How to Identify When a Company Is Ready to Buy

Timing is everything in B2B sales.

You can have the perfect pitch, the right contact, and a killer product—but if you reach out at the wrong moment, you'll get a "not right now" response and watch your competitor close the deal three months later.

The difference between a closed deal and a missed opportunity often comes down to one thing: knowing when a company is actually ready to buy.

The Problem with Gut Feel

Most SDRs rely on intuition to identify buying signals. They scan LinkedIn for job postings, check funding announcements, and hope they catch someone at the right time.

But here's the reality: 67% of buying signals are invisible to manual research. By the time you notice them, your competitors already have meetings booked.

The best sales teams don't rely on gut feel. They track four specific categories of buying signals that indicate purchase intent.

The 4 Buying Signals That Actually Matter

1. Financial Signals: Follow the Money

Financial events are the strongest predictor of buying behavior. When a company raises funding, gets acquired, or releases strong earnings, they're actively hiring, expanding, and—most importantly—spending.

What to track:

• Funding rounds (Series A, B, C)
• Acquisitions (buyer or seller)
• Revenue milestones (IPO filings, earnings)
• Financial partnerships

2. Text Signals: What They're Saying Publicly

Companies telegraph their priorities through public communications. Blog posts, case studies, press releases, and social media aren't just marketing—they're buying signals.

What to track:

• Blog posts about challenges ("How we're scaling our infrastructure...")
• Job descriptions (what skills they need = what problems they have)
• Press releases (partnerships, product launches)
• Executive LinkedIn posts (priorities, pain points)

3. Event Signals: Changes Create Opportunities

Organizational change creates buying windows. New executives bring new budgets. Rapid hiring means infrastructure gaps. Office expansions mean new tooling needs.

What to track:

• Leadership changes (new CTO, VP of Sales, etc.)
• Hiring surges (especially in specific departments)
• Office expansions or relocations
• Product launches (indicates investment in R&D)

4. Tech Stack Signals: What They're Already Using

Your best prospects are already using tools adjacent to yours. If a company adopts Salesforce, they'll need email sequencing tools. If they use AWS, they'll need monitoring solutions.

What to track:

• Technology adoptions (via job postings, about pages, case studies)
• Integration partnerships announced
• Tech stack mentions in job descriptions
• Engineering blog posts about tools

Why Manual Tracking Doesn't Scale

Let's be honest: tracking these signals manually is impossible at scale.

An SDR managing 50 target accounts would need to:

• Monitor 50+ company blogs
• Track 200+ executive LinkedIn profiles
• Set up Google Alerts for 50 companies
• Check Crunchbase daily
• Scan 100+ job postings per week

That's 10+ hours per week on research alone—and you'll still miss 70% of the signals.

The Compound Effect of Multi-Signal Tracking

Here's where it gets interesting: the combination of signals matters more than any single signal.

A company that just raised funding (Financial Signal) AND is hiring a VP of Sales (Event Signal) AND published a blog about scaling challenges (Text Signal) is 12x more likely to buy than a company showing just one signal.

Most teams only track 1-2 signal types. The best teams track all four—and they do it automatically.

How Top Teams Are Doing This

Elite sales teams aren't spending hours on manual research. They're using intelligence platforms that:

1. Automatically detect all four signal types across target accounts
2. Score opportunities based on signal strength and recency
3. Generate personalized hooks that reference the specific signals detected
4. Alert SDRs in real-time when hot accounts emerge

This isn't just faster—it's fundamentally better. When you reach out with: "Saw you raised Series B and are hiring 3 sales engineers—here's how we helped [similar company] scale..." you're not cold calling. You're starting a warm conversation.

Your Next Steps

Start tracking these four signals for your top 20 target accounts:

• Set up Google Alerts for funding/acquisition news
• Follow key executives on LinkedIn
• Subscribe to company blogs
• Track job postings on their careers page

But if you're serious about scaling ABM intelligence, stop doing this manually.

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Stop Guessing When to Reach Out

We're building something to solve exactly this problem. SignalIQ automatically tracks all four signal types across your target accounts and tells you exactly when to reach out—and what to say.