Intent Scores Don't Start Conversations. Signals Do.

Your intent platform says an account is "surging" on your category. Your SDR opens LinkedIn, stares at the company page, and asks the only question that matters: what do I actually say to these people?

The score has no answer. That is the gap this article is about. Intent scores and buying signals both claim to solve timing, but they behave very differently the moment a human has to start a conversation. Here is how they differ, where each one earns its keep, and how to combine them without drowning your team in dashboards.

What an intent score actually is

Third-party intent scores, the Bombora and 6sense style of data, work roughly like this: a network of publisher sites tracks which companies are consuming content on which topics. When reads on a topic spike above that company's baseline, the account gets flagged as surging, usually with a score attached.

Useful information. Also, by construction, three steps removed from a conversation:

→ It is account-level. "Someone at this 800-person company read about your category" does not tell you who. → It is anonymous. The score cannot name the person, their role, or what specifically they read. → It is unverifiable. You cannot reference it in a message without sounding like you bugged their office, and you cannot check whether the surge was an intern doing coursework.

An intent score is a probability estimate. Probabilities are for prioritizing. They are terrible at writing first lines.

What a buying signal is

A buying signal is a specific, observable event tied to a company and usually a person. The company posted its fifth SDR role this quarter. It announced a Series A on Tuesday. Its head of growth commented on your competitor's launch post. Someone who championed your product just started as VP Sales somewhere new.

Signals have the three properties scores lack:

→ They are attributable. You know the company, and often the exact person, plus their title. → They are concrete. A real event happened, and both of you can see it. → They are referenceable. You can build an opener on it without revealing any tracking, because the event is public.

That last property is the whole game. "Saw you are scaling the SDR team, most teams hit a data-quality wall around rep five" is a message a human can send. "Our data provider says your firm is surging on sales intelligence" is not.

The conversation test

Put any piece of intent data through one test: can a rep turn it into a first line that a stranger would find relevant rather than invasive?

An intent score fails the test. The rep falls back to a generic opener, and the prospect receives what is, from their side, plain cold outreach. The score changed who you contacted, but not what you said. Reply rates behave accordingly.

A buying signal passes. The opener names a real, public event and connects it to a problem you remove. The prospect reads relevance, not surveillance. In our campaigns, that difference is the gap between ICP-filtered signal-based outreach at roughly 55% connection acceptance and 30% replies, and a cold-list baseline at 20 to 30% acceptance with 5 to 8% replies. Same channels. Different opening line.

Where intent scores still earn their keep

None of this makes topic-level intent useless. It is just miscast as a conversation starter. Scores are good at exactly the jobs that do not require naming anyone:

→ Account prioritization. If two accounts fit your ICP equally, work the surging one first. → Ad targeting. Warm the surging accounts with paid coverage before and during outbound. → Deal support. A surge on a competitor's brand mid-deal is worth flagging to the AE. → Territory planning. Aggregate surges show where demand is forming by segment or region.

The pattern: scores are for allocation decisions, signals are for outreach. Trouble starts when a team buys an intent feed for allocation and then asks SDRs to prospect with it.

Why signals win the first touch

Three structural reasons, beyond the numbers.

1. Specificity compounds trust. A message that names a real event proves a human paid attention. Buyers reply to attention. They ignore templates with their company name merged in.

2. Signals carry their own timing. A funding round or a hiring spike dates itself. You know the window is now, and the prospect knows why you showed up now. A surge score has fuzzy timing: the reads could be last month's research project.

3. Signals survive scrutiny. If a prospect asks "why did you reach out?", the honest answer for a signal is "you are hiring five SDRs, that usually means X." The honest answer for a score is one you would rather not say out loud.

Using both without the bloat

If you already pay for topic intent, the combination is straightforward: scores select, signals speak.

1. Filter everything through your ICP first. Fit gates both scores and signals. A surging account outside your ICP is still noise, and so is a hiring spike at a company you would never serve. In one of our recent runs, 4,774 raw signal leads reduced to 341 qualified ones after the filter. The 93% cut is what keeps the pipeline honest.
2. Use scores to rank accounts. Surging plus in-ICP moves to the top of the queue.
3. Find a concrete signal on each priority account. Hiring, funding, competitor engagement, a job change. This becomes the opener.
4. Reach the person the signal points to. The hire owner, the new executive, the engaged buyer. Not a generic persona from a template.
5. Let the signal write the first line, and keep the first touch about them: a useful observation or resource, no pitch, and stop on reply.

If you do not pay for topic intent, skip straight to signals. A small team with fresh, ICP-filtered signals will out-reply a big team armed with surge scores every week of the year.

Frequently asked questions

Is intent data a scam, then? No. It is misused. Topic-level intent answers "which accounts should we spend attention on," and it answers that reasonably well. It was never designed to answer "what do we say," and that is the question outbound lives or dies on.

Can I mention an intent surge in my outreach? You should not. It is unverifiable, it reveals tracking the prospect never agreed to think about, and it references nothing they recognize as an event. Signals are referenceable because they are public and concrete.

Are website visitors intent scores or buying signals? First-party visitor identification sits in between: it is concrete and timely, but referencing it directly ("saw you on our pricing page") still reads like surveillance. Treat it like a score: use it to prioritize, then find a public signal or a problem angle to actually open with.

What is the cheapest way to start with buying signals? Pick one signal type that maps directly to your offer, hiring being the usual first choice, and work it manually for two weeks: find the event, find the owner, open on the gap it implies. The lift shows up fast enough to justify automating the loop after that.

Scores sort. Signals speak.

An intent score can tell you where to look. It cannot tell you what to say when you get there. Buying signals do both, which is why they start conversations and scores start dashboards. Sort with whatever you like. Open with a signal.