Buying signal
A detected event that suggests a target account is in or near a buying window. Mama catalogs 47 signal types across 5 categories. A signal is the entry to a workflow, not the exit — it tells you which 12 accounts to work this week, not what to send them.
Plain English
The phrase "buying signal" comes from B2B sales, where it originally meant anything a buyer says or does on a sales call that indicates interest. Modern usage broadened it: a buying signal is now any public event at a target account that you can detect without them telling you, which suggests they're moving toward a purchase decision in your category.
The shift matters because it changes what outbound looks like. Old outbound: send a lot of emails, hope some land on the few accounts that are in-market right now. Signal-driven outbound: detect which accounts are in-market right now, then send a small number of relevant emails to them.
Why it matters
At any given time, only a tiny fraction (most analysts estimate 3–5%) of your TAM is actively in-market for what you sell. Without signals, you're spraying outbound across the full TAM and getting reply rates that reflect the dilution — usually 1–3%.
Signals let you flip the math. If you can identify which 3–5% are in-market this quarter, you can concentrate your outbound on them and get reply rates closer to 12–20% (see the worked numbers in the cold-email-opener playbook).
The catch — and it's a big one — is that a signal isn't an outbound email. The signal is permission to act; the action still has to be good. Most teams that buy intent data assume the signal IS the work and wonder why reply rates didn't change. Section 04 of the manifesto argues this in more detail.
The five categories Mama detects
47 specific signal types collapse into 5 categories. Each category fires at a different cadence and carries a different base confidence — see /sources for the upstream-data provenance for each.
Real signal vs ambient noise
Not every detectable event is a buying signal. Most aren't. The distinction matters because conflating the two is how teams end up with thousands of "intent records" that don't convert — they're firing on noise.
Three tests for whether something is a buying signal
- Is it an event, not a state? "Just hired a VP" is an event. "Has a VP" is a state. Only events fire signals; states feed firmographic ICP fit.
- Does it change the buying environment? A funding round creates capacity and pressure to spend. A new office in a new city creates a need for local tooling. A quote about "workflow latency" creates a category-shopping moment.
- Can you point to the source? If you can't link the signal to a public artifact (press release, LinkedIn post, podcast episode), Mama tags it as inference, not signal. See /sources for the provenance rules.
Strength + recency
Two signals of the same type aren't equally useful. A $45M Series B with a Bloomberg interview is louder than a $4M angel round with a tweet. A signal that fired yesterday is more useful than one from 90 days ago. Mama scores both axes per signal.
Strength · how loud is the signal?
Each of the 47 signal types has its own loudness curve. For funding signals, loudness scales with round size, lead-investor profile, and press footprint. For exec moves, it scales with seniority and whether the move was internally promoted vs externally hired. Strength is per-signal-type — a "loud" hiring signal doesn't look like a "loud" funding signal.
Recency · how fresh is the signal?
Signals decay. A funding round from 14 months ago is not a buying signal — it's history. Mama applies a per-type half-life to every signal. Funding signals have a 14-day half-life; exec moves 30 days; stack changes 21 days; voice quotes 60 days (because exec statements stay relevant longer than transactional events).
The ICP rubric weighs both axes together: signal recency at 25% weight, signal strength at 20% weight. See the ICP rubric entry for how the 4 dimensions combine.
How Mama uses it
Three places signals show up in the product:
- In the brief — every account brief lists the top 3 signals firing on that account, with strength and recency stamped on each, and the source link.
- In the score — signals feed two of the four dimensions of the ICP rubric (recency + strength). The combined score is what drives working-list sorting.
- In the working list — Mama publishes a daily "score-jumped" list of accounts where the score rose by 10+ points in the last 24 hours, which is almost always driven by a fresh strong signal.
The signals also feed the cold email builder directly — when you pick a signal type, the builder slots the right consequence sentence into the 6-line frame automatically.
Common mistakes
Three patterns we've seen kill the value of signal-driven outbound. All three are listed in more detail on /anti-patterns.
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