Prospecting
The signal fired. Now what?
Signal-based selling uses events — a job change, a hiring spike, a champion moving — to decide which account to approach and when. A signal tells you where to look; it doesn't tell you what to say or who else must agree. Teams that win on signals treat each one as the opening move of an account plan, never as a send trigger.
The alert was never the hard part
HubSpot has acquired Trigify, and the standalone platform winds down on October 22 — accounts are not being migrated, and customer data does not transfer. If your team ran on those alerts, you have a real decision to make this month, and it is not “which tool has the same dashboards?”
It is: what were the alerts actually doing for us — and which part of that work do we have to keep?
Congratulations to the Trigify team, sincerely. An acquisition like this is the market agreeing that signals matter: events around an account tell you when it deserves a seller’s attention. That idea is now becoming CRM plumbing. What no signal tool ever shipped — what was always the seller’s job — is everything that happens after the alert.
At 9:04 on a Monday, the alert lands: a VP of Engineering just started at one of your target accounts.
Two sellers see it at the same time. By 9:08, the first one has already hit send.
1. What a signal actually is
Which events deserve a seller’s attention?
A signal is an observable event that changes the odds an account will buy soon. Three kinds are worth acting on:
People moves. A new executive, a champion changing companies, a hiring spike in the function you sell into. New people inherit old problems and arrive with a mandate to change something.
Money moves. A funding round, a budget cycle, an acquisition. Money moving means priorities are being re-argued, and re-argued priorities are the only kind you can join.
Stated initiatives. A leader announcing a consolidation, an expansion, a compliance deadline. The account has said, in public, what it is trying to change.
Everything else — a page view, an email open, a fifth tool reporting the same executive hire — is noise with a timestamp. The test is simple: does this event give a specific seller a reason to believe a specific account is more likely to buy? If not, it does not deserve minutes.
2. What the alert can’t tell you
The signal names an account. Who’s the buying group?
Two different problems meet at every signal, and most teams only staff one of them.
The first is attention: with finite selling hours, which account deserves them this week? Signals genuinely help here — that is the job they do well.
The second is depth: the new VP is one person. Who do they report to? Who did they displace? Which of the account’s live problems just changed owners, and what would this account need to believe before it spent money with you? The alert contains none of that. It cannot, because that information is not an event — it is an account.
This is why “we bought a signal tool” so often turns into “we sent more email.” The tool solved the attention problem, the team skipped the depth problem, and the output was faster outreach with nothing new to say.
Illustrative signal
One signal, two mornings
Monday, 9:04 a.m. — a VP of Engineering starts at a target account. Two sellers see the same alert.
The send trigger
- 9:08
A templated email goes out: "Congrats on the new role…"
- 9:09
Skimmed on a phone between meetings. Archived.
- Cost
The account learns your name means noise.
The opening move
- 9:15
Map who arrived, who they report to, and who they displaced.
- 9:40
Form the hypothesis: what does this hire change, and for whom?
- 10:15
Choose the two buyers the change actually affects.
- 10:30
Send one message written for one person, about their problem.
- Result
A conversation — or a fast disqualification. Both are wins.
- What the signal gave you
- The account and the moment
- What it could not
- The buyers, the reason, the words
Next move: run the right-hand column on the next signal you get. The rest of this post walks it.
Illustrative example. The times are the point: the difference between the two mornings is about eighty minutes of account work.
3. The first ninety minutes
What does acting on a signal look like when it’s an opening move?
Map first. Before anyone writes a word, put the new arrival in context: the team they inherited, the leader they answer to, the predecessor whose decisions they are now living with. A signal about one person is really a signal about a group.
Then form the hypothesis. A new VP of Engineering might mean a platform consolidation, a build-versus-buy review, or nothing at all — the account’s own evidence decides which. Write the sentence you believe: this hire means the account is likely to change X, which creates a problem we solve for Y. If you cannot write that sentence, you have an alert, not an opportunity.
Only then choose the people. Usually the event touches two or three buyers, not one — the new leader, the peer whose workflow changes, the person who owned the old way. Each gets one message about their stake in the change, not a congratulations card.
This is prospecting at its normal standard; the signal just tells you which account earned it today. And notice what “win” means here: a real conversation is a win, and so is discovering in ninety minutes that the hire changes nothing for you. A fast, evidenced no returns the hours to an account that deserves them.
4. What the acquisition means
Why would a CRM company want the signals layer?
Because detection consolidates. Watching the world for events is infrastructure, and infrastructure migrates into systems of record — that is the story HubSpot just told, and it is a compliment to everyone who proved signals work.
It also moves the frontier. When every CRM ships alerts, detection stops being an edge; every competitor sees the same VP start the same job on the same Monday. The advantage that remains is the response: which team can turn the shared alert into the better-understood account, the sharper hypothesis, the message a buyer actually answers.
That advantage was never in the tool that fired the alert. Teams that keep winning after October are the ones that never outsourced it.
5. You can run this with a spreadsheet
Can you do signal-based selling without a dedicated tool?
Yes — and if Trigify’s wind-down leaves a gap in your stack, start here rather than panic-buying a lookalike.
One sheet, one row per target account. Columns: the signals worth watching for that account (the three kinds from section one), where you’d notice them (the account’s newsroom, leadership page, job postings, your named-account news feed), the date last checked, and — the columns most teams skip — the current buying-group map and the standing hypothesis. A weekly pass through the sheet is a functioning signal motion. It will beat an unread alert feed, because every event lands on an account you already understand.
The manual version proves the method, then reveals its limit. Maps age. The hypothesis you wrote in March quietly dies in June. Checking forty accounts weekly is an afternoon; researching the two that moved is another. Eventually the upkeep costs more than the judgment it feeds.
That is the point of systematizing — and the order matters: systematize the preparation, never the judgment. Narrative AI keeps the account map, the research, and the hypothesis current so a signal lands on an account the seller already understands; the seller still decides who matters and what to say, every message is rep-initiated, and every AI-suggested CRM change waits for the rep’s approval.
The alert was minute one. The teams that win own minutes two through ninety.
The Prospecting motion
This is one step of prospecting — see how the whole stage runs, end to end.
Explore Prospecting