Shark Week 🦈: The Buying Signals Your Sales Team Is Missing

It’s one of my favorite TV events of the summer: Shark Week! In case you’ve been too busy putting out fires in your pipeline to come up for air, once a year, Discovery Channel runs a full week of documentaries and TV specials all about sharks, from the wildest attacks caught on camera and the things that tick them off to serious matters of ocean conservation.

While Discovery can teach you everything there is to know about sharks, at Seamless we wanted to have our own Shark Week. Just as a predator might be lurking beneath a calm ocean surface, your market is the same.

Your market might feel like it’s slowed down from the summer crawl, but buyers are researching, hiring, switching jobs, raising funding, visiting pages, and showing intent well before they ever fill out a demo form. But the best sales teams don’t wait for prospects to raise their hand.

The best sales pros are like sharks. They watch for movement, identify trigger events, and act before everyone else realizes there is blood in the water.

In this week’s Shark Week edition of The Prospector, we’re going to show you how to smell buying signals in the water before your competitors.

Blood in the Water: Buying Signals You Should Never Ignore

When it comes to B2B prospecting, buyers rarely announce, “I’m ready for a demo” (if only it were that simple, right?).

Instead, they drop subtle clues.

It might be a surprising funding announcement or a sudden hiring spree. But it’s typically small movements beneath the surface that signal a company may be preparing to pull the trigger.

Here are five buying signals worth watching.

1. New Funding Rounds

Funding announcements aren’t just for bragging rights. They’re a signal to every shark sales pro that new budgets might be opening up. After all, investors are looking to see growth. That means hiring new talent and buying new tech to help:

• Build pipeline faster
• Reach new markets
• Hire and onboard teams
• Improve operational efficiency
• Replace systems that cannot support their next stage of growth

You can track company funding announcements, business news, and executive social media activity with *Seamless company search *or our AI search if you don’t want to deal with filters.

Whichever approach you take, don’t wait to reach out. The best time to get your product in front of the C-suite is right after a funding announcement, while leadership is deciding where to invest.

2. Leadership Changes

Let’s say a company decides to clean house and hire new department heads, a new CRO, and a new VP of Sales. This is a goldmine for a shark because new leaders shake things up.

They are hired to fix problems and accelerate growth. In order to do that, they’ll reevaluate the team’s current vendors and tech stack, which is where you can come in and take advantage of this new buying cycle.

If you want to stay on top of leadership changes in departments that typically use a solution like yours, then monitor job updates, company leadership pages, press releases, and executive announcements.

3. Job Changes

Your strongest opportunity may not be a company signal. It may be a people signal.

When a previous champion changes jobs, they may bring old vendors with them. And if they are tools they swear by, this former customer could end up becoming your best internal advocate at their next organization.

This creates a warmer entry point versus a stone-cold prospect you’re calling for the first time. And shark sales pros love a warm lead.

Track contact-level job changes through Seamless *Job Changes. You can also set up our free [API ](https://seamless.ai/products/api?utm_source=beehiv&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=content&_bhlid=52af7229f3a93608c9ab358f6f3485fe82d6809a)*to run auto-enrichment on data you already have in your CRM so you’re never in the dark and you’re always up to date with loyal customers and closed-lost champs.

4. Hiring Spikes

When a company, out of the blue, starts hiring more SDRs or filling several marketing roles, that gives a shark sales pro a glimpse into where the company’s head is at and where they’re investing before their strategy becomes obvious.

Lots of sales hiring may indicate aggressive revenue targets. A spike in marketing roles may point to increased demand-generation efforts.

Hiring spikes = Growth. And when growth is the goal, a company needs tools like yours to scale.

So monitor company career pages, but go beyond the total number of openings at any given department. Identify which teams are growing, how quickly roles are being added, and whether the hiring pattern aligns with the problems you solve.

5. Intent Topic Surges

77% of *B2B buyers* do their own research before they ever speak to a sales rep. That’s why buyer intent data is so clutch because a surge in relevant intent topics may indicate that multiple people inside an account are trying to compare potential solutions, or prepare for an upcoming purchase.

An account with intent topic surges is the closest signal to active demand and one of the warmest leads you’ll ever get, but to handle it like a shark, timing and relevance matter. The signal is strongest when it is combined with other activity, such as pricing-page visits, new leadership, increased hiring, or direct engagement.

Use intent-data platforms like Seamless *Buyer Intent, website visitor identification, [content engagement tracking tools](https://www.appcues.com/blog/user-engagement-tools?utm_source=beehiv&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=content&_bhlid=37bb7795907d757c9dbf12a8bf738e3968d93723)*, CRM activity, and account-level research alerts.

Focus on high-intent topics connected to competitors, implementation questions, pricing, integrations, or problems your product directly solves.