Every go to market tactic has an expiration date. What gives you an edge (GTM alpha) today will be copied tomorrow and ineffective next quarter.
Signals—detected data changes that suggest sales opportunities—are a perfect example of this. Every company announcing funding and every executive changing roles receives hundreds of generic product pitches. While these signals may have once been novel, they’re now just background noise.
Today, we're launching signals in Clay, bringing together career movements, social listening, news tracking, and, most importantly, custom signals in one unified platform.
That means teams can win in two ways:
- Track custom signals that your competitors aren’t looking for. Turn any data point into a signal, including website content changes, financial filings, Google Maps reviews, and social media activity. For example, if you're a compliance platform, you could monitor when prospects announce plans to pursue SOC2 certification or open offices in highly regulated locations.
- Enrich all signals—especially common market signals—with superior context. The era of generic "congrats on your job change" emails is over. If you’re going to use job changes as a signal, you need to layer on relevant follow-on research: did the person actually use your product? Where did they find value? What tech stack does their new company use? Has their company launched recent product lines? In Clay, you can enrich every flagged account with 130+ data sources and AI and take immediate action, whether that’s an automated email or a Slack notification to a rep.
Teams find GTM alpha by defining unique customer signals and acting on them better—and faster—than their competitors.
Step 1: Find your ideal customer signals
Tracking signals once required overwhelming manual work by SDRs, like scouring the websites of every prospect for news and updates. Vendors then started selling products for limited signals like job changes and company news. But today, with AI, any data point can be a signal: the only limit is your creativity.
To define the custom signals that best fit your business, ask your sales and CX teams about the accounts that convert the fastest and at the highest ACV. What helped you know that these prospects needed your product right now? What indicators predict a customer’s churn or expansion? The signals you choose to use should reflect your best judgement on what makes for a great fit customer.
Successful teams often layer signals together, combining third-party signals (company doubles engineering team) with first-party signals (trial user signs up).
Here are some examples:
- Vanta monitors four signals at once: SOC2 certification announcements, website changes related to compliance, funding announcements, and CISO job postings.
- Cursor uses signals to track what customers are saying about them on X, LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit and the internet to help CX respond to users, get feedback to the product team, and find new prospects.
- Rippling enriches job changers and, after further filtering, uses location data to determine their most likely corporate office for direct mail campaigns.
- Amplitude is using their own product data combined with AI research in Clay to determine which customers are the best fits for cross-sell.
- Density monitors prospects’ office lease expiration dates; when those dates get close, they listen for social engagement on LinkedIn or Slack before reaching out.
- At Clay, we monitor multiple signals—job changes, news, website visits, event attendance, social mentions, technology used, product activations, support tickets that indicate customer expansion potential, etc.—and send both our sellers and CX team bundled and prioritized Slack messages per account.
Step 2: Enrich each signal for 360° intelligence
When a signal flags an account, enrich it deeply to help craft the most relevant message possible.
The wrong approach is painfully obvious: missing the opportunity entirely or sending the same generic "Congrats on your funding!" emails as everyone else.
Instead, you should use AI and multiple data providers to enrich every signal with research like company context (size, offering, growth, recent news), relevant decision-makers (roles, background, engagement history), and their contact information. Below are some examples.
You can add any signal you want to this list. For each one, ask yourself: "What does this signal reveal about the prospect's needs?" Then: "What critical context is missing, and what additional data would confirm this is a genuine opportunity?"
Step 3: Put your signals to work
Once you’ve enriched a signal, you have to do something with it.
Signals can help you both source new accounts (prospects engaging with social posts, adopting new technology, or discussing new priorities) and monitor existing accounts (job changes, product usage, etc.) The action you take depends on the signal type and the account’s strategic value.
Alerts to trigger automated replies
If a signal warrants immediate, programmatic intervention, such as the below, trigger an automated reply.
Alerts to spark manual replies
If a signal requires human judgment and personalized outreach, alert your sales or CX team for manual handling. You can reserve your most important accounts for human outreach while automating responses for others.
At Clay, we create bundled Slack messages to our reps to show them aggregate signal activity across their top 5 named accounts with open opportunities and also without open opportunities.
We also create similar alerts for our CX team to alert them on relevant product activity and give them a comprehensive view of what their customers are up to in the product. We’re currently adding in recommendations for what actions reps should take based on these signals.
Building your signal program in Clay
Signals offer a strong GTM advantage, but not if everyone uses them in the same way. Our customers are building systems around signals their competitors miss—and then connecting them to the rest of their enrichment and outreach systems to link them to direct action. See more examples of use cases on our website, or start directly from a Claybook.
Every go to market tactic has an expiration date. What gives you an edge (GTM alpha) today will be copied tomorrow and ineffective next quarter.
Signals—detected data changes that suggest sales opportunities—are a perfect example of this. Every company announcing funding and every executive changing roles receives hundreds of generic product pitches. While these signals may have once been novel, they’re now just background noise.
Today, we're launching signals in Clay, bringing together career movements, social listening, news tracking, and, most importantly, custom signals in one unified platform.
That means teams can win in two ways:
- Track custom signals that your competitors aren’t looking for. Turn any data point into a signal, including website content changes, financial filings, Google Maps reviews, and social media activity. For example, if you're a compliance platform, you could monitor when prospects announce plans to pursue SOC2 certification or open offices in highly regulated locations.
- Enrich all signals—especially common market signals—with superior context. The era of generic "congrats on your job change" emails is over. If you’re going to use job changes as a signal, you need to layer on relevant follow-on research: did the person actually use your product? Where did they find value? What tech stack does their new company use? Has their company launched recent product lines? In Clay, you can enrich every flagged account with 130+ data sources and AI and take immediate action, whether that’s an automated email or a Slack notification to a rep.
Teams find GTM alpha by defining unique customer signals and acting on them better—and faster—than their competitors.
Step 1: Find your ideal customer signals
Tracking signals once required overwhelming manual work by SDRs, like scouring the websites of every prospect for news and updates. Vendors then started selling products for limited signals like job changes and company news. But today, with AI, any data point can be a signal: the only limit is your creativity.
To define the custom signals that best fit your business, ask your sales and CX teams about the accounts that convert the fastest and at the highest ACV. What helped you know that these prospects needed your product right now? What indicators predict a customer’s churn or expansion? The signals you choose to use should reflect your best judgement on what makes for a great fit customer.
Successful teams often layer signals together, combining third-party signals (company doubles engineering team) with first-party signals (trial user signs up).
Here are some examples:
- Vanta monitors four signals at once: SOC2 certification announcements, website changes related to compliance, funding announcements, and CISO job postings.
- Cursor uses signals to track what customers are saying about them on X, LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit and the internet to help CX respond to users, get feedback to the product team, and find new prospects.
- Rippling enriches job changers and, after further filtering, uses location data to determine their most likely corporate office for direct mail campaigns.
- Amplitude is using their own product data combined with AI research in Clay to determine which customers are the best fits for cross-sell.
- Density monitors prospects’ office lease expiration dates; when those dates get close, they listen for social engagement on LinkedIn or Slack before reaching out.
- At Clay, we monitor multiple signals—job changes, news, website visits, event attendance, social mentions, technology used, product activations, support tickets that indicate customer expansion potential, etc.—and send both our sellers and CX team bundled and prioritized Slack messages per account.
Step 2: Enrich each signal for 360° intelligence
When a signal flags an account, enrich it deeply to help craft the most relevant message possible.
The wrong approach is painfully obvious: missing the opportunity entirely or sending the same generic "Congrats on your funding!" emails as everyone else.
Instead, you should use AI and multiple data providers to enrich every signal with research like company context (size, offering, growth, recent news), relevant decision-makers (roles, background, engagement history), and their contact information. Below are some examples.
You can add any signal you want to this list. For each one, ask yourself: "What does this signal reveal about the prospect's needs?" Then: "What critical context is missing, and what additional data would confirm this is a genuine opportunity?"
Step 3: Put your signals to work
Once you’ve enriched a signal, you have to do something with it.
Signals can help you both source new accounts (prospects engaging with social posts, adopting new technology, or discussing new priorities) and monitor existing accounts (job changes, product usage, etc.) The action you take depends on the signal type and the account’s strategic value.
Alerts to trigger automated replies
If a signal warrants immediate, programmatic intervention, such as the below, trigger an automated reply.
Alerts to spark manual replies
If a signal requires human judgment and personalized outreach, alert your sales or CX team for manual handling. You can reserve your most important accounts for human outreach while automating responses for others.
At Clay, we create bundled Slack messages to our reps to show them aggregate signal activity across their top 5 named accounts with open opportunities and also without open opportunities.
We also create similar alerts for our CX team to alert them on relevant product activity and give them a comprehensive view of what their customers are up to in the product. We’re currently adding in recommendations for what actions reps should take based on these signals.
Building your signal program in Clay
Signals offer a strong GTM advantage, but not if everyone uses them in the same way. Our customers are building systems around signals their competitors miss—and then connecting them to the rest of their enrichment and outreach systems to link them to direct action. See more examples of use cases on our website, or start directly from a Claybook.
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