What are Signals

The buzzword of the day? The next hype to fall flat on its face?

It's neither.

Recently "signals" have been gaining steam across Marketing, Sales, and RevOps circles. There are even entire software tools dedicated to signals. And it turns out they aren't just a marketing buzzword, but an actual tool you can use to make data worth its salt.

Signals have been around for a long time. Thousands of years. And now, they've just been refined specifically for business.

In the general sense, a "signal" is a detectable or measurable indicator that conveys information about a specific condition, event, or system.

They can be in many different forms. Electrical, biological, digital, visual, and more. They can be used deliberately to communicate, or they can be observed as a byproduct of what's going on (and not intentionally communicated).

In terms of business, a "signal" is a data point that indicates specific behaviors, patterns, or trends that can be used to inform decisions or trigger actions.

Signals Evolution

Think back thousands of years to a time when traveling to a nearby town took days to weeks. When invaders could approach without any warning.

How would communities communicate impending attacks from the outskirts back to the city center? Signals! This could've been using smoke signals from outposts to send info back to the central part of a town miles away; or it could have been an observed signal of campfires several miles outside the town and seen by patrolmen standing atop a castle.

But we're not going to just ramble through history to get to where we are today. Let's hop into how it evolved in business.

Outside of Marketing and Sales

This section is short because it's not the focus of the article. Basically signals have been used outside of marketing and sales in business for decades. Mostly for financial investing, but also in engineering and other disciplines.

Signals that a stock will go up or down. Signals that an engine part will fail. You get the idea.

They're not new, they're just getting reapplied.

Marketing and Sales Evolution

Before computers, people still sold things (duh). And the best salespeople and marketers understood that people in specific situations were more likely to buy what they were selling.

Ta-da, this is the first use of signals in business (without people pontificating about the term).

For example; a person selling drinking water thousands of years ago might observe that people are coming back from long journeys in the desert via a specific path into the city. And that they always have depleted supplies while coming back. And that they sell water to them quicker and in larger quantities than when they try to sell it at the center of the market.

Those are positive business signals. The literal path they are traveling (customer journey) and the characteristics about them (demographic/firmographic data) are the data points that are strong signals.

Meanwhile, a strong negative signal is that a person is already carrying a full container of water. They are the least likely to need more at the moment and therefore not the smartest use of time to try to sell to.

This basic description of signals evolved from an undocumented and undefined way to sell and market to a defined and documented way to sell and market.

Before it was processized, people who used these signal data points were "just good at their jobs". Once companies defined and created processes around leveraging these signals, then the companies became good at selling what they do.

This happened gradually over the centuries. And eventually when consultants grew in use and popularity, it started really taking hold. Sales organizations and marketing organizations had specific "triggers" that they looked for in order to push their product. They tapped in to these signals to better communicate with their prospects and place their products/services at exactly the right moment.

Enter early 2000s, when companies started realizing that his term could be explicitly defined and understood as an entire approach to sales and marketing. Technology could be used extensively to track, aggregate, and analyze their prospects. Companies were formed, signal products created, and no one paid any attention.

Even as late as 2015, people were posting about "Marketing Signals" and no one was really paying attention.

But after COVID, things really picked up steam. Maybe it was the fact that people were online so much more? Maybe that companies felt things could be measured better because of that? Or maybe it was that influencers started talking about it on places like LinkedIn and Twitter?

Whatever the reason, in the early 2020s signals grew to become known to many marketers and salespeople. In a technical and official sense. They were something that could be formalized into how the company went to market. How they drove strategy. How they actually achieved results predictably.

The world now is at a place with tool maturity and process maturity to where this can be an incredibly high impact concept to latch onto. CRMs are hyper advanced in their native capabilities, and data can be purchased from millions of vendors. Today, signals can be used comprehensively to drive efficiency and rapid GTM scale.

How it Relates to MergeYourData

We've been around since 2019 (when I started the firm part-time). And even though we've always been focused on data, there wasn't a specific framework we identified with. All that we knew was that we could get great results by looking at business data in different ways.

Turns out this entire time, we were doing Signal Analytics. Finding the data points that indicated what was likely to happen. And it turned out that our best clients were the ones that we did this work for inside of Marketing and Sales disciplines.

So at the end of 2023 we decided to document and pull together everything around Signal Analytics that produced the best results (and some of the worst). Thinking of our work through this lens aligned everything.

It's why we've been able to see 30-50% lift in our customers' revenue in the quarter after we launch our solutions for them. It's why we know that Signal Analytics is the path forward to achieve financially healthy and sustainable businesses.

What do you think Signals can do for you?