Signal Best Practices

In this guide, we’re diving into the types of signals to look out for from our experience working with hundreds of fast-growing companies.

What is an Intent Signal?

A signal is a specific action that people are taking on your website or in your product. This could be a page view, content download, form fill, or more advanced product metrics such as usage or reaching a certain milestone.

Learn more on how we collect these signals: How enrichment works

Signals are unique to every business, and Koala allows you to configure the set of signals that you want to track. If you’re a seller using the platform, your admin has likely already set up these signals for you to track.

Slack Alerts

Once these signals are set up in the platform, you can configure them to send Slack alerts to notify sellers at the specific moment they happen. For example, send an alert if a prospect is viewing a specific integration tech doc for longer than 45 seconds. These alerts are triggered 15 seconds from the moment the action took place, allowing you to get a real-time sense of how prospects are engaging.

In our work with customers, we’ve identified some patterns on the types of signals to look out for that may be useful to understand as you get started.

Focus on Bottom-of-the-Funnel Content Koala provides a ton of value in identifying prospects who are deep in product research. Typically, a very strong signal of this is prospects looking through your technical documentation. For example, if they’re diving deep into your API documentation or looking at your large team rollout docs, it is likely a pretty strong indication that there is a level of interest from that account beyond basic exploration.
Product Signups are Great, but… Seeing people sign up for your product is a fantastic signal, but from our data, we’ve found that it’s often just the start of a prospect's sales exploration. They may be kicking the tires of your product, but they may not quite be ready to go deep in a sales conversation—wait till you see signals of them going deep on tech docs, specific product pages, or showing more usage in specific parts of your platform.
Look for Complex Feature Usage One example we like to use is when people start looking at one of our more advanced features—auto-outbound. This typically happens a couple of months into the journey, once the prospect has had time to develop a level of comfort with the product—although these types of signals happen less frequently, they’re fantastic signals of someone who is deep in trying to leverage your product.

To make it real, these are a few patterns we’ve seen across customers:

Want more insights? Read our guide on finding signal through the noise.

In the next lesson, we’re going to dive into how you can take everything you’ve learned about the warm outbound mindset, account research, and signal best practices and turn them into value-add outreach for your prospects.