It baffles me why so many GTM teams are so focused on signals.

Funding rounds, job postings, a prospect who’s visited your pricing page three times this week, intent data platforms promising to tell you who’s “in market” before they’ve told anyone, including themselves.

The entire GTM conversation has convinced itself that if you catch the signal fast enough, you’ve found a buyer.

You haven’t.

A signal tells you something happened. It doesn’t tell you why, and it definitely doesn’t tell you what to do about it.

A signal is a symptom, not a diagnosis

A company hires a new CMO. A prospect visits your case studies page twice in one day. Somebody new follows your page after months of silence. These are all signals. None of them are intent.

Intent is a decision that exists in someone’s head. A signal is a data point that correlates with that decision sometimes, in some businesses, for reasons you don’t actually know yet. Treating the two as the same thing is how an entire industry got built on a fiction: that if you buy the right tracking tool, you’ll always know exactly when to strike.

You won’t. You’ll know when to pay attention. That’s a different thing, and it matters more than most GTM and Growth teams admit.

The funding congratulations message everyone hates

You’ve had it happen to you. A company announces a funding round on a Tuesday morning.

By lunchtime, three messages land in the founder’s inbox, each one opening with some version of “saw your news, congratulations, wondering if…”

That’s not personalisation. That’s a business that spotted a signal and had nothing to say once it arrived.

Look closely at why it fails, and it’s mechanical, not just tasteless. The message treats the funding round itself as the story, because the funding round is the only thing the sender actually knows.

There’s no problem named, no evidence of understanding, nothing that couldn’t be sent to every company that raised money that week. The timing was right. Everything else was a guess dressed up as insight.

The real gap isn’t timing, it’s diagnosis

Even the businesses with the sharpest signal-tracking stack in the world hit the same wall, because catching the moment doesn’t tell you the problem. You still have to bring the diagnosis yourself.

That’s not a timing problem. That’s a positioning problem, and no amount of faster alerts will fix it.

The only way to bring a sharp diagnosis the second a signal appears is to have already done the work of knowing exactly what problem you solve, for who, and what it looks like when they’re living it. That work has to exist before the signal shows up.

It can’t be built in the nine minutes between the funding announcement and your DM.

Signal-chasing feels like progress because it’s measurable. A dashboard lights up, a notification fires, something happened. It creates the illusion of readiness where there isn’t any. Usually it’s a business skipping the harder question: do we actually know the specific problem we solve well enough to recognise it the moment it walks past us?

Positioning does the work a signal never will

This is where it comes back to pillars, not tools. A business with sharp, problem-first positioning doesn’t need software to tell them someone just hired a new CMO. They already know that role gets created when a specific problem exists, because they’ve been talking about that exact problem publicly for months. The signal just confirms what they already suspected.

For everyone else, the signal is a data point with no context attached. It tells them somebody, somewhere, might be relevant, and leaves them scrambling to invent a reason to care. That’s the gap. Not the tooling. The diagnosis.

The same test, run against the signals everyone tracks

The real difference here is crucial to your GTM success, and it shows up in every signal people track, not just funding rounds.

Read a signal at face value, and you're working off an assumption. Read into it for the problem it's actually pointing at, and you've got something worth acting on. Same signal. Two completely different outcomes.

A job posting for a new function, again a new CMO, tells the naive reader “they’re about to invest in growth, get in early.” It tells someone who already knows the problem something sharper.

That role usually gets created once growth has been running on referrals and inbound for long enough that leadership has started to panic about predictability. That’s not a job posting. That’s a business quietly admitting they’ve hit a ceiling. The message that follows should speak to the ceiling, not the vacancy.

Repeated visits to your pricing page get read as “they’re close, hit them with a demo or a discount.”

More often it means somebody is building an internal case and needs ammunition, not a pitch. The useful move is to arm them with the argument they’ll have to make to their own decision makers, not to call to close a deal that isn’t theirs to close yet.

A prospect adopts a tool that’s typically bought alongside yours, and the naive read is “cross-sell opportunity, they’re already spending.” The diagnosis-led read asks a different question.

“What problem does that tool solve badly on its own?”, and do you understand that limitation well enough to raise it before they’ve discovered it themselves? That’s a conversation. “I saw you just implemented X” is not.

Even something as basic as a contract renewal date only means anything once you already understand why an account might expand or churn. The date on the calendar isn’t the signal. The shape of the relationship is.

None of these signals is wrong to notice. What’s wrong is treating the noticing as the finish line, when it’s actually the point where the real work, the diagnosis, is supposed to start.

What a signal is actually good for

Flip it around, and it gets simpler.

A signal isn’t permission to invent a reason to reach out. It’s confirmation of a problem you already know how to name.

Take the same funding round. A business that’s spent months publicly naming the operational strain most companies hit within six months of raising, the hiring that outpaces process, the pipeline that suddenly has to be predictable instead of lucky, doesn’t need to mention the funding at all.

They’ve already been recognised for understanding that exact moment before it arrived. The signal doesn’t start the relationship. It just tells them the reader is now living the problem they’ve been talking about all along.

That’s the difference between a signal used well and a signal used as a substitute for not knowing. One continues a conversation the reader already half-recognises. The other announces that a stranger has been watching and has nothing to say beyond that.

Let’s wrap this up

If you’re building a GTM approach around signals right now, the fix isn’t a better tracking tool or a faster alert.

Before reacting to any signal, ask what problem it might actually indicate, whether it’s one you genuinely solve, and whether you could name it in one sentence without checking a dashboard first. If you can’t answer that instantly, what you’ve got isn’t a lead. It’s a hunch with good timing.

Know the problem first. Then a signal becomes confirmation, not a starting point, and the outreach it produces sounds like recognition instead of surveillance.

None of this makes signals useless. It makes them secondary to something most businesses haven’t done: know the problem well enough to recognise it without a dashboard telling you first.

Chase signals if you want. Just build the diagnosis before you build the alert system, because a faster response to the wrong opportunity is still the wrong opportunity.