LinkedIn Buying Signal Prompt
A ranked signal list for your specific product, with the LinkedIn surface each one appears on and the window it stays actionable for. Everyone says "sell on trigger events" and then lists funding rounds, which are the least useful signal for most products. This prompt works the other way round: from what your product changes, back to the events that create that need, filtered to the ones that are actually visible on LinkedIn without paid data.
You are a demand analyst. You work backwards from what a product changes to the events that create the need for that change, and you are sceptical of signals that everyone already acts on.
## What we sell
{{COMPANY}} — {{PRODUCT}}
## Who buys it
{{ICP}}
Primary buyer: {{PERSONA}}
## Objective
Identify the events that make this product urgent, restricted to events observable on LinkedIn without a paid data vendor.
## Method
1. State the "before" condition: what has to be true inside a company for this product to be worth buying now rather than next year.
2. Work backwards to the events that produce that condition. Include slow ones (a hiring pattern over a quarter) as well as fast ones (a single announcement).
3. For each candidate event, decide whether it is observable on LinkedIn. The surfaces available are: company page posts, employee job changes, job postings, headcount growth over time, profile edits, comments and reactions, and group or event participation. If an event is not visible on one of those, exclude it and say why.
4. Rate each surviving signal on three axes: strength (how reliably it predicts need), latency (how long after the event the window stays open) and competition (how many other vendors are watching the same signal).
5. Rank by strength divided by competition. A medium signal nobody watches beats a strong signal every vendor in your category emails about within an hour.
6. For each of the top signals, write the one sentence that references it without being creepy about it. The test: would the prospect be comfortable if they knew exactly how you spotted it?
## Constraints
- Funding rounds may appear only if you can justify why they matter for THIS product specifically. "They have money now" is not a justification.
- Do not propose anything requiring data LinkedIn does not show: technographics, web traffic, intent data, hiring budgets.
- Be explicit when a signal requires a paid tier to watch at scale, and name the tier.
## Output format
### The "before" condition
Two sentences.
### Signal table
| Signal | Where it appears on LinkedIn | Strength | Window | How crowded | Priority |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Ranked by priority.
### The top three, in detail
For each: what exactly to look for, how to set it up as a saved search or alert, the window in weeks, and one sample opening sentence that references it naturally.
### Signals to ignore
The ones everyone uses that do not predict need for this product, with the reason.
### What you cannot see from LinkedIn
The events that matter but are invisible here, and the cheapest non-LinkedIn way to catch each one.- You want to know what to set Sales Navigator alerts on.
- Your outreach is well written and ignored, which usually means timing rather than copy.
- You are building a saved-search system and need to know what to watch.
- You are choosing between a broad list and a small, well-timed one.
- Be specific in {{PRODUCT}} about what changes for the customer. A vague product description produces vague signals.
- Run it once per persona if you sell to more than one. The signals that move a CFO are rarely the ones that move a Head of Engineering.
- Take the top three into Sales Navigator as saved searches and alerts, using the Saved Search Strategy prompt.
- Revisit quarterly. The "how crowded" column is the part that decays — a signal stops working once your competitors find it.
The output schema it demands
The single highest-leverage part of any prompt. Without a declared shape you get prose you then have to reformat; with one, you get sections you can act on — and you can tell at a glance when the model skipped something.
### The "before" condition ### Signal table (strength / window / crowdedness / priority) ### The top three, in detail ### Signals to ignore ### What you cannot see from LinkedIn
What it looks like filled in
Illustrative, not a promise — this is the shape of a good answer rather than a guarantee of one. The scenario is the same fictional company used across the whole toolkit.
Cadence — payroll reconciliation for multi-entity finance teams. Primary buyer: Group Finance Director.
The "before" condition — a finance team is reconciling more entities than the process it inherited was built for, usually right after an acquisition or a new subsidiary.
The top three, in detail — 1) A new entity announced on the company page: window roughly two quarters. 2) A "Group Financial Controller" hire posted in the last 120 days — the company has just staffed up for exactly this pain. 3) A post from the Finance Director themselves describing a long close: the strongest signal, because they said it rather than us inferring it.
Signals to ignore — funding announcements. A raise says nothing about entity count specifically, and it is the one signal every vendor in the category is already emailing about within the hour.
Do not do these
Each one is a real failure mode, not a disclaimer.
- Acting on a signal within an hour of it appearing. Same-day outreach on a funding announcement arrives in a queue of forty identical messages.
- Treating a job posting as a signal without reading it. The posting text usually says which of your competitors they already use.
Attach these once and stop retyping your business
This prompt works pasted into a blank chat. It works considerably better inside a Project with these attached, because then the ICP, the product and the limits are already in context and every answer inherits them.
This is one step in a sequence
The output of the step before is the input to this one, and this one's output is the next one's input. That is the whole reason these are not independent pages.
The reference behind this prompt
Several of the best signals — headcount growth, department-level hiring, job-posting filters — need the Advanced tier. This page says which.
If the only reason you are considering Sales Navigator is signal monitoring, there are cheaper ways to watch two or three specific triggers.
Written to a fixed structure and run through Claude and ChatGPT to confirm each one returns the output format it declares. That is not the same as a measured reply-rate benchmark, and nothing here claims one — if you run these at volume and have numbers, we want them.
Take the whole folder instead
This prompt, the files it expects and the rest of the sequence, as a zip you can drop into a Claude Project, a Cursor workspace or an agent repo. Free, no account.