You cannot tell from one prospect. You can tell from two or three independent things happening around the same person or company inside a short window. One action is noise. Two or three from different places, close together, about the same problem, is a buying moment. Fit tells you who could buy. Timing tells you who is looking right now.
That is the whole answer. The rest of this is how to read it without guessing.
What actually counts as a signal?
A signal is any observable action that suggests someone is thinking about the problem you solve. Not thinking about you. Thinking about the problem.
They break into three groups.
Your own ecosystem. Profile views, company page views, follows, inbound connection requests, engagement on your posts. These are the warmest and the most ignored, because they arrive as notifications and notifications get scrolled past.
The person, outside your ecosystem. Engaging on a competitor's post. Commenting under an industry voice. A role change. Suddenly posting about a topic they never posted about before.
The company. A relevant job advert. A new hire in the role that owns the problem. Funding. News. A physical expansion.
Most founders only look at the first group, and only when it lands in the app. That is the narrowest possible view of a market. Third-party activity surfaces intent before a prospect ever touches your content, which is exactly when you want to know.
What does a real buying moment look like?
It looks like accumulation, not intensity.
Here is the shape, in the order it usually shows up:
→ Something changes at the company. A hire, a funding round, a new site, a job advert naming the problem → A person at that company starts moving. They comment somewhere relevant, they change role, they start reading → Their attention narrows. The comment is about pricing, or about a specific failure, not "great post" → They come back. A profile view weeks after a connection, not during it → The window tightens. Two or three of these land inside days, not months
The moment is the overlap. A company that just hired a head of growth is interesting. A company that just hired a head of growth, whose founder commented under a competitor's post about reply rates last Tuesday, is a conversation.
Neither of those facts sells anything on its own. Together they tell you what is on someone's desk this week.
How do I tell interest from noise?
Three tests. Run them in this order.
1. Does context change the weight? A like is not a comment. A comment agreeing is not a comment asking what it costs. A profile view during a handshake is polite. A profile view three weeks after you connected, with no prompt, is someone checking you out for a reason.
Score what it means, not that it happened.
2. Is there a window? Two signals six months apart is a coincidence. Two independent signals on the same company inside ten days is a completely different conversation. Time-box everything, or you will end up treating a stale list as a warm one.
3. Does it come from more than one place? This is the one that does the heavy lifting. A strong signal from a single source gets overruled by two weak ones from different sources, because the combination says something neither one says alone.
Most tools cannot produce that combination. They each hold one fragment of the same person and nothing joins the fragments, so nothing accumulates.
What about fit, doesn't that decide it?
Fit and readiness are two different questions and founders collapse them constantly.
Fit answers: could this person buy. Right size, right sector, right role, right problem. Readiness answers: is this person looking now.
Let fit qualify. Let intent prioritise.
Here is why the order matters. Around five percent of any addressable market is actively buying at any moment, according to research from the B2B Institute. The other ninety five percent are future buyers. If you build a list on fit alone, you are targeting all one hundred percent and hoping. If you only chase the five percent, you are competing head on with every other vendor aiming at the same accounts, at the same time, with the same message.
The edge sits in the ninety five percent. Not selling to them. Watching them, so you are there on the day one of them moves.
That is a monitoring job, not a list-building job. It is the reason a lane producing forty companies a month with a real feed beats a lane producing two hundred companies once from a static page you can never refresh.
Can you show me what this looks like on a real prospect?
Take a run I did in freight logistics, where the buyer does not live on LinkedIn at all and the signal has to come from somewhere else.
The question was: which companies are about to buy road freight in.
Two things get joined. First, expansion. A company taking major new warehouse space or investing in production capacity. That is a company whose transport volume is about to change. Second, the operator licence register. It shows whether a company runs its own vehicles or not.
The gold pairing is a company taking new space that holds no operator licence at all, or a restricted one. No fleet. They must buy freight in.
Of roughly sixty named occupiers joined to the register, around forty three held no operator licence at all, which means they buy one hundred percent of their freight from third parties. Those are not people with a mild interest. They are companies with a structural need and a live change happening at the same time.
One extra layer, and it is the part most people miss. Site closures generate prospects at the customers, not at the closer. When a supplier shuts a facility, every customer who bought from there now has stock coming from much further away. Their cost just changed. They did not announce anything. The signal was somebody else's announcement.
That is what reading a buying moment looks like when you cannot rely on someone conveniently liking your post.
What does this change about my outreach?
Two things, and only two.
Who you contact, and when.
The message follows from the signal, so it stops being a guess. You are writing about the thing they showed interest in, at the point where they showed it. That is a different letter to the one you would have sent on a Tuesday because Tuesday was outreach day.
The negative version is worth naming plainly. Untimed outreach hits the ninety five percent who are not in market, and misses the people actively looking right now. Reply rates drop. Meetings get harder. Calls get spent on prospects who were never close.
Better copy does not repair that. It is not your copy or your content, it is timing.
One number to make the point about how narrow the reading is. In one January campaign, 41.3 percent of connection requests accepted, 1340 sent. Read alone, that tells you almost nothing. Accept rate measures whether your profile and your reason for connecting made sense to one person on one day. It says nothing about whether they were ready to buy. It is the most comfortable way to be wrong: the network grows, the numbers look healthy, and the pipeline stays where it was.
A connection is a stage. Readiness is a different question entirely.
How do I do this without a full-time person on it?
Start by narrowing what you watch, not widening it.
- Pick five to ten competitors or industry voices your buyers actually read
- Watch who engages there, every week, not once
- Cross that against your own notifications: views, follows, inbound
- Add one company-level source that is cheap and reliable, such as relevant job adverts or company news
- Set a window. Anything older than a couple of weeks goes back in the pile
Then apply the subtraction rule. The job of a signal is not to add names to your list. It is to take them away, so your fixed outreach capacity goes to the few names that earned it.
That is the manual version and it works. It also eats hours, which is the reason most founders start it and stop.
The alternative approach is buying another tool and hoping it joins the picture up. It does not. Each one holds a fragment, and you end up being the integration layer, doing the joins in your head at eleven at night.
What I run instead is a single record per buyer that holds everything: every signal, every score, the reason it mattered. What lands on my screen each morning is a short list of people worth contacting today and why. I approve, edit or reject. Never more than 25 to 30 invites a day, human approved.
Not more activity. Fewer, better names.
If you want the grading framework on one page, take the Buying-Signal Scorecard. If you would rather see it run on your own market before you do anything else, the free run grades the people engaging in your space one to five and hands the list back. There is more detail on how it works and on the proof if you want to check the working first.
Readiness is not a feeling you develop. It is a pattern you can define, watch for, and act on the same week it appears.
Common questions
How many signals do I need before I reach out?
Two or three from different sources inside a short window, usually ten days or less. One signal on its own is not enough to act on, however strong it looks. If you only have one, the right move is to keep watching that person rather than message them.
Is a profile view worth anything?
It depends entirely on when it happens. A view right after you connect is normal politeness. A view three weeks later, unprompted, from someone who fits your ideal client, is a person checking you out for a reason. Same action, completely different meaning.
What if my buyers are not on LinkedIn?
Then the signals come from company-level sources instead: job adverts, company news, expansion announcements, registers and public records. The freight example in this piece works exactly that way, with no social engagement involved. You get less out of the LinkedIn layers, and that is worth saying out loud before anyone commits.
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