How to identify your business signals: method, sources and tools

A business signal is a public fact showing that a company, or someone in it, is entering the moment when your offer becomes useful. Finding signals is not the hard part: they are everywhere. The hard part is finding yours, the ones that point to a need for what you sell, and turning them into a first message that gets a reply.

If you want a full definition with examples first, start with what is a business signal. Here, we assume the idea is clear and move on to the method.

Where do you start to find your own business signals?

With your customer, not with tools. A signal is only worth something if it is tied to a reason to buy. Before you search for anything, you need to answer two questions about your best current customers:

• Why did they buy? What problem, constraint or goal made them move?
• When did the need appear? What had just changed for them at that point?

The second question is the most useful, and the least worked on. A buyer does not wake up with a clearly stated need. They go through several stages: they don’t see the problem yet, then they understand it, look for information, compare solutions and finally decide. The best time to write is usually between understanding the problem and actively searching: early enough not to be the fifth supplier in touch, late enough for the topic to land.

An example from one of our past client accounts: a company that fits out vans for tradespeople. When does a plumber or an electrician get a van fitted out? Right after buying one. So the signal is not “tradesperson in construction” (that is a targeting criterion). It is “tradesperson announcing a new vehicle”. And plenty of tradespeople post about it, proud of their growing fleet.

How do you list your business signals in an hour?

Here is the method we use to start a new targeting setup. It has six steps.

1. Describe your offer and your buyer in two sentences. Who signs, in what kind of company, to solve what.
2. List the “whys” and the “whens”. A generative AI tool can help, with a simple prompt: “Here is my solution and my buyer. List 15 reasons they need it and, for each one, the moment that need appears. Think about indirect signals: people mostly post to announce a success, a hire or a project, rarely to say they have a problem.”
3. Turn each “when” into a visible fact. “When the team grows” becomes “hiring a second salesperson”. “When regulation changes” becomes “reacting to posts about the upcoming requirement”.
4. Sort them into two families. Moments: the person or company announces something (a hire, a new role, a new site, a funding round). Interests: the person announces nothing, but reacts to or comments on the topic you deal with.
5. Test them on real recent data. On LinkedIn, a search with operators ("carbon footprint" AND ("CSR" OR "CO2")) filtered on the past 24 hours shows you within minutes whether the signal exists and who produces it.
6. Keep the ones that bring up the right people. A signal that mostly surfaces students, consultants or your competitors should go, even if it looks logical on paper.

At the end, you usually have three to five solid signals left. That is enough to start.

Where should you look for business signals?

Each source shows a different kind of fact. The table below sums up what you actually see there.

Source	What you see	Example signal	Limit
LinkedIn, posts	What the person or company announces	“We’re hiring an industrial buyer to structure our subcontractor panel”	Lots of promotional noise
LinkedIn, reactions and comments	What the person is interested in	A finance director comments on a post about mandatory e-invoicing	A like on its own is still a weak signal
Job postings	Open roles, so projects under way	An SME posts its third payroll administrator ad of the year	A posting can stay online for a long time
Press and press releases	Funding rounds, new sites, acquisitions, appointments	A manufacturer announces a new production unit	Months can pass between announcement and purchase
Customer reviews (Google, Trustpilot)	The problems a company’s customers are having	Repeated reviews about late deliveries	Mainly useful for certain offers
Forums and communities	Questions asked openly	“What tool do you use for…?”	Profiles are often anonymous

LinkedIn remains the richest source in B2B, because you see both what people announce and what they react to. The other sources fill in the gaps. You will find the detail of what can be spotted on each in our page on buying signals by source.

Why are your “inactive” prospects not really inactive?

You often hear: “My customers aren’t on LinkedIn, they never post.” That is rarely true. They post little about their problems, but they post about everything else: a new hire, a trade show, a new customer, the company anniversary, a new building. And many react to other people’s posts without ever writing anything themselves.

These traces are indirect signals. A company announcing a new office does not say it needs furniture, an IT network or remote management software. But the need is there, and it is dated. The job is to link these ordinary announcements to your offer, which the method above makes systematic.

One trap to know: not everyone who reacts is a buyer. At an industrial subcontractor we work with, posts from machine shops showing off their new machines are mostly liked by other machine shops, in other words by competitors. A signal must always be cross-checked against the person’s role and company. To go further on this sorting, see how to qualify a signal before you reach out.

How do you turn a signal into an opener?

This is where most approaches fail. The signal is good, the person is right, and the message starts with “I saw that…”. The prospect realises they are being watched, or that the message is a template with a variable. They don’t reply.

Two simple rules change the outcome:

• Never quote the signal itself. For a reaction to a post, talk about the topic. For an announcement, pick up on what it implies.
• End with a question about their situation, not a request for a meeting.

Illustrative example

Signal: a plumber posts a photo of his two new vans.

Opener that falls flat: “Hi, I saw your post about your new vehicles. We specialise in van fit-outs. Would you be free for a 15-minute call this week?”

Opener that gets a reply: “Two more vans also means twice the storage question: where to put the kit so nobody is hunting for it when they get on site. Are you fitting them out yourselves or using someone?”

The second version talks about the tradesperson’s day-to-day, not about the offer. It asks a question he can answer in one line. And his answer, whatever it is, opens the conversation.

How do you get from signal to meeting?

A signal is useless if it stops in a spreadsheet. The full chain has four links:

1. The signal: a recent fact, linked to your offer.
2. The right person: the one who decides or owns the topic, not just the one who reacted.
3. The opener: a first sentence about their situation, with no hint that you are watching them.
4. The follow-up: when the person replies, qualify with one or two questions, then offer a specific time slot, without repeating the same argument three times.

Each link can break. A good signal with a poor opener produces nothing. Nor does a good opener sent to the wrong person. We go through this chain in detail in from buying signal to meeting.

Do you need a tool to identify your business signals?

Not to start. The manual method is enough to confirm that your signals exist and bring up the right people. It gets heavy once you want to keep up the pace: rerunning searches every day, discarding false positives, writing a different message for each prospect.

Approach	What it does well	What it requires
Manual search (LinkedIn, press, careers pages)	Free, ideal for testing	Time every day to keep up the pace
Alerts from a sales tool (job changes, filters)	Following accounts you already know	Writing every message yourself
Database with “signal” filters	Building lists quickly	Sorting, then writing
Signal-based prospecting tool or service	Daily detection and the first message	A well-defined target from the start

MeetMagnet sits in the last row: LinkedIn signals (reactions and posts) are detected every day, prospects are filtered against your target, and each first message is written from the signal, then reviewed. On the Assisted plan, human support calibrates the target and the signals with you. Other sources (reviews, forums, job postings, press) are added through the multi-source option of the Assisted plan. Whatever option you choose, the method stays the same: start from your customers’ why and when, and judge a signal by the quality of the opener it lets you write.