Buying signals in B2B sales: the occasion first, then the company

Most companies on your list aren't buying right now

According to John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, about 5% of B2B buyers are in the market at any given time.¹ The rest will buy in months or years. Of 400 companies that fit your criteria, about 20 are, on paper, looking for a solution right now. The list won't tell you which 20.

Many providers make up for it with volume and send cold emails by the thousand. Instantly measured an average reply rate of 3.43% on such emails for 2025.² Out of 1,000 emails, about 34 recipients reply. We don't offer mass mailings.

How we recognise an occasion

We count something as an occasion if the company made it public itself and it relates to your offer. These rank highest for us:

• A job ad for exactly the role whose work your offer makes easier. If a machine builder is hiring a cost estimator who knows its ERP system, you can fairly assume it prices its quotes in spreadsheets today.
• A stand at the next trade fair. The company's sales team is out in the field, and the exhibitor page often names the contacts.
• An investment such as a new production hall, another site, a certification or a funding round. The company expects more orders and has released budget.
• The company describes its problem itself, in a customer notice, on its website or in a post. Then we pick up its own words.
• A new managing director or department head. Someone who has just started reorganises their tools and doesn't have to defend their predecessor's decisions.

Reactions to your competitors' posts count too. A company that fits your criteria and shows nothing else goes into storage. We contact it as soon as it gives us an occasion.

An occasion needs a source

We record every signal with a link and the date we retrieved it. If either is missing, it doesn't count for us. For a job ad, we copy the title and location word for word and sum up the requirements in one sentence. We only add contacts that a public source names, such as the legal notice or a press release. We don't guess addresses.

For every company, your sales team sees why we picked it and can open the source themselves.

When we get in touch

A single job ad can be routine. We get in touch when several occasions come together at one company, for example an ad for inside sales and a trade fair stand in the same month. Until then, we keep watching the company.

We send the first message on LinkedIn, or we call. It names the occasion and asks a question about it. It contains no offer and no calendar link. We get in touch in the week we find the occasion. Once the job is filled, you have no reason left to call.

What our platform does and what a person decides

On every run, agents on our platform search job boards, exhibitor lists, news, company registers and public tenders for the search terms in your profile. They check each hit against your target profile and against the companies we have already shown you.

A run ends with five companies at most, sorted by the strength of the occasion, each with its source, the role concerned and a suggested opening line. The rest goes into storage. A person makes the choice and writes the message too. We automate nothing on LinkedIn, neither connection requests nor messages. Every contact attempt sits in your CRM with its date, including the ones nobody answered.

How we tell whether an occasion works

Industry averages are of little use for your market, because it has occasions of its own. So we treat each type of occasion as its own assumption, for example: companies hiring a cost estimator respond to a question about how they price their quotes. An assumption holds for us once it gets at least two responses from at least ten contacts. Below that, we call the result too early to judge.

Once a week we pull the numbers from the CRM and change one thing per channel. Whether a reply turns into a lead for your sales team, we check against your criteria, with evidence in the CRM. More on that in the article What does “qualified” actually mean at your company?, and we describe research, outreach and handover on Sales OS.

Sources

1. The 95:5 rule, after John Dawes (Ehrenberg-Bass Institute): Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, “The 95:5 rule is the new 60:40 rule”; Peter Weinberg and Jon Lombardo, Marketing Week.
2. Instantly, Cold Email Benchmark Report 2026, data from 1 January to 18 December 2025.