What is an Intent Signal?

An Intent Signal is a moment in the customer journey that signifies buying intent. Koala reports on the raw data of every single visitor across every single account, which can be a lot of data to comb through. Intent Signals are “highlights” of this activity that are so important they (1) generate a real-time Slack Alert and (2) are highlighted on the profile page.

Intent Signals can be made from any action a vistor does:

  • page view (e.g., /pricing viewed for 30+ seconds)
  • form fill (e.g., /webinar-registration with a work email)
  • active session time threshold (e.g., visitor crosses 10 minutes session time this month)
  • user trait change (e.g., user goes from anonymous to known by submitting an email)
  • account trait change (e.g., data starts flowing into a workspace)
  • custom event (e.g., ‘Invite User’ event happens in your product)

Intent Signals & Slack Alerts

Here is what it looks like to send Intent Signals to a Slack channel:

And here’s what it looks like for a sales rep to receive an Intent Signal:

Intent Signals on profiles

Here is what Intent Signals look like when you’re doing account research on profiles:

Getting started with Intent Signals

Though it may sound like a simple concept, figuring out what Intent Signals to set up is at the core of your company’s GTM strategy. We find that getting a few folks together — someone representing Demand Gen / Growth and someone representing the Sales Development team — often yields the best results. Koala makes it easy to iterate on Intent Signals — both trying new ones and discarding the ones that don’t work.

To help you on this journey, we have two guides.

First Intent Signals

First Intent Signals contains best practices around setting up the first set of signals from your marketing site — think “visited the pricing page” or “visited our technical docs about SSO.” These are simpler to instrument and are a blind spot in most organizations.

Advanced Intent Signals

Advanced Intent Signals contains some of the more powerful Intent Signals you should consider, especially if you have a free trial, PLG motion, or Proof of Concept in your Sales cycle.