How to reach people when they're actually ready to buy, not at random

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Most outreach is a volume game against a cold list: you don't know who's actually in-market this month versus who's just a name that fits your ideal customer profile. Intent signals change that by surfacing specific behavior, a competitor review left recently, engagement with relevant content, a job change into a role with buying power, that suggests someone is actually closer to a decision than the rest of your list. The pitch from every vendor in this space is roughly the same: stop guessing who's ready, start reaching the people who are already showing you. If you would rather work a short list by hand, see email, phone and social outreach for a short list of ideal clients.

The three real options, and how they differ

• Diginius Intent Leads. Site-visit and intent-based signals at a lower price point, a focused tool if intent data is genuinely the whole job. I've covered this in more depth separately, including its actual pricing and what the signals cover, in my guide to finding companies that are already looking for what you sell.
• Bombora. A large, well-established intent data provider, strong coverage, enterprise-priced and generally sold to larger sales and marketing teams rather than small agencies.
• Amplemarket's Intent Signals and Job Change Alerts. Bundled into its broader database and outreach platform rather than sold as a standalone intent product; the signal is one input among several (database search, enrichment, sequences) rather than the entire point of the subscription.

Option	Signal types covered	Sold as	Fits best for
Diginius Intent Leads	Site-visit and intent-based	Standalone, lower cost	Teams that want intent data only, nothing else bundled
Bombora	Broad intent coverage, enterprise data co-ops	Enterprise, custom-priced	Larger sales and marketing teams already buying enterprise tools
Amplemarket	Post engagement, competitor reviews, inbound leads, job changes	Bundled with database, enrichment, sequences	Teams already using Amplemarket for prospecting and outreach

The real decision isn't which has "better" signals, since all three are working from broadly similar categories of public behavior. It's whether you want intent data as a standalone, focused tool (Diginius, cheaper and simpler), as part of an enterprise data stack (Bombora, if you're already buying enterprise tools), or as one feature inside a platform you're using for prospecting and outreach anyway (Amplemarket).

How Amplemarket fits this specifically

Amplemarket's Intent Signals and Job Change Alerts track buying signals (post engagement, competitor reviews, inbound form fills) alongside job-change tracking specifically, flagging when a past contact moves to a new company. The job-change-alert contact cap scales by plan: 500 contacts on Startup, 1,000 on Growth, 2,000 on Elite. This is the feature where Amplemarket's "one platform for the whole job" positioning actually pays off, since a flagged signal connects directly to the same database and sequence tools you'd use to act on it, rather than needing to export a signal and manually load it into a separate outreach tool.

Practically, the 500-contact cap on Startup means you're choosing which past contacts and target accounts are worth tracking, not tracking everyone you've ever met. Prioritize former clients, people you had real conversations with, and named contacts at your highest-value target accounts, rather than every LinkedIn connection you've ever added. A list of 500 well-chosen contacts generates more usable signals over a year than a thin spread across 2,000 names you barely know, which is the actual argument for staying on Startup rather than assuming a higher plan is automatically better here.

Amplemarket bundles this under what it calls Duo Signals, part of a broader set of AI features (alongside Duo Copilot and Duo Copywriter) included on every plan rather than priced as a separate add-on. Worth knowing before a sales call: since it's included rather than metered separately, there's no extra line-item cost to ask about for the signal feature itself, the only real cost variable is which plan's contact cap and database size you need for the rest of what you're doing.

A worked example: is upgrading to Growth worth it for signals alone?

Say you're on Startup and routinely hit your 500-contact job-change-tracking cap, meaning you're having to drop older tracked contacts to add new ones. Growth doubles that cap to 1,000, but Growth isn't separately priced for the signal feature alone, it's a quote for the whole plan (4 users, 140,000 database contacts, more mailboxes). Upgrading purely to raise a tracking cap by 500 contacts rarely makes sense in isolation; it only makes sense if you were already outgrowing Startup's other limits (users, database size, mailboxes) and the larger tracking cap is a welcome side benefit of a move you needed to make anyway. If signal tracking is genuinely the only thing pushing you to upgrade, it's worth first auditing whether all 500 currently-tracked contacts are still worth tracking, since pruning stale ones often recovers the headroom you need without paying for a bigger plan. Set a calendar reminder to run that audit every six months rather than waiting until you're already at the cap and scrambling to decide who to drop.

A worked example: what a signal actually looks like, day to day

Say a contact at a target account leaves a review of a competitor's product, or a past contact at a company you used to sell to takes a new VP role somewhere else. Both are intent signals, but they call for different responses. The competitor-review signal suggests active dissatisfaction right now, worth a timely, specific message referencing the general category of problem (not the review itself, which would be an odd thing to reference directly) while it's fresh. The job-change signal is a relationship, not urgency: that person already knows you or your product, and a short, low-pressure "congratulations, let's reconnect" message tends to outperform a hard pitch, since you're trading on an existing relationship, not cold intent.

This is the part a tool can't do for you: deciding the right message for the right signal. A platform that surfaces 50 signals a week and gets a generic templated message sent to all 50 regardless of signal type will underperform one that surfaces 10 signals and tailors the response to what each one actually means.

A second scenario: what to do when no signal fires on a target account

The flip side of a signal arriving is a target account that never produces one. This happens constantly, since intent signals depend on observable public behavior, a review, a post, a job move, and plenty of genuinely in-market buyers simply don't generate any of it during the window you're watching. Don't treat the absence of a signal as the absence of interest; it just means you're back to prospecting that account the normal way, on your own outreach schedule rather than waiting for a trigger. A reasonable approach: run a steady baseline of outreach to your full target list regardless of signals, and treat a fired signal as a reason to move an account up the priority queue and personalize the message more, not as the only trigger that gets an account contacted at all. Teams that wait exclusively for signals before reaching out often end up contacting fewer accounts overall than ones running a baseline cadence with signals layered on top.

What I'd actually tell you

Intent signals genuinely improve who you reach out to first, not whether your outreach itself is good. If your current message and follow-up process aren't working, intent signals will just mean you're sending the same ineffective message to a slightly better-targeted list, which helps some, but it isn't the fix for a broken outreach process underneath it.

Where I'd actually invest here: treat different signal types differently, as in the example above, rather than routing everything through one generic sequence. That distinction matters more to your reply rate than which vendor's signals you're using.

A common mistake worth naming

The mistake I see most often is subscribing to intent signals and then letting them sit in a dashboard tab nobody checks daily. A job-change alert or a competitor-review flag loses most of its value if you act on it three weeks after it fired rather than within a few days, since the window where that signal actually reflects current behavior is short. If nobody on your team has the explicit job of checking signals daily, or you can't realistically route them to an alert (a Slack notification, an email digest) that someone actually sees, the signal feature is quietly going to waste regardless of how good the underlying data is. Set up the notification before you worry about the quality of the signals themselves.

When to skip this, and when it's worth a custom build

Signals bring you more names worth prioritizing, not closed deals on their own. You still need a message and the time to follow up; if that capacity doesn't exist on your team, more signals just pile up unused, which is its own kind of waste. If you're a solo operator already stretched thin on outreach capacity, adding a signal feed without adding capacity to act on it is a net negative, since now you're also spending time reviewing signals you can't follow up on anyway.

Where it's worth building further: if you're getting real volume from Amplemarket's intent signals and want them routed automatically, by type, to different message templates or different reps, rather than landing in one undifferentiated queue someone has to triage by hand, that's a case for a small custom routing layer on top of whichever intent tool you use. I build this kind of signal-to-action automation for sales teams getting real volume from intent data, usually alongside the alerting piece mentioned above, since a routing system that sorts signals correctly is only as useful as the notification that gets each one in front of a human fast enough to act on it.