Customer Buying Signals

What are Buying Signals?

Buying signals are actions or indicators that suggest a potential customer is interested in purchasing a product or service. These signals can take many forms, including website visits, social media engagement, contact form fills, and phone calls.

Understanding and interpreting these buying signals is crucial for B2B organizations to identify potential customers who are likely to make a purchase. This information allows businesses to tailor their sales and marketing efforts towards these prospects and increase the likelihood of closing a deal.

Customer Buying Signal Examples

Here are some common buying signal types that marketers use to detect buying intent:

Behavioral Buying Signals

• Demo Requests: Indicate that the prospect is interested in learning more about a product or service and‌ evaluating it for purchase.
• Partner Referrals: Suggests the prospect is actively seeking a solution and has been recommended the company’s products or services by a trusted source.
• Virtual/Live Event Registrations/Participation: The prospect is interested in learning more about the company’s offerings and possibly seeing how they stack up as a potential solution.
• Score-Promoted Leads (MQLs): When the prospect has engaged with the company’s marketing materials, it demonstrates an interest in the company’s products or services.
• Demo/Freemium Usage: Can be a strong buying signal as it suggests they are actively evaluating the offering and considering a purchase.
• Form-Fills: It’s a strong buying signal when the prospect expresses interest in the company’s offerings and provided their contact information for follow-up.
• Product Review Site Leads: Leads generated through product review sites can be a strong buying signal as they indicate that the prospect is actively researching solutions and considering the company’s products or services.
• Email Opens/Clicks: When a prospect opens or clicks on a company’s marketing emails, it can be a strong buying signal as it suggests they are engaged with the company’s content and potentially interested in their offerings.
• Ad Clicks: Clicking on a company’s ads can be a strong buying signal as it suggests the prospect is interested in learning more about the company’s offerings.
• Social Leads: Engagement with a company’s social media page shows a customer is actively consuming content and may be interested in their offerings.
• Anonymized Website Traffic: Visits to a company’s website can be a signal of interest and potential buying intent, as it suggests the prospect is actively researching solutions.
• Product Review Site Engagement: Visiting product review sites suggests the customer is considering potential solutions, and is evaluating their options before making a purchase decision.
• Third-Party Intent Data: Third-party intent data is created when a potential customer is actively researching solutions in a specific industry or for a particular product or service.

Readiness Signals

• AI-Derived Buying Stage: With enough behavioral signals tied to an account, and AI-powered sales platform can analyze behavioral signals to determine the buying stage of the account. This helps prioritize outreach and tailor messaging to be helpful and persuasive.
• Technographics: Technographics can also reveal the components of a company’s tech stack. This tells you if the tech stack is technically compatible with your solution, which is often a critical sales qualifier. You can also see if there is a gap in the tech stack that you can fill, an existing tool you can complement, or a competitor you can displace.
• Organizational Performance: Is the company profitable or not? Is the company growing? Has the company recently received investment funding? Is the company gaining or losing market share? Is it hiring employees or laying them off? Sales intelligence tools can reveal the health of accounts — and how likely they are to make any purchases.
• Market Forces: Changes in regulations, taxes, or government spending programs can have a big impact on company plans and influence their behavior. Companies may be focused on compliance or government contract opportunities.

What Sales and Marketing Team Members Should Use Buying Signals?

Research has shown that companies that use fewer buying signals are missing opportunities to identify buyers and understand their market. Here are ways to get the most out of buying signals:

1. Sales Representatives: Sales representatives should be well-versed in identifying buying signals to understand when prospects are ready to make a purchase. Recognizing signals such as increased interest can help sales representatives focus their efforts and close deals more efficiently.
2. Sales Managers: By understanding the buying signals, sales managers can assess pipeline health, forecast revenue, and make strategic decisions to optimize the team’s performance.
3. Marketing Managers: Marketing managers should look at buying signals such as engagement metrics, click-through rates, or conversion rates to assess the effectiveness of their campaigns and adjust their marketing efforts accordingly. Understanding buying signals helps marketing managers optimize their messaging, target the right audience, and generate higher-quality leads.
4. Customer Support Representatives: Customer support representatives should pay attention to buying signals indicating upselling or cross-selling opportunities, such as inquiries about additional features, or indications that customers are researching competitors. They can pass on this information to the appropriate sales team members, contributing to revenue growth.
5. Product Managers: By paying attention to buying signals shared by the sales and marketing teams, product managers can gather valuable insights about customers’ pain points, preferences, and desired features. This information can guide product development, enabling product managers to create offerings that align with market demands and increase sales potential.

Buying signals can help members throughout the revenue team improve their decision-making, tailor their approaches, and maximize revenue generation. But, to realize that advantage, organizations have to acquire the relevant buying signals for all members of the buying team.

How to Not Miss Buying Signals

In B2B sales, the size of a buying group is closely related to the size of the purchase. Higher value deals generally involve more stakeholders and decision-makers. To have a complete picture of an account’s buying intent, the buying signals left by each individual member of the buying team must be considered. 

B2B sellers need a robust sensory system to pick up on every buying signal. Here’s what your company can do to set up such a system:

• Define Your Buying Signals
• Train sales and marketing teams on identifying and interpreting buying signals
• Foster collaboration and open communication between sales and marketing teams
• Leverage Technology and Analytics
• Use a pipeline intelligence platform that can automatically track and score leads based on their engagement and actions
• Empower all team members to actively listen to customers, ask probing questions, and pay attention to their needs and preferences

How to Identify Hidden Buying Signals

Revenue teams can better understand buyers’ needs by leveraging information found in what 6sense calls the Dark Funnel™. The Dark Funnel is anonymous activity that occurs throughout the majority of the buyer journey, such as third-party research or product review site engagement. This anonymous activity still leaves buying signals behind, but the data has been mostly invisible and inaccessible to revenue teams until now.

6sense is a predictive intelligence platform that uses advanced data analysis and AI-driven technology to uncover these hidden intent signals, identify them at the account level, and use buyer readiness signals to let revenue teams know when they are in-market. Here’s how 6sense’s platform can accomplish this:

• Intent Data Collection: 6sense gathers vast amounts of data from various sources, including online behavior, content consumption, social media, and firmographic data. This data is continuously collected and aggregated to build a comprehensive profile of potential buyers.
• Buyer Intent Modeling: 6sense utilizes machine learning algorithms and predictive analytics to develop buyer intent models. These models analyze the collected data to identify patterns, trends, and signals that indicate the likelihood of a buyer being in-market and actively researching specific products or services.
• Account-Level Intent Scoring: 6sense assigns intent scores (called 6QAs) to different accounts based on their behavior and engagement data. These scores indicate the level of intent or interest exhibited by each account. Higher intent scores suggest that an account is actively researching and more likely to make a purchase.
• Behavioral Tracking and Monitoring: 6sense tracks and monitors the online behavior of potential buyers across various touchpoints and channels. This includes tracking website visits, content consumption, keyword searches, and interactions with marketing materials. By analyzing these behaviors, 6sense can identify signals of active research and engagement.
• Personalized Engagement: 6sense’s platform enables personalized engagement strategies. Sales and marketing teams can leverage account insights to tailor their messaging, content, and outreach efforts to align with the specific needs and interests of each buyer. This helps in delivering more relevant and timely information, increasing the chances of conversion.
• Predictive Analytics and Forecasting: 6sense’s platform utilizes AI-powered predictive analytics to forecast and prioritize potential buyers based on their intent data. This enables revenue teams to focus their efforts on high-value accounts that are exhibiting strong buying signals, improving their efficiency and effectiveness.
• Integration with CRM and Marketing Automation: 6sense integrates with common CRM systems and marketing automation platforms to streamline the flow of intent data and enable seamless activation of sales and marketing activities. This integration ensures that the buying signals detected by 6sense are effectively utilized by revenue teams throughout the customer journey.