Two people with the same title at two similar companies are not equally likely to answer you. One of them raised money last week, opened six roles, and posted about the pain of onboarding. The other has been in the same seat for four years with nothing changing. A buying signal is the difference between them, and it is the reason the first person gets contacted first.
The signals agaria reads
- Funding. A round means budget and a board expecting growth. It is the most reliable signal for anything sold to a scaling team.
- Hiring. Open roles say what the company is about to do. Six SDR roles means outbound is a priority. Three engineers means a product push. The roles are more specific than the round.
- A new leader. Someone six weeks into a VP Sales job is building a plan and has the mandate to change tools. Someone six years in has a plan already.
- Activity. A post, a comment on your post, a talk. Activity means they read LinkedIn, which means they will see your message. It also gives you something true to say.
- Expansion. A new office, a new market, a new product line. Change creates needs, and expansion is change with a press release.
- Layoffs and mergers. A harder signal, but a real one for the right offer: fewer people, same targets.
Each lead gets a short research pass that reads the company and the person for these events, and the result is written into the lead as a plain paragraph you can read.
How fresh is fresh
A signal has a shelf life. A round announced last week is a reason to write today. The same round three months later is old news, and mentioning it reads like you found a press release. As a rule:
- Funding and new roles: strong for about a month, fading after two.
- Hiring: as long as the roles are open.
- Activity: a week or two. A post from May is not a conversation starter in September.
agaria weights recency into the order, so the lead with a signal from last week ranks above the lead with a bigger signal from last quarter.
What a signal is for
Two things. It sets the order of the list, so daily quotas go to the people most likely to answer. And it gives the first message its first sentence. "You put up six SDR roles this month" is only possible because the roles were found and dated. A message without a signal has to open with something about you, and that is the message people ignore.
The lead without a signal
Every list has people who match the title and nothing else. They are not deleted. They stay in the campaign, at the bottom, and they move up when something changes for them: a post, a hire, a round. Contacting them today spends a quota on a message that cannot say why now. Waiting costs nothing.