LinkedIn buying signals: 12 we act on, and 5 we ignore

01What counts as a buying signal, and what doesn’t

A buying signal is something one named person did or said, in public and recently, that points at the problem you solve. Two neighbors get mixed up with it all the time, and they need different handling.

A trigger event (the older sales term is “sales trigger”) is a change at a company, like a funding round, a launch or a new hire, that often creates the problem. It tells you which company. It doesn’t tell you which person.

Intent data is research behavior that a data vendor collects across websites and scores: the topics a company’s staff have been reading. It suggests a company might be shopping, and it rarely names anyone.

Our rule: a trigger event or an intent score can put a company on the review list, but nobody gets invited until we can write one sentence about why this person, and why now.

02From signal to invitation: one row of the reason log

The reason log is one page, every Friday, listing everyone invited that week, why each was picked, the first line sent and what happened. This is what a single signal looks like once it’s written down.

Why that first line. It names the signal in its opening words, so the reader can tell nobody pasted it into a thousand inboxes. It asks one question with two likely answers, which is easier to reply to than “tell me more”.

It doesn’t mention the product at all, because the question does the qualifying: if the questionnaire is the problem, the software is relevant, and if it isn’t, we’ve lost nothing. And at 125 characters it sits well inside LinkedIn’s note limit of 200 characters (LinkedIn Help, checked 28 Sep 2026).

If you’d like the week-by-week view of this, here are the signals your operator watches every weekday. If you run outreach yourself, LinkedIn outreach for founders, start to finish covers the rest of the week: the note, the replies and what to count on Friday.

03The 12 signals we act on

These are grouped by where the signal comes from: the person, the company, or the context around them. Five come from the person because person-level signals are the ones that justify a personal note.

From the person

1. They posted about the problem

A post in their own words about the problem you solve is the strongest signal on this list, like a founder writing that security reviews keep stalling deals. We save the post’s URL in the log. If the same point shows up on their blog or a podcast, we link that too, since a source off LinkedIn is easier to check later.

Fresh for 14 days; after that the thread has usually been answered or forgotten.

2. They commented and named the problem

Comments are often more candid than posts, because people say in someone else’s thread what they wouldn’t announce in their own. We log the comment’s link and the post it sits under, because context changes what a comment means. Fresh for 14 days.

3. They started a job that owns the problem

A new VP Engineering or head of security inherits the audit and its budget, and gets a short window in which they’re expected to change things. LinkedIn’s own sales blog describes a Sales Navigator filter for people who changed jobs in the last 90 days (LinkedIn Sales Blog, February 2024).

We confirm the move on the company’s team page or announcement as well, because profiles lag. Fresh for 90 days.

4. They engaged with your posts

A real comment on something you wrote is warm in a way no other signal is, because they came to you first. A like doesn’t count; it’s on the ignore list below. We check the comment thread on the client’s post and act within 7 days, while they’ll still remember writing it.

5. They viewed your profile, and they fit your target brief

We use this one carefully. What you can see depends on the viewer’s privacy setting and on your own account type (details under “What a signal can’t tell you”).

So a named view from someone who already fits the target brief counts, and an anonymous or off-brief one doesn’t. Fresh for 7 days.

From the company

6. The company is hiring its first salesperson

A job ad for the first account executive at a 10 to 40-person company usually means the founder is still selling and is about to hand some of it over. This is the signal we watch most closely for GTME’s own outreach, because it describes our buyer exactly.

We save the ad’s URL, since ads come down, and act while it’s live, up to 30 days.

7. The company is hiring the role your product helps

If your product makes a job easier, a new opening for that job is a budget line with a name on it. For the made-up SOC 2 client, that’s a first security or compliance engineer. We invite the person the new hire will report to, not the hire.

Fresh while the ad is live.

8. The company raised money in the last 90 days

Funding changes what a company can buy and who it plans to sell to next. We check the company’s own announcement and read what they say the money is for, because “moving upmarket” matters more to a SOC 2 seller than the size of the round.

Fresh for 90 days. Older rounds are on the ignore list.

9. The company launched something

A new product, an enterprise tier or a first integration tends to create a new problem within weeks of going live. We check the changelog, the launch page or the company blog, and act within 30 days.

10. The company is expanding into the US or UK

First US hires, a London office, a new entity: expansion brings buyers with different expectations. We verify it through job posts with US or UK locations, a press release or the company’s own post.

We act within 60 days, while the first hires are still deciding how the new market gets sold.

From the context

11. You share a community, plus one of the signals above

On its own, a shared group is a thin excuse to write, and people can tell. We use it only as a second fact on top of a real signal: the same meetup speaker list, the same public group, the same podcast.

We check the public event or group page, and the window is whatever the other signal allows.

12. They posted about leaving a tool

“We’re moving off X” is a buyer halfway through a decision. If your product replaces that tool or sits beside it, this is the most time-sensitive signal on the list, and we act within 30 days.

To see what goes wrong when a message leaves its signal out, here are ten messages founders delete and the first line each signal earns, rewritten.

04The 5 we ignore

Each of these shows up in signal tools and dashboards, and each one looks like a reason to write when it isn’t. Here’s why we skip them.

1. Likes on viral posts. Liking a post with thousands of reactions tells you they scrolled past it. It says nothing about their problem.

2. Funding older than 90 days. By then the money has owners and the plan is set. A round from last spring is trivia.

3. A single profile view with nothing else. Views can be anonymous or accidental, and a free account shows you only a few of them. One view alone is too little to write about.

4. Recruiter and agency hiring posts. A recruiter advertising “AE, Series A SaaS” could be filling a role at any of a dozen companies, and an agency hiring for its own clients isn’t the buyer. We trace the ad to the employer’s careers page, or skip it.

5. Companies over the size ceiling in the target brief. A strong signal from a 2,000-person company is still a no if the brief stops at 200 staff. Bigger companies usually have a sales team for this already.

Skips go in the log too, with the reason, because they show the judgment as clearly as the picks do.

Sample skipped row (Example) Founder, compliance consultancy · Not invited · Skipped: sells the same service as the client, so they’re a competitor, not a buyer.

05How fast to act on each signal

Act on anything a person did (a post, a comment, a profile view) within one to two weeks. Act on company events like funding within one to three months. The table gives the window for each signal and the reason for it.

These are our working windows as of 28 September 2026, not LinkedIn rules and not measured results. Treat them as an ESTIMATE until our own log has enough weeks to test them.

When the log shows a window is wrong, we’ll change it in this table and put the date of the change under it.

06What a signal can’t tell you

A signal shows that a problem is likely. It doesn’t show that anyone wants to buy from you, and some of LinkedIn’s own data is partial by design.

• Profile views are incomplete. LinkedIn Help says a free account sees the three most recent viewers from the last 90 days, and only if your own profile-viewing setting shows your name and headline; Premium shows up to 365 days of viewers. Nobody, Premium included, can see the names of people browsing in private mode (both LinkedIn Help, checked 28 Sep 2026).

• UK and EU prospects have rights you must respect. The UK regulator, the ICO, says UK GDPR applies to a named person even when they act in a business capacity, and that the right to object to direct marketing is absolute (ICO, checked 28 Sep 2026).

  So we use public, work-related signals only, and anyone who says no goes on a do-not-contact list that covers every client. This isn’t legal advice.

• Scraping is off the table. LinkedIn’s User Agreement, section 8.2, forbids software that scrapes or copies the Services. We don’t scrape and we don’t buy lists.

  We do use a sending tool for invitations, which the same section doesn’t allow either, and we say so plainly on how we run your account.

07What our own log shows

We don’t yet have enough weeks of our own outreach logged to say which of these 12 signals earns the most replies. Once we do, this section will show which led to accepted invitations and replies, with the number of invitations behind each figure. Until then, we’d rather show you nothing than an estimate dressed up as data.

Daniel

08Common questions