Signals are cheap. Judgment is the product.
Knowing what to do with revenue signals is the whole game.
“Capturing a signal is actually the easy part. Activating them is 90% of the work.”
That’s Dan Rosenthal, writing in Kyle Poyar’s Growth Unhinged. In Growth Unhinged’s 2025 State of B2B Go-to-Market report, intent-based outbound ranked as the #2 channel teams are investing more in for 2026.
So everyone’s racing to capture signals. Almost nobody has worked out what to do once they have them.
We see it every week. A team gets set up. The signals start firing with data flying into the CRM, notifications landing in Slack. It’s exciting. The excitement lasts probably about six months. And then it goes quiet.
Kate (one of my co-founders) put it better than I can:
“Everybody says ‘this is great, you’ve given us these signals’… and now what do we do with them?”
Almost every team using Accoil has said this.
This isn’t an Accoil pitch, though. It’s GTM in general. There’s this whiplash that happens after you set up any signals. That’s the fun part, because you get to see things maybe you’ve not seen before AND you get to dream up ways to use it all.
So the real work starts when you have to decide how to use it. What do you do with what you’re seeing? Turns out that’s not as easy to answer as you’d think.
An ICP-fit company creates an account. Great, and then what?
A target account raised a Series A six months ago. Now what?
A power user jumps to a new ICP company. Now what?
There are endless signals out there, some more valuable than others (think 1st-party vs 3rd-party signals). More valuable than any signal is the judgment about what to do with it.
That last 10% Dan’s talking about? That’s the whole game.
We’ve got a customer who completely trusts their signals now. They run trials, and the one they watch is dead simple: did a brand-new account do the core thing in the first seven days? If not, someone reaches out before the trial goes cold. That’s it. One signal, one play.
The data part is done. What’s left is the human part, including the message, the timing, the relationship. The “so what?” And honestly, that’s the fun part: it’s creative, it’s energetic, it’s full of possibilities.
But on any team there’s variation on the “so what? now what?” decisions. Everyone sees the same signal, but comes up with totally different ideas about what comes next.
That’s not a problem unless you let it be one. It’s the point of getting the signals set up in the first place.
What happens after you get a signal? It’s all hypothesis. Build it, test it, run the feedback loop, make it better. Once you trust the signals, you get to refine what comes after them.
If you’re doing product-led growth or product-led sales, pay attention here: you are sitting on some of the most valuable signals that exist, coming straight out of your own product. You don’t need to buy more signals or more sources. You almost certainly don’t have a capture problem. You have a now what problem.
So make it small. Pick one signal → your single highest-intent moment after sign-up. Something a new customer can do in your product that makes them go “Hey, this is great!”
Then decide the one action it should trigger: a message, a call, maybe even a handwritten letter. Decide who owns it and when it fires. Pair one signal with one play, end to end. Run it and see what happens.
As you work out and find successful Signal-to-Action pairings, start stacking more of them. Find another signal, start a new play, run the feedback loop, improve it. Then do the next one.
Most teams have never built even one real solid Signal-to-Action play. I’m convinced it’s because it feels overwhelming. I felt overwhelmed reading Dan’s piece on Kyle’s newsletter.
But we’re all sitting on valuable data and signals. It’s what we do with those signals that will determine the trajectory our companies are on.
Like seemingly everything else right now: Signals are abundant. Judgment is scarce. That’s the part worth getting good at.
Peter