Buyer intent signals are dated public events that make a purchase more likely soon: a new job, an open role, a launch, or a post about a problem you solve. They are only as good as their date, and the date a tool hands you is usually the day it noticed, not the day it happened. The guide above takes each signal and says what a seller learns, what to trust, what to discard and which date to go by, read from the platform that makes it public.
How to read the guide
Read the discard answer first, because it is where most bad outreach starts. A promotion from last spring that turns up in a list this week leads to a congratulations email that reads as a template, since the person has had the title for months.
Every signal links the page it comes from and the day we last read it.
Which signals hold up
Career moves are self-reported. Use the start date on the profile. Work anniversaries are the weakest signal: they repeat every year and say nothing changed.
Posts carry their own creation date. The risk is identity, so open the profile before you quote anything.
Code activity is solid where it is concrete: new repositories and what changed in them. Stars are not, because GitHub describes starring as a way to bookmark a repository.
Hiring has the best dates when the employer uses Google's job posting structured data, which holds the day a job was posted and the day it expires. A reposted job is not new demand.
Launches date by the listing. Drop listings that are only a landing page or a sign-up form.
Much of what is sold as intent data is research activity you cannot open and check. A signal you cannot date or verify is a guess with a score attached.
What to do next
Date it by the platform, not by the tool that found it.
Check who it belongs to before you quote it.
Check fit before timing. A company you cannot serve is still a company you cannot serve.
Name the event in your first line, so the message could not have been sent last month.
In Oneprofile, each signal in the guide is a search you can run, and the cost shows before anyone is added. Signals no public page carries, such as a question about price on a call, are in our buying signals examples, and how signals add up to one number is in the guide to lead scoring.