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Nick Rybak explores how modern B2B companies grow through marketing strategies, website innovation, and content that converts. Every two weeks, we talk to marketing leaders and founders about what’s working and what’s not.
Let's pray for a conversion!
Nick Rybak (00:55)
William, welcome to the podcast. I’ve been looking forward to this one. You are one of the GTM leaders I know who deeply cares about signals. You know a lot about that, and I hope we will uncover the truth about signals because I see that topic is quite hot, especially on LinkedIn where people are discussing the right time to approach a client. So, welcome to the podcast.
William Wickey (01:26)
Thank you, Nick. I’m thrilled to be chatting with you.
Nick Rybak (01:30)
Alright, so let’s start with the basics. I know that everyone talks about signals. It is, as I said, quite a hot topic right now. But let’s start with actually defining what is a signal in go-to-market and what is not, from your point of view.
William Wickey (01:51)
Signals can mean a lot of different things to different people, and you see different platforms offering different shades and flavors of this. At a high level, a signal is just when something happens to an account or contact in your market that indicates there’s a reason to take action. So at the broadest level, that’s what I would define a signal as.
Nick Rybak (02:18)
And what do you think? Is there anything that people might think of as a signal which actually is not?
William Wickey (02:28)
That’s a good question. I would say in a lot of tools out there, you will see signals that I would define as more of a “score.” I think of a signal as something that is specific, that is happening: a field changes, a specific event occurs, and that is useful as a trigger for either reaching out or doing further enrichment.
There are lots of intent offerings that are more of a score. They are aggregates of various things happening in the background that are measured as a percentage or a meter. I think that is one thing that people confuse. I think of a signal as a trigger action, and oftentimes what you see with intent offerings in many platforms is a black-box score.
Nick Rybak (03:47)
As I understand, there are different types of signals. Some of them are account-based, some are person-level signals. How do they differ in value and use cases from your point of view?
William Wickey (04:05)
Yes, there are lots of different things that people call signals, including things happening on the contact level, on the account level, in various places of the funnel, and things that you own versus things you’re sourcing from a third party. My hierarchy of intent signals would roughly flow down from contact-level signals that match specific buyer personas to more account-level stuff, while also cascading from specific to general.
For example, at the contact level, the most valuable intent signals are going to be first-party signals that you source yourself: your email views, page views, product usage, demo engagement—things that haven’t yet risen to the level of a lead conversion but are happening with your product. You’re measuring those with a tool like Segment or within HubSpot with your lead scoring or GA4. Things that are happening on your content are going to be more valuable for reaching out and scoring people.
Below that, I would probably put contact-level signals that indicate specific buying action. For example, with Deal Intelligence, we flag when your buyer persona is connecting with a direct competitor’s AEs on LinkedIn. That’s usually a strong indicator that someone is in a buying cycle. When you see your ICP engaging with your competitors, that’s a very strong timing indicator.
Below that, I would put what I call first-degree inferred signals. For example, one of your users who has buying authority moves to a new account. UserGems is an example of a tool that does this really well. You want to reach out to them in their new role and make your pitch.
There’s also third-party account-level intent. For example, people are engaging with your product profile on G2. If you’re seeing lots of people compare you to other products or look at your category, that is an indicator that they’re in a buying cycle.
I would also put technographic changes in this category. So you observe one of your target accounts install software that you know you need to have present for an integration, like HubSpot. That’s a good reason to reach out.
And then down towards the bottom, you’ve got these bundled intent scores that we mentioned. They’re more of a meter that lets you know there is a collection of activity, but you may not know exactly what. That’s what you often see with ZoomInfo and Apollo. So that’s roughly the cascade from specific to general, from contact to account, of how I think about the actionability and clarity of intent signals.
Nick Rybak (09:34)
You’ve mentioned some different tools like Apollo, ZoomInfo, LinkedIn, and so on. Do you think people should ever consider building their own signals? For example, scraping likes from your competitors’ posts on LinkedIn and reaching out to these people if they match your ICP, or is that overkill?
William Wickey (10:06)
I think people should absolutely be building their own signals. There are a lot of exciting things you can do with scraping plus agents. The most simple way to build out your own signal prioritization is your own lead scores. Build lead scores that have a dimension for contact-level fit and engagement, as well as account-level fit and engagement. The inputs to those are sometimes those first-party intent signals we mentioned; you want to weight more heavily if someone is interacting with your pricing page or competitor pages.
I think people should absolutely be doing it. It’s not extremely difficult. When it comes to scraping, one thing I’ll just note is that you not only want intent data, you want feeds of intent. You want ongoing monitoring. Scraping a bunch of information is a snapshot in time, which is great for prioritization, but what you really want is ongoing observation. That’s the big difference between just lead data and the context and timing piece that you really want with intent. I would encourage people not just to think of intent as a snapshot, but as ongoing feeds of relevant information to trigger campaigns off of.
Nick Rybak (13:08)
I like the idea of constantly monitoring your ICP for signals. When you say “score,” is it basically stacking those signals on top of each other? For example, if they saw a pricing page, then they went to G2 and compared some software. Do you sum up these signals to get a better score of intent?
William Wickey (13:46)
That’s exactly right. When you’re building out your own lead scoring system, your inputs are these signals combined with certain firmographic data points. Account and contact data are relatively easy to source these days; that’s fairly commoditized. But the ongoing observation of signals within those accounts is what is harder to source, especially at scale, to a level where you’re feeding enough automated campaigns or your SDRs enough to hit their quota. So I think of it in terms of working backwards from whatever our target is in pipeline generation and figuring out how we get enough touches on the right people to fill that bucket.
Nick Rybak (15:19)
You’ve mentioned lots of tools. What are the most valuable sources of signals today? I’ve never tried ZoomInfo, for example, but many people say it’s extremely expensive and there are better alternatives. Do you have a list of some gold sources of signals?
William Wickey (15:47)
I think it’s different for every company. In terms of first-party engagement, people can get a lot of this information with Segment, HubSpot, or GA4—anything that gives you a more granular view of anonymous people visiting your site. Clearbit is a good one for de-anonymizing website visitors at the contact level. Gong can be one; if you have lots of discovery calls, some of that data can feed into your account-level scoring over time.
I would definitely encourage people to check out Deal Intelligence if you’re in a really competitive market. That’s where this sort of tool really shines.
Most people already have lead data in place, either from a vendor like Apollo or ZoomInfo. I would say try that out, see if it meets your needs. If you are not getting quality signals that are converting at a strong rate, then you should be thinking about higher-quality, more relevant signals and probably be willing to pay a premium for those. If you’re converting 10%, that’s a huge difference, even if it’s a lower volume. The more valuable thing to do, in my mind, would be to pay a bit of a premium to build out some of these higher-quality but lower-volume intent feeds and stack them, versus going super broad with the bundled scores.
Nick Rybak (19:17)
As you mentioned, signals aren’t universal and differ from company to company. If you’ve never tried to work with signals, how do you start? How should teams decide which signals matter for their specific product and market?
William Wickey (19:50)
I think doing a bit of a brainstorm and coming up with your wish list is a good way to begin. Generally, the best signals are going to be things that help indicate a buyer has entered the market. They’re either ready to purchase or they’re doing something that says now is a good time to reach out. I would think about your own lead qualification criteria or your MQL definition.
The way to really wrap your head around building a strong intent signal motion is to ask: how can you take things that are happening on the engagement level with your existing content and website and turn them into actionable triggers, either for automation or for the SDRs? That’s the muscle you’re building. Set up email drips, your own scoring, dynamic lists, and then try to get a sense of the ratio of signal to noise. Start broad and then narrow it down to something that is manageable. Execute on it, and then see if you’re getting the conversion rates that you want. That’s roughly how I would think of getting started.
Nick Rybak (22:31)
How do you operationalize signals in outreach without crossing the line into “we are watching you” territory? How do you not cross the line of compliance or just being too weird when you mention something and people wonder, “How did you know that?”
William Wickey (23:09)
This is a common question. I get it a lot: how do we not be creepy with this? I think the way to think about it is when you see one of these signals, first, do you already have an outreach motion in your repertoire that is relevant? The key would be to look at the context. Are you going in completely cold, or is there some historic context as to why you are reaching out?
Usually, there is some sort of context that you can observe over time as companies mature. For Deal Intelligence, for example, we monitor the social interactions between your competitor and your market. When you observe that connection, what do you do? You don’t reach out and say, “Hey, I saw you connected with these people.”
But it’s certainly reasonable to reach out and say, “Hey, are you in market for this tool? I’ve had a lot of conversations with people in your industry with your title recently. Here’s a piece of value-add content that we’ve written to solve a problem you might be running into.” It doesn’t have to be tied directly to the signal in a way that makes it stand out as distinct from how you would approach your outbound motion otherwise. Always offer value and make that connection.
Nick Rybak (26:46)
That totally makes sense. Basically, being honest about why you are reaching out may help you not be creepy in the first place.
William Wickey (27:02)
Important not to be creepy. I think being genuine or straightforward is always helpful. It doesn’t mean you have to show how you’re doing everything. In that competitive situation, it’s perfectly reasonable to say, “Hey, we’re helping people solve this specific set of pain points. It looks like from my research that you’re competing with companies A, B, and C. Are you guys thinking about tools that solve XYZ pain point?” The timing piece that is supplied from these signals doesn’t have to be foregrounded necessarily. Outreach should always have that ring of being genuine and helping with a legit problem.
Nick Rybak (28:19)
How does signal usage evolve as a GTM team matures? If you start with basic ones, how do you add on top of that to make it perform better or automate things?
William Wickey (28:44)
I think what typically happens is people will start really broad. They’ll see these signals from lead providers, get as many as possible, and then run automated campaigns to them that are fairly homogenous. That’s a fine starting point. But they’ll see those lower conversion rates and then start dialing things back to focus on a motion that is more robust.
The better way to do it, in my opinion, would be to start narrow. Start with really clear trigger actions and then build those up over time. Start stacking them. Maybe one of these signals is only giving you five signals a month, or 20, or 100. That’s not extremely high volume. But if you add a couple of those in and they’re converting well, all of a sudden you’ve got a pretty strong intent pipeline.
Frankly, just pay more for higher-quality signals, validate that it’s worth it, and go from there. On the marketing side, we have calculations like return on ad spend. You can do the same thing with signals. Oftentimes, marketing teams are paying hundreds or even four figures for leads for B2B companies, but for their entire intent programs, they’re getting data for just the $100 add-on and not treating it the same way, when really these are potentially more valuable and convert better. You can just do the math for yourself: what is your signal-to-lead conversion rate and what does lead-to-close look like? You’ll see that you can be spending a lot more for higher-value signals if they are demonstrating buying behavior. The mentality should be higher quality over higher volume.
Nick Rybak (32:41)
That’s a great perspective. If you are throwing away lots of money on paid ads, for example, not capitalizing on signals can be just a waste of your ad budget because you can work with people who already showed some interest in your product.
William Wickey (33:12)
That’s exactly right. And there is also a virtuous relationship between these intent signal programs and the marketing team. As you are building out and scoring accounts or observing intent signals, you should also be building out ad audiences and feeding them to the marketing team. The same motion that you are running out of your CRM can power your ad campaigns. These can absolutely be supporting each aspect of your funnel.
Nick Rybak (34:30)
You’ve already dropped lots of insights here. But if you had to summarize a signal-based GTM playbook for 2026, what are the non-negotiables?
William Wickey (34:54)
I would say focus on clarity over volume. Think in terms of clear trigger actions. Think in terms of really these four aspects: account fit, contact fit, context, and timing.
Those are the key ingredients for a really effective intent signal. When you start boiling it down, you will see that these things are not extremely high volume. But if you start building out the motion to work through the highest value pieces that meet those thresholds, then you’re heading in the right direction.
Also, just begin trying. I think there are a lot of mature companies that don’t have this motion in place. The companies that I’ve seen adopt this have been wildly successful. This is one of the first things that we oftentimes set up for early-stage companies, and it is the cornerstone of driving volume, demand, and pipeline.
And with any marketing and sales topic, I would encourage people to strip the buzzword out and ultimately think about what is happening here because these terms come and go. The motion we’re talking about here is lasting: it is now possible through new types of tools to dynamically observe things that indicate when you should reach out to people. That is something that will persist into the future, whether or not we call it “intent signals.” That’s the motion you want to be building.
Nick Rybak (38:38)
I love that. William, that was a fantastic deep dive. Thank you for sharing that so openly. If you enjoyed this episode, go follow William Wickey on LinkedIn. He shares sharp insights on GTM, intent, and signals. And while you are there, add me on LinkedIn as well. I’m Nick Rybak, host of the B2B Marketing Flywheel podcast. So William, thank you for sharing that. Appreciate it.
William Wickey (39:08)
Thank you for having me today. I love talking about this stuff, and if people have questions, feel free to reach out. I’m always happy to chat. I even maintain personal office hours for fun, so you can go to my website and find a calendar link there. I love chatting with people about these topics, and I appreciate the time chatting with you today.
Nick Rybak (39:35)
I love that. Thank you. And please make sure to follow the podcast, leave us a like, or you can ask any questions in the comments. Thank you for listening, and see you in the next episode.