If you’ve ever burned hours chasing “hot” leads that went nowhere, you know the pain of bad prioritization. Most sales tools promise to surface the best prospects, but few actually deliver. If you want a practical, no-nonsense approach to finding leads who are actually ready to buy, this guide is for you. We’ll walk through using Vainu to spot real buying signals, weed out the tire-kickers, and focus your time where it counts.
Why Buying Signals Matter (and What Most People Get Wrong)
Let’s get something straight: not all buying signals are worth your attention. There’s a lot of noise—“They visited our website!” or “They opened an email!”—but most of that means nothing if you’re selling B2B. Chasing every little blip just fills your day with busywork.
The signals that matter are the ones that indicate intent or need. These are things like:
- A company recently got funding and is likely expanding
- They’re hiring for roles that use your product
- They switched tech stacks and now have a gap you fill
- Their current contract is expiring soon
This is where Vainu can help: it collects a ton of company data—real firmographics, technographics, news, and more—and lets you filter for the signals that actually matter for your sales process.
Step 1: Get Clear on What Your Buying Signals Look Like
Before you even log in, spend 30 minutes with your team and ask: “What’s actually true about our best customers right before they buy?”
Don’t rely on generic advice or what the tool says you should look for. Instead, dig into your own deals:
- Look backward: What changed for your last 10 closed-won accounts before they signed?
- Ask your reps: What do you notice about leads that end up converting?
- Be specific: “Company grew 20% in the last year,” not “they’re growing.” “Hired a Head of Data,” not “hiring.”
Write these down. This is your checklist, and it’ll save you from chasing shiny objects later.
Pro tip: Ignore signals you can’t actually act on or that don’t fit your sales cycle. If you sell to companies with 100+ employees, don’t bother with news about tiny startups.
Step 2: Set Up Vainu to Find the Right Leads
Once you know what you’re looking for, it’s time to set up Vainu to do the grunt work. Here’s how to avoid drowning in irrelevant data.
1. Build Custom Filters
Vainu’s strength is its filters. Don’t just use their default “hot leads” list—customize it:
- Firmographics: Company size, location, industry, revenue. Standard stuff, but don’t skip it.
- Technographics: What tech are they using? Did they just drop a competitor’s product?
- Hiring signals: Are they adding roles related to your product? Vainu scrapes job boards for this.
- Recent company news: Funding rounds, expansions, mergers, leadership changes.
- Contract renewal signals: If you know your competitor’s contract cycles, you can get alerted when customers might be open to switching.
Stack these filters together. For example, “SaaS companies in the Nordics, 100-500 employees, just raised Series B, hiring for DevOps.”
2. Save Your Search
Don’t rebuild your filters every time. Save them as “Smart Views” in Vainu. You can set alerts so you get notified when new companies match your criteria—no more manual list building.
3. Test and Refine
Chances are, your first filter will be too broad or too narrow. That’s normal.
- Run your filter.
- Spot check 10 companies. Are they a good fit?
- If not, tweak your criteria (add or remove filters) and repeat.
This takes an hour or two upfront, but it saves you days of chasing junk leads.
Step 3: Score and Prioritize—Don’t Just “See Who’s There”
Here’s where most people mess up: they get a big list of companies with buying signals and treat them all the same. Don’t do this.
Set up a basic scoring system in Vainu (or your CRM) so you can rank leads by how strong their intent looks. Here’s how:
- Assign points for different signals. For example:
- +10 if they raised funding in the last 90 days
- +7 if they’re hiring for a relevant role
- +5 if they use a competitor’s tool
- +3 if they’re in your target industry
- Tally the points. Leads with the highest scores go to the top of your outreach list.
You don’t need a fancy algorithm. The point is to focus on the best 10-20% and ignore the rest (for now).
Don’t overthink it: If you find yourself adding 20 scoring criteria, you’re probably making it more complicated than it needs to be.
Step 4: Sync Vainu With Your CRM (and Actually Use It)
All the buying signals in the world don’t help if you’re still copying and pasting data between tools. Vainu integrates with most major CRMs (like Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive). Hook it up so your best leads flow straight into your pipeline, along with the buying signals you used to score them.
- Map the right fields: Only sync the data you’ll actually use. No one needs 50 columns of random info.
- Create a “Vainu Leads” view in your CRM, sorted by score or buying signal strength.
- Set up notifications for reps—flag new high-score leads so they don’t get lost.
If your team is still working leads from spreadsheets, you’re missing the real value.
Step 5: Outreach—Tailor Your Message to the Signal
Here’s where the magic happens. Most people blast the same “just checking in” email to every lead. Instead, use the buying signal as your opener:
- “Saw you just raised your Series B—congrats! Teams at this stage usually need X. Is that on your radar?”
- “Noticed you’re hiring your first Head of Data. We help companies like yours onboard quickly—want to see how?”
- “Saw your company switched from {competitor}. Is there anything you’re missing that we could help with?”
This shows you’ve done your homework and aren’t just spamming everyone in the database.
What to ignore: Don’t over-personalize with fluff (e.g., “I see you like hiking!”). Stick to the business trigger.
Step 6: Track Results and Tweak Your Signals
Don’t just “set it and forget it.” Every month or so, look at which signals actually led to conversations and deals.
- Which triggers did your best-converting leads have?
- Are some signals (like “hiring” or “news mentions”) just noise in your market?
- Did you miss obvious prospects because your filters were too narrow?
Update your Vainu filters and scoring as you learn. The best buying signals change over time—what worked last quarter might not work next.
Pro tip: Keep it simple. Two or three strong signals will serve you better than 10 weak ones.
Honest Takes: What Works, What Doesn’t, and Where to Be Skeptical
- What works: Using Vainu’s real company data and smart filters to avoid wasting time on dead leads. Plugging buying signals right into your outreach so you sound like a human, not a robot.
- What doesn’t: Blindly trusting “hot lead” scores from any tool, or thinking more data automatically means better results.
- Where to be skeptical: Vainu is only as good as the signals you define. Garbage in, garbage out. Also, if your sales process is transactional and you don’t need much context, all this might be overkill.
Keep It Simple and Iterate
Prioritizing leads with buying signals isn’t magic—it’s just common sense, made easier by the right tool. Don’t let yourself get paralyzed by options or overwhelmed by data. Start with a few strong signals, build your filters, and improve as you go.
Remember, you don’t need perfect automation or a thousand data points. You need a short list of leads who actually want to buy, and a clear way to spot them. That’s how you close more deals—and spend way less time chasing ghosts.