Hi There,

Question: what are signals and intent? And why does it matter?

Answer: I've been seeing these used as buzzwords a lot lately. So, I'm going to break down how I think you should think about and use them.

Here’s how I define them:

• Signals estimate a prospect’s problem awareness: Do they have a problem?
• Intent estimates a prospect’s solution awareness: Are they looking for a solution?

Let's break this down further:

Signals tell you there’s a need, and intent tells you they’re ready to act. Both exist on a spectrum, and it’s your job to gauge their likelihood.

Ex: you're an HR software

• Signals: Open vacancies, Changes in the HR team, Paid ads for vacancies, ATS adoption, headcount changes (both positive and negative), and other signals related to growth/ expansion...
• Intent: LinkedIn engagement (with us and our competitors), website visits*, LinkedIn views...

Most of these signals have a time horizon as well, e.g., open vacancies can be taken as a snapshot and over time, a sudden increase in vacancies in any given period for example.
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At the risk of going a bit too advanced here as well, this time horizon also reflects building in a time decay into the intent and signal scores. For example, a website visit today shows higher intent than one six months ago. This might seem obvious for intent, but the same holds true for signals. The game here is to gauge intent and signals right now. We do that by looking at their current situation and their past.
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Hope this gives you a better understanding of how to think about signals and intent and makes it a bit more practical as well.

*If you're using website visits as a signal, don't just use a visit as a show of intent, look at how long they were on the website, what pages they visited, different sessions...

Tool of the week

​RapidAPI​

This tool is so good, I almost didn’t want to share it. (No sales pitch here—they don’t even have an affiliate or partner program, sadly.) This is my go-to for pulling data into customer data platforms (CDPs) when a web crawler doesn’t cut it. It’s an affordable, flexible solution for accessing data like LinkedIn insights, ad libraries, and more.

(RapidAPI, if you’re reading this - let’s talk partner programs.)

System of the week

To build on RapidAPI, here's a quick video on how to set up an API using RapidAPI and n8n. So you don't even have to do any googling. 😉

Thanks for reading!

Happy Sunday,

Laurens

PS. I'm slowly filling the spots for Q1 at GTM Engineer, if you want to be considered, send me a DM - the next batch will probably be either late February or March.

PPS. A bit of a shorter more practical video this week - still thinking through how exactly I want to organize these so let me know what you think.

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