Sales Signals: How to Leverage Data & AI to Reach Prospects First
Today’s most effective go-to-market teams are increasingly embracing signal-based selling, a strategy that leverages real-time data and unique insights about promising prospects to gain a crucial edge in intensely competitive markets.
Signal-based selling goes far beyond traditional lead generation or cold outreach leveraging basic intent data. Instead of waiting until buyers are clearly in-market, sales teams now can rely on a layered, AI-fueled analysis of multiple high-value signals to zero in on prospects who are strong fits for their product or service but not yet showing classic signs of interest.
The advantage is clear. Sellers who fuel their sales process with advanced signals and the latest AI tools create twice the opportunities as their counterparts, save up to 10 hours per week on time-consuming administrative tasks, and improve productivity by 60%.
How do they do it? We asked some influential voices in the sales world to share how they define, monitor, and respond to key buying signals to help them sell smarter, win faster, and erase nagging opportunity gaps in their pipeline.
Funding
Funding rounds are among the strongest signals for both sales and marketing teams. New funding suggests ongoing product development, imminent growth, and investor confidence.
But according to Tom Slocum, founder of sales consultancy The SD Lab, it’s not enough for frontline salespeople to merely identify companies that have successfully raised new funding — there still has to be a compelling value proposition.
“We don’t want to be the typical reps who say, ‘Hey, just got funding, how are you?’ But it is an indication that the timing is good,” he says. “They want to either build a sales playbook and refine their sales motion — because they’re about to double in size — or they hired 50 people and lost 20, because their onboarding wasn’t there.”
Most go-to-market teams understandably focus on new funding rounds as a signal when prospecting. But Slocum and his team at The SD Lab have been using ZoomInfo Copilot to identify adjacent signals that indicate potential opportunity.
“What I love about Copilot is that it shows companies decreasing in funding. That’s a good signal for us. Why? Because that means it’s hurting. Something’s not working. They can’t get the sales, the pipeline isn’t moving. Our revenue accelerator and our lead gen can boost those results for them or come in and support them.”
Tom Slocum, Founder of The SD Lab
Eric Nowoslawski, founder of outbound agency Growth Engine X, agrees that funding can be a valuable signal for sales teams. Although Nowoslawski and his team look for funding round signals, they typically don’t mention the event as a reason.
“I don’t want to start every email with, ‘Hey, congrats on your latest funding round,’ because then you’re just the same as everybody else. So we’ll pick another relevant data point to bring up about the company, but use the funding round signal to build the overall list,” Nowoslawski says.
Product Launches
Nowoslawski and his team typically use product launch signals as a starting point for further research — especially opportunities to preemptively solve problems common when bringing new products to market.
“Usually, we see product launches as an opportunity to say, ‘Hey, with this product launch, there could be problems you may not be sure how to solve. Let’s talk about how we can take care of that,’” he says.
However, with hundreds of thousands of software products alone released every year, researching or responding to most of them manually simply isn’t feasible. To solve this, Nowoslawski and his team use AI technologies to scale their prospecting and outreach motions while leaning on their expertise to personalize specific interactions.
“A lot of times, the messaging we create that goes along with product launch announcements is basically using AI to talk about the product launch — but then also saying, ‘In our experience, these are the problems that often come with this type of launch,’” he says.
Account-Fit Score
With AI becoming a necessity for sellers, many businesses are focusing on data accuracy — the old adage of “garbage in, garbage out” has never been more relevant, and sales leaders are quickly discovering that feeding poor-quality data to even the most sophisticated AI is a fast-track to failure.
The same principle applies to account-fit score, especially in increasingly automated sales workflows.
“First, you need to make sure your CRM is clean,” Slocum says. “You have your customers outlined. You have the right titles for the people that you’re closing deals with. I’ve worked at companies where we thought the ICP was one thing, and when we started closing deals and looked at the signatures, it’s a title we weren’t even targeting.”
The SD Lab relies on ZoomInfo Copilot’s rock-solid data foundation to avoid these costly mistakes. They’ve already seen promising results from Copilot’s Account-Fit Score, using it to identify similar companies to existing clients as a starting point for further prospecting.
“ZoomInfo will start feeding you things that fit the most potential,” Slocum says. “You want this title, this company size, this industry — and then Copilot will map everything that’s currently in your CRM and say, ‘Hey, this company actually looks like a really great fit for what you’re doing.”
After identifying strong account-fit matches using ZoomInfo Copilot, Slocum’s reps surface companies in the same industry of similar size, revenue, and growth potential to clients they’ve already worked with. From there, they identify potential brand champions that can advocate for them internally, and refine their results using hiring plans, funding rounds, and other signals.
Pain Points
Businesses don’t invest in new products or services for its own sake — they do so to solve specific problems that are hindering growth. This makes pain points among the most valuable signals for frontline GTM teams, as they reveal the most urgent challenges facing a business and provide salespeople with a strong opening.
Most salespeople know that, when leveraging pain points in sales conversations, demonstrating a keen understanding of the prospect’s problem and offering a relevant solution is crucial. However, according to Slocum, many salespeople miss valuable opportunities simply by approaching conversations the wrong way.
“Everybody talks about personalization,” he says. “It’s important, but it’s not about your dog, your college, or anything like that. With pain points, it’s about relevancy. How do we tie that into the prospects’ world? It’s about the cost of inaction.”
Slocum recommends leaning into competitor research when leveraging pain points. Asking informed questions about specific challenges is an excellent way to demonstrate the in-depth industry knowledge the best reps should have. It also allows reps to adopt a more consultative role that can establish and build credibility and trust.
“If your solution can tie into that cost of inaction, then you have the opportunity to say, ‘Hey, your revenue has decreased for the past six months and your headcount’s going down with it,’” Slocum says. “‘What are you doing to address that? Here’s what we do to help companies that have been in this situation before, and here’s what they got out of it once we were through that pain challenge.’”
However, according to Nowoslawski, it’s crucial that salespeople think carefully — and act judiciously — when evaluating pain points as a signal.
“It’s kind of creepy if you were to email somebody and say, ‘Hey, the reason I’m reaching out is because my software told me you were searching for tech-stack consolidation. We don’t call out that we built our list via intent data, but we do match the pain point with that intent data.”
Eric Nowoslawski, Founder of Growth Engine X
Part of the challenge when using pain points as a signal, especially for cold outreach, is knowing how to focus your messaging. Some prospects may have multiple pain points, and therefore be receptive to multiple messages, but casting too wide a net may result in lost opportunities.
“When you’re sending a cold email, you don’t quite know what you’re walking into,” Nowoslawski says. “Are they going to resonate with the fact that you can help them save money? Are they going to resonate with the consolidation play? Are they going to resonate with ease of use?”
His approach? Focusing the entire motion on a single pain point, to be sure the prospects are responding to a need that sellers are ready to address.
Earnings Calls
Earnings call transcripts, as well as 10-K and other regulatory filings, can be an invaluable source of information for motivated sales reps, which makes their publication a valuable signal that reps should be quick to act upon.
However, these materials are often dense, complex documents, and even the most motivated salespeople only have so much time. Not so long ago, this was a considerable disadvantage.
“I used to have to fight with my AEs as a manager because my AEs would want my SDRs to do that admin work. ‘Go read this report. Go watch this call,’” Slocum says. “And it’s like, where do I have that time, I have to be prospecting?”
Today, AI-assisted sales makes accessing the insights contained within these materials easier than ever. Tools such as ZoomInfo’s Earnings Scoops, available within Copilot, can surface a wealth of information in seconds, giving salespeople a vital competitive edge.
Best of all, these insights can be identified virtually as soon as an earnings call transcript or regulatory filing is available, meaning frontline reps can make the pain points and growth goals surfaced from earnings calls the central focus of their outreach.
Hiring Plans
At first glance, hiring plans may appear to be among the most straightforward signals for GTM teams. Plans to increase headcount are understandably seen as a positive indicator of future growth, whereas reductions in headcount are typically seen as a reactionary measure to cut costs or in response to declining demand.
Although this is generally true, there is a great deal more information to be learned from prospects’ hiring plans — if you know how and where to look.
For Slocum and his team at The SD Lab, which specializes in helping early stage founders build bespoke, scalable outbound sales motions, hiring plans are among the most valuable signals because they indicate underlying pain points that are hindering growth.
“I love looking at an application portal and seeing that a prospect has had 150 applicants but that posting has been up for nine months,” Slocum says. “Something’s going on. You’re not finding the right person. If I’m a sales leader, I want my team looking at hiring plans because if our product can support that new role, great, let’s get in there — maybe it can even replace that role.”
According to Nowoslawski, hiring plans can be an indicator of several additional positive signals, including heightened demand, greater investment in research and development, or anticipated growth.
In today’s markets, however, it’s no longer enough for frontline GTM professionals to use hiring plans as a simplistic one-to-one indicator. Instead, Nowoslawski recommends avoiding assumptions about hiring intentions and focusing on supporting the prospect through the challenges that often come with increased headcount.
“I used to be a job-board maximalist,” Nowoslawski says. “But we’ve actually found that targeting people by job boards just doesn’t matter. A lot of times, reps are like, ‘They’re hiring for graphic designers, they should totally use our graphic design software.’ But that’s not actually the right bridge — they might be hiring a graphic designer because they need new creative ideas, not new tools.”
To identify solid opportunities for cold outreach, Nowoslawski and his team often use vacancy listings as a source of data on the challenges facing would-be clients, using AI to analyze thousands of job descriptions and surface potential talking points.
“We’ll pull the actual listing of what they’re hiring for and mine the job description for keywords using AI,” Nowoslawski says. “Instead of saying, ‘Hey, I saw you’re hiring for SDRs, you should buy ZoomInfo or hire Growth Engine X,’ we’ll say, ‘Hey, I noticed that you’re hiring for an SDR. I checked out the job description and it said that they’re going to be making outbound calls. Where are you currently sourcing your mobile numbers from? ZoomInfo has the best mobile numbers in the market.’”
Layoffs
The past several years have seen some of the most turbulent economic conditions in recent memory. The tech sector, in particular, saw unprecedented layoffs in 2023 as businesses sought to recalibrate in the wake of the pandemic and the “new normal” that followed.
According to Slocum, layoffs represent an opportunity to revisit previous conversations — with the necessary tact and diplomacy, of course.
“Layoffs let you know that the cost of inaction happened,” Slocum says. “Something is broken. So if you’ve got a marketing strategy, solution, or service, go in and talk about that. Be more consultative. ‘Hey, I see your layoff. Something’s going on. We can help.”
As a signal, layoffs can be indicative of more than simple overscaling. Heightened competition, poor product-market fit, and M&A activity can all result in broad reductions in headcount, all of which are valuable data points for frontline reps seeking to better understand their prospects.
Targeting Buyers & Champions
With investments in technology under greater scrutiny than ever before, it’s little wonder that today’s buying groups are bigger than they’ve ever been.
Data from sales consultancy Challenger indicates that the average B2B buying group has expanded steadily in size from around five individuals in 2009 to upward of 10 as of 2019. In the enterprise, buying groups can be even larger, with IDG’s Foundry reporting buying groups of almost 30 people in 2024.
These committees are also constantly changing as job roles and company priorities shift. Staying on top of the composition of your buying groups is doubly powerful, allowing sellers to connect with new decision-makers and track the moves of past buyers to new roles or companies.
“Buying groups is one of my favorite signals — I get Slack alerts on that all day long, and it is fantastic,” Slocum says. “Buying group changes can be your best friend, because now you have a real pulse on when people are moving, where they’re going, and you have a way to support that motion with them as they navigate the job changes.”
Finding Signals in the Noise
Not too long ago, salespeople had limited visibility into their prospects and markets. Today, the opposite is true, and discerning the signal from the noise is becoming increasingly difficult.
Nowoslawski and Slocum say that adopting signal-based selling is not simply a new set of templates or workflows to follow — instead, frontline teams should cultivate cultures of ongoing experimentation with the understanding that not every signal or strategy will be effective.
“You’re always trying to reach out to the right person, with the right timing, with the right message — the three R’s,” Slocum says. “That trinity coming together gets you that meeting, and signals help you find that right person, that right timing, and that right messaging all in one.”
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This article was written by Zoominfo and originally published here.
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