.” It's based on reading between the lines aka signals. 

Rely on tools to catch those unspoken needs, desires, pain points – then properly act, react, and make the right move to close that deal.