Most of what looks like a signal is noise. A single visit to your homepage from a company IP means somebody had thirty free seconds; it does not mean somebody is buying. The visits that do indicate intent share a few structural features — pages visited, sequence, recency, breadth of the account. This piece is the short version of what SDR teams learn after three months of watching the feed.
What actually counts as a buying signal
A buying signal is a visit pattern that a random reader would not produce — someone with an active problem, not curiosity, generated it. Five patterns hold up across industries.
- A visit to the pricing page. The single strongest one-visit signal.
- A return visit within seven days. Second contact is far more predictive than first.
- Multi-stakeholder activity: two or more sessions from the same company on the same week.
- A comparison or "vs" page view. People land there because they are in evaluation.
- A deep read on a product-specific tour or docs page (dwell time > 90 seconds).
A scoring table you can adopt on Monday
The scoring below is deliberately simple: add points as signals accumulate, cap the score, and route the tiers to the right owner. It exists to prioritise a Monday-morning list, not to model intent perfectly.
| Signal | Points | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| ICP fit (industry + size match) | +2 | Non-ICP resets everything to zero |
| Any visit to /pricing | +3 | Highest per-visit weight |
| Comparison or "vs" page | +3 | Explicit evaluation intent |
| Return visit within 7 days | +2 | Applies once per week |
| Two or more sessions in the same week | +2 | Proxy for multi-stakeholder |
| Product tour / demo page, > 90s dwell | +2 | Once per session |
| Blog / TOFU content only | +0 | Not scored |
| Visit from a career-page-only path | −2 | Job-seeker signal, not buyer |
Score into three tiers: 7+ points is a "route to owning AE within one hour", 4–6 is a "route to SDR queue for same-day outreach", 1–3 is a "monthly digest, no per-visit action". Tune the thresholds after two weeks of live data — you will know within a fortnight whether your top tier is too generous.
The rule that keeps this useful
Kill any signal that produced zero replies for a month. Signal quality decays; new ones (a new product page, a launched integration) appear. Review the table quarterly, not annually.
Routing without a new integration
A common mistake is to make routing depend on a new tool. It does not have to. Three routes cover almost every SaaS team.
- Slack channel for the top tier — one message per identified company, with the pages, the reason it scored, and a link to open the company in the CRM.
- Assignment rules in your CRM — the second tier lands as a task on the SDR who owns the industry or region.
- A weekly digest for the third tier — no action required, but a place marketers look on Monday to see which content is pulling ICP-fit companies in.
The first message
The message that follows a buying signal is not the same message that opens a cold-call sequence. Reference the page they read, one specific outcome your product produces, and one soft ask — a fifteen-minute conversation, not a demo. Signal-based outreach converts because it is timely and specific; the moment it turns into a template, the reply rate drops back to cold-call baseline.
Published by
lead.box Team
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