Buyer intent signals for small teams: who to contact and why now

Sales trigger events: what counts as a buyer intent signal

A buyer intent signal is a specific, dated event that suggests a company may have a reason to talk now. Sales teams also call these sales trigger events: a funding round, a job post for a role your product serves, a technology the company adopted or dropped, a news story, a question in a public forum or a visit to your website.

None of them proves someone will buy. Each is a reason to look closer, and a better one when it matches what you sell.

Which signal fits what you sell

These are illustrations of the idea, not results:

• You sell a replacement for a specific tool: that tool appearing on, or disappearing from, a target's website.
• You sell to funded startups: a recent funding round.
• You compete with a named rival: a public post asking for an alternative to that rival.
• You sell to people who ask in public: a question about your category in a forum thread.

What a signal looks like in FoxKnock

FoxKnock saves each signal with a title, a short summary, a strength from 0 to 100, a date and, for signals found on the web, a link to the page it came from. The date is the publish date when the source gives one, and the day FoxKnock found it otherwise. That keeps the claim checkable.

B2B intent data for small teams: first-party and public signals

B2B intent data comes in two kinds. First-party intent data comes from your own channels, such as website visits and form submissions. Third-party intent data is collected by outside providers across other websites.

FoxKnock uses first-party signals and public web events such as hiring, funding and news. It does not include third-party browsing data, so it cannot tell you which companies are researching your category on other sites. If that is the data you need, FoxKnock is the wrong tool.

Three sources become signals without a monitor:

• Website visits: a company identified on your site creates a signal. Website visitor identification is company-level, sets no cookies, honors Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control, and needs a Snitcher or IPinfo API key.
• Form submissions: a submission through a FoxKnock form creates a hot signal at strength 90.
• Community threads: a Reddit or Hacker News thread scoring 75 or higher in community radar becomes a signal. FoxKnock drafts a reply, but posting is always manual.

How FoxKnock finds public signals

Signal monitors cover six kinds. You choose the kind, what to watch and a schedule of hourly, daily or weekly.

Monitors that watch companies scan up to 50 per run, taken from a list of up to 50 domains, a static CRM list or, by default, your A and B fit companies. If you have more than 50 A and B companies, each run moves on to the next group, so all of them are covered over several runs.

What happens before a signal is saved

Funding, news, competitor and custom search results go through triage first:

• Claude judges whether a result is relevant, what kind of signal it is and how strong, and writes the one-sentence reason shown on the card.
• If a model call fails, simple keyword rules stand in.
• Results dated more than 60 days back are dropped.
• A result with the same link as an existing signal, or the same title for the same company in the last 30 days, counts once.

Hiring posts are matched on your titles and keywords, and tech changes by comparing a site's technology with the last scan, so neither uses a model. Triage uses Claude, by Anthropic, so the search results being judged are sent to Anthropic.

Hiring signals for sales

Hiring signals work for sales because a job post is public, dated and specific. A hiring monitor takes your titles and keywords, skips any you exclude, and scores a post higher when the title matches closely and the posting is recent.

An illustration: a 3-person agency that builds outbound systems could watch for SDR and Head of Sales postings at companies on its target list. That is a reason to look, not proof the company needs an agency.

How the Today queue ranks them

Signals feed the Today queue, the first screen in the app. Each card's score multiplies five things:

• Fit: the company's 0 to 100 score against your segment (60 if it has not been scored yet).
• Signal strength: a form submission starts at 90, and a hiring post depends on title match and recency.
• Freshness: weight halves every 7 days, so a 14-day-old signal counts a quarter as much as one from today. News and funding age from their publish date. Hiring, tech change and custom search signals age from the day FoxKnock found them. Only signals from the last 45 days count.
• Reachability: no contact with a usable email multiplies the score by 0.55, because FoxKnock can still look for one.
• Recent contact: a company you contacted in the last 3 days is multiplied by 0.15, and the penalty fades over 30 days.

The queue shows one signal card per company, the best signal winning, and is capped at 25 cards in all, so the list always ends. The same queue holds replies to answer, approvals waiting and tasks due, so those share the 25 slots.

It is recalculated each time you open it. You get a ranked list of who to contact and why now, not a stack of ready drafts: drafts are written when you enroll a contact in a sequence.

Plays: from signal to next step

A play is a "when X, then Y" rule. The trigger is one or more signal kinds, a minimum strength, a minimum fit and, optionally, a segment. The actions are:

• Run research (quick, standard or deep).
• Find contacts and find emails.
• Enroll in a sequence.
• Add to a list.
• Notify in the app, by email or in Slack.
• Create a task.

Every play has a daily limit, and nothing runs until you save the play.

For example, a play could say: when a hiring signal of strength 60 or higher arrives at a company with fit 70 or higher, run standard research, find contacts and create a task. Each action spends credits at its own price (standard research is 225 credits at default prices), and your monthly spend cap stops spending when it is reached.

Enrolling a contact does not skip your review. A play can create a review task instead of enrolling anyone until you confirm, and most starter templates turn that on.

Messages then follow the sequence's approval level: by default each draft waits in your approval queue, and automatic sending is opt-in and has to be earned. AI-written drafts use AI prospect research, where every fact is an evidence card with a source and an expiry date.

Start small: two or three monitors

Start with two or three monitors, not six. Point them at a tight list of accounts you would be glad to win, use exclude keywords to cut noise, and set a minimum strength and fit on plays so only strong matches spend credits. For the wider picture, see B2B buying signals.

For one or two sources, hand-built alerts and a spreadsheet can be enough. This is how they differ:

What it costs

At default prices (they can change, see pricing), a monitor charges 12 credits for each new signal, which is $0.12 at list price (1 credit is $0.01). Duplicates, weak matches (strength under 20) and results triage rejects are not charged, and monitors stop when credits run out or your monthly spend cap is reached.

Other sources are priced separately. A website visit costs 5 credits per identified company at default prices, and community radar costs 25 credits per relevant thread with a drafted reply.

As an illustration, monitors that find 40 new signals in a month would use 480 credits at default prices, about 2.4% of Growth's 20,000 monthly credits.

The pricing page lists signals, automated plays and website visitor ID on Growth ($149 a month, 20,000 credits) and community intent radar on Starter ($49 a month, 5,000 credits). Free lists discovery and standard research, not signal monitors. Credits roll over, and there is no annual contract.

To try FoxKnock on your own market, sign up free and use the 500 one-time credits on discovery and research, then add signal monitors on a plan that lists them.