Making Sense of Buyer Intent, Signals, and the Real Human Journey in HubSpot

In this episode, Chris and Danielle Urban break down one of the most misunderstood concepts in modern go-to-market strategy: buyer intent. But instead of treating intent data as a shortcut to “more leads,” they explore how signals fit into a much richer human journey — the Value Path — and how HubSpot’s evolving data model finally makes it possible to operationalize this in a meaningful, human-centered way.

They examine why most teams misuse data, how signals can unlock deeper context, and how AI fits into (and sometimes ruins) the process. What follows is a conversation about rebuilding GTM around real human behavior, not funnel mechanics.

What you’ll learn

• How every human moves through the Value Path — audience → researcher → handraiser → buyer → value creator.

• Why signals only matter when paired with strategy, not as a trigger for lazy outreach.

• The importance of culture-wide adoption of value-first behavior.

• How HubSpot’s new Signals object gives you unprecedented context on company-level behavior.

• Why AISDR experiments often backfire and damage trust.

• How to align lifecycle stages with human behavior, not internal handoffs.

• What “signal-based scoring” really means — and why it’s the future.

In this episode, we cover

00:00 — Welcome & context
Setting up the discussion and last week’s momentum.

02:00 — The human journey every customer goes through
Audience, researcher, handraiser, buyer, value creator, adopter, advocate, champion.

05:20 — The nuance of internal vs. external advocacy
Why internal adoption precedes external evangelism.

06:50 — HubSpot’s buyer intent & the new Signals object
Chris discovers “signals” in the URL — a hint at HubSpot’s data model evolution.

09:30 — Why signals without context lead to spam
The danger of “I saw your article…” outreach.

11:30 — The culture shift required to act on signals meaningfully
Reading, understanding, engaging — not pitching.

14:40 — Connecting signals to CRM context
Layering ICP, interactions, and behavioral data.

17:30 — Signal recognition, smart properties & AI support
How AI can assist after proper strategy is in place.

20:40 — Heat maps, diagrams & the internal work required
Why internal alignment matters more than the signals themselves.

24:20 — Monthly signal reviews to train the organization (and your AI)
How to use transcripts to uncover gaps and bias.

26:40 — AISDR horror story
Chris shares his first AI SDR call — and why it failed.

30:10 — Applying Value First inside HubSpot
Restructuring lifecycle stages, mapping behavioral indicators, and designing views.

33:40 — Preparing for calls with AI
Using context to enrich pre-call intelligence.

36:00 — Loop marketing & the future of scoring
Why signal-based scoring is the next major shift.

38:00 — Closing reflections
Why this signals update is another validation of the value-first model.

Tools and ideas referenced

• HubSpot Buyer Intent

• HubSpot Signals object

• Smart Properties

• Data Agent Insights

• Org Chart Hub

• Signal-based scoring

• Loop marketing

• Breeze pre-call insights

• Co-creation as a signal

• Surround-bound engagement approach

Key takeaways

• Buyer intent is not a list — it’s a context amplifier.

• The Value Path provides the actual human journey internal lifecycle stages should reflect.

• Signals only matter when the org knows how to interpret and act on them.

• AI can help — but misused, it erodes trust instantly.

• A monthly cross-functional review of signals + transcripts creates compounding clarity.

• Signal-based scoring unlocks true loop marketing.

Transcript

Chris:
Good morning and good afternoon, Value First Nation LinkedIn friends. Welcome to another episode of Value First Measurement with Danielle Urban. Happy Monday, Danielle.

Danielle:
Hey, happy Monday. Good weekend, I hope. Low heat, which was very nice. It's really cold now, so I just don't want to leave my house and I didn't have to.

Chris:
Yeah, that's a good plan. Just, just eighty degrees down here right now. So I wish you the best. I wish you the best. Oh man, so much has happened since last week in terms of more conversations about what we started talking about, the conversation you and I had, and then know, Riley and Casey right after and led to some more conversations throughout the week, really starting to flesh out these concepts that we're talking about. So we are going to dive into a little bit of a value path conversation this week. But from the perspective of the humans, of course, but also like, just because You can track everything. The old adage, doesn't mean you should. We're going to describe, at least from my perspective, every human, and I think there's value in standardizing around stuff like this, is every human goes through this journey, whether we're involved or not. And real quick, it's an audience stage. in which they're learning. Researcher, in which they're surprised researching. Handraiser, which they're asking for help directly and intentionally. Buyer, they're in buying mode. They're ready to find the right solution and purchase or continue on the path with you. And then we've got value creator. So After activation, whoever gets involved needs to start creating value. We want them to adopt as an adopter stage, which means they realize the value. Nobody's adopting anything unless they realize some value. even if the value is just because I need to follow the rules that the boss has given me. Advocate, so they tell others about you. And a little bit of nuance here, like we try to enable internal sharing before expecting all this external, because often you'll have one advocate and then a bunch of people in the value creator stage. How can we help everybody become an adopter? And then champions. uh, you know, look no farther than most of the value first contributors and the way that we talk about HubSpot and try to come up with new methodologies to help people with HubSpot and growth and all that stuff. So really, um, you know, taking that trust and loyalty to another level and, uh, interesting point came up and, uh, I always appreciate Joshua Oaks for his, uh, his experience and his knowledge around this topic. He used champion as a good example. Like if you're an insurance company, right? Selling life insurance or whatever, you might not, like champions might not be a part of your strategy, right? And that's okay. Having said that, We do have people walking around with like progressive t-shirts on and like talking about progressive stuff. Right. Like it's their favorite, you know, thing because they were taken care of in an automobile accident, whatever it was. Right. So. The key is that these stages exist in every human. They might not be a champion of your business, but there's likely something else that they are a champion. They've gone this far in their life, right? And what we want to lay down is that if you understand that these are all possible, Instead of what we normally do in focusing on these four and maybe customer closed one, we start to understand the granularity so that when we're in a conversation, we can say, hey, we know nobody else in your space is doing it. But what if we focused on champions and tried to just think outside of the box? So strategically understanding that these exist, you can start to strategically understand the value path that each human you're trying to serve, the value path that they're on.

Danielle:
Yeah.

Chris:
The reason that I think this is important is because, as an example, HubSpot is giving us all of these tools, just so many tools right now, that I started playing with this because I have credits. I'm like, all right, credits don't roll over. I want to use them. You know, buyer intent is something that I would love to understand more about. And so naturally I hit my limit like right away, which is easy to do. Luckily it rolls over tomorrow. So that's cool. But I found this today because right away I'm like, As I'm sure in this occasion, I'm like, what does it even mean that they're on this list? Like, right? Like, OK, there's zero signals, so nothing here yet. But luckily, we have one to latch onto. And as we open it up, so hopefully we can touch all the angles. I want you to notice that there is signals in the URL up here. which usually means something related to the data model and objects. When we talk about HubSpot moving in this direction, words just don't end up in the URL by accident. As I scroll down here and just dive deeper into this object, Right? So key signals that lead to us like the map. That's why we want to map so badly for you because you have the ability to track things. And like we talked about last week, this one signal is the VP and CTO just wrote an article, right? Do you see what we want to achieve for you? is let's say you get excited and use all your credits. Do you know what your team is going to do with this signal? Does it matter to your business? Like, if we can answer that question, then it makes sense to gather signals. But if it's just like, hey, here's all this data sales team, do whatever you want with it, which is going to be like some half-assed pitch like, oh, I saw you wrote an article last week. That was cool. Let me tell you about our products. Like, no, that's not, we need to go a little bit deeper. I would love to hear your thoughts on this as I, when I shared this with you earlier today.

Danielle:
I was so excited. But I had the same thought. I was like, if you feed this to someone and don't give the context, they're immediately going to send an email that's like, hey, saw your recent article. And it's not going to be any better than some AISDR crap that gets sent out and fills inboxes these days. So you need to take that signal. And we've talked so much about shifting culture And that's where this process needs to be a culture-wide adopted practice, where it's not just, so you wrote an article, it's actually reading it, actually making sense of it, reaching out and starting a conversation to have a relationship with the humans, because that's now there, so that you can start to build off of that and be mutually beneficial, where there is value realized and not just... shoving a sales pitch down someone's throat. But I think this is so interesting and insightful. I didn't catch the URL. That's a big deal. But my initial reaction was like, I've been waiting for this. Years ago, a colleague reached out to me who I hadn't talked to in probably a decade. And he was like, hey, you posted about de-anonymizing web traffic in HubSpot. This was before Clearbit acquisition. And I was like, oh, yeah, it's at this URL. It's not great. It's not connected to anything. You can just see a list of companies. And it will tell you whether or not they're already in your HubSpot. And so the first person I reached out to was that person I had the conversation with was like, look what you can do now. Because the fact that I could click through to this company record and see this activity on their timeline tells me that we're finally connecting the dots between the activity that HubSpot was tracking for us. And it's been there in some capacity, now a much better capacity. And it's actually tracking through in a way that's actionable. Like you can use this to generate lists, to score people, to do all of these things with, to actually move your business better and have like a complete picture of a contact, a human of company. And it's really exciting. I've been waiting for this.

Chris:
Yeah, it is. And this is why it's like, we don't, If we can't get you to want these things, what you, what you end up doing is just click over like, oh, okay. Buyer intent. Okay. Let's make a list. All right. Sales team. Here's a list. Yeah. Right. And in reality, like when we get the strategy, right. And the mapping, like it's so helpful when it comes to this kind of strategy, like look at these and there's nothing in here right now. Yeah. Top page views, recent page views, research signals about contacts. That sounds so much like a funnel, like HubSpot's got it ready made like for you and you just have to click some buttons to turn it on. Right. Like, oh my gosh. Like, so if you don't have, if you haven't been spending your, at least three thousand credits, which you have, like just sprint over to here, it's ten credits per company. Right. Just do it for the right reasons, not to just build some data that your team can, you know, act on without strategy. Right. I guarantee this is going to be, um, like just an hour, like turn these on, let it run. And then just an hour at the end of the month of just a couple of people from the GTM teams, like just looking at it, like, do we care about this? Yes or no? Okay. If not, why not? If yes, then why? Right. And what, yeah. What actions are we taking? Yeah. Right. And this is what I'm talking about when I say like, use the data that you already have instead of trying to go you know pay a bunch of other systems and and like data vendors uh all this stuff i mean this has been under the radar a lot uh with with hubspot um but when i landed on this this morning because i just activated this last week I was so happy I had the one signal, but it really can tell the whole story, right?

Chris:
Yeah. Because if we click into here, there's another page, by the way, that I'm not going to share because I don't know if I'm supposed to. But basically, when we talk about signal recognition, which I think is a phrase that everybody needs to get used to, because AI can do that for you if you tell it how to do it. coming into the record and then aligning. We've got all these data agent insights with smart properties where it's just a click away, buyer intent. The whole story that we've been trying to talk about and trying to work so hard to create slide decks and grab all these things and try to make something that's you know, is usually missing a huge chunk. It's, it's here. Got org chart hub involved now. It's not like that, but you know, it's so much is available. You just gotta ask these systems to do it like first, right?

Danielle:
Yeah. Well, and I love this because it's, it's now sort of extrapolating and adding a layer of information that is more easily acted upon. Because we've done a lot of work in resetting the view, like what do you put in the view where so that it's very actionable. But if now you can just basically write yourself a prompt or rework this page to give you the exact context, you can ask things like what are the recent signals and how does that line up to their current buying status with us? And now it's like you've got an answer almost readily written for you for like how to reach out to this contact.

Chris:
Yeah. And this is the kind of thing like we also saw on the morning show today, we like social. There's a social update that's in private beta that will allow you to see your personal posts that are made outside of HubSpot. And this is the kind of thing like, first of all, If you're in sales and you want to do something with this signal, like just don't pitch off the back of it. Like say, I, I like this topic or I want to learn about this topic or whatever. Go find it a topic. Like maybe they posted about it on LinkedIn and then you go like it and comment. Right. Super, so good at the surround bound approach. That's how any company. literally can use this signal, whether they care about, you know, sustainability and technology, technological innovation at all. If this person is also in your, you know, ICP or ACP, if you want to know what ACP stands for, check out Nico tomorrow on the admin's hug. Putting the pieces together, right? When you look at this stuff in a vacuum, of course teams aren't going to be able to use it very well. So when it comes to, so what's the next step? Let's say, okay, a team says, yeah, we think this signal is important to us. What should we do next to make sure we leverage it?

Danielle:
I mean, read it. Actually consume all of the details, understand it, understand the people referenced, understand the people who wrote it. There's work that needs to go in, whether that's an agent doing the work or you as a human salesperson doing the work, where you jump in and actually make sense of the content because that is the basis for a conversation. It's not the fact that they wrote it. It's the fact that you now have a window into something that's important to them or important to their business because they're writing about it. Now, once you have all of that context, you can actually start a conversation, leveraging that context to be relevant and relationship driven, not sales driven. And so you just have to forget about sales to do sales.

Chris:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's so easy if you just switch into like, you're not selling, you're helping, like you're just helping people by helping people through their value path. Because then it's like, why did they write that article? Why is that important to them? Literally coming from a place of human interest and caring. Again, it's not all like, oh, we just want to build relationships with everybody. Obviously, there is a profile sitting nearby that says usually people in this job title, in this role, in this industry, they buy our stuff. So let's build relationships. Um, worst case scenario, when you approach it like that is like referrals, right? Like, cause you can, oh man, just building trust and value by connecting on a human level, you know, first, uh, it takes a different approach obviously. And if you're in the mode of, okay, we got to. act on every signal and how am I going to hack the process by saying I saw this article and read it? That's not the approach.

Danielle:
Right. And this is just one signal that we're waxing out here. If it's right next to recent page views and top page views, it gets easier and easier to leverage these. That's where I think that what we want to do is understand the context of the signal within your process and within your business. And I started sharing this last week. It's come so far since last week. Thank you, AI. So the things we hit on last week is, OK, this is the journey that we're talking about, and this person you know, went through all the stages of the perfect example, right? And we talked about things like co-creation of white papers, getting published, you know, keynoting things. So similar signals. So I didn't, and there's no way I could have faked this signal. So just so you know, like, and this is HubSpot, like HubSpot saying this is a signal. Like I didn't do anything to say. You just turned it off. right? I just turned it on. So again, the signals are not just hand raises, right? There's lots of reasons that we want to classify things as signals.

So as we work through that, what I've added to this space, and I'm working on how visually like, you know, nice this stuff is to look at. So don't hate too much. But the intent here And just so you know, I do have like, I am looking out to try and make this stuff more consumable and more friendly but this is where I started. Okay. Right. So five years ago, like one Sunday, like six hour binge session, just pulling everything out of my head that related to like everything externally that had to happen, everything internally that had to happen to push people from unaware to advocacy. And what I quickly found out was, Oh, this half of the diagram is usually just not documented anywhere. for any reason, yet we all know that this is where a lot of the money is made. And oh, by the way, we've got to do this. We've got to iterate on this for all these different key markets that we say we want to target because those key markets speak differently. They care about different things, right?

So imagine the signals that we're talking about. I'll see if I can get here or not. But imagine this is like a heat map. So that if there's a lot of signals here and none over here, we're just fully top of funnel. We're not serving them throughout the process. And basically that's what happens when it's like we get their email and then just sales, sales, sales, because there are no signals happening there. when sales is just trying to start that conversation in that way.

Chris:
So I've been thinking about making this diagram better for a while and in context. So imagine here where, because this is where it's super insightful for me, because we're going to tell you, create the space for all of these signals to happen and for them to matter for you. But a lot of internal effort is required from strategy to execution of rev ops, marketing ops, to make that possible. And it's very easy to say the farther away we get from the actual sales call, the lower the priority is. um so trying to create a space where it's like okay um what happened and why is it important to us right can we just start start there and have those conversations and that's where if you have those conversations internally so let's say you do um you know turn this on and then have that open forum conversation the end of the month that's one hour give that one hour transcript to ai and it will turn out gold for you right it will also make it very clear like where the biases are and you know and well if you ask it to help help you where the gaps are right right so That's where I would go in terms of, okay, we've got some signals. Like, how are we thinking about it in terms of the context of the business? Like you get. Thirty days. Um, as soon as you turn a company on now, uh, you get the past thirty days. Cool. So like, can we find any of these, like in our closed ones or closed lasts? Yeah. Right. So, uh, yeah, I never thought I would be talking like, if you asked me at the beginning of this year, if I'd be talking about buyer intent, like there's no way in hell. Um, I'm kind of glad I've gotten here though. Like, right.

Chris:
Yeah. Super valuable stuff. Um, but how different is this than just buying a bunch of buyer intent data and then like not treating it. you know, in this way. Right. So giving it the context alongside your CRM is so, so important because you've got, you've said it, the signal itself layered with your ICP or ACP layered with their interactions with your brand. Now you actually have a picture of who you're talking to and why, and you can just build off of that to have a genuine relationship.

Danielle:
Yeah and when we have the next call coming up and you have the button that says like prepare for call it gives you all these notes if you're doing the work of helping breeze understand you know what's what to do with these kinds of signals man those kinds of button clicks just increase in value like immensely right um So I was excited to see this. And I think it sets a good stage for what we want to build. Because it's so easy to just focus on the hand raiser. It's what we are trained to do.

Chris:
Yeah, I'm thinking back to all of the contact filtered views that had like mqls and then it was sorted by most recent web page visit or most recent form fill dates so that you could follow up with the people who did the thing with your brand most recently and this just really brings us so far beyond that i'm so proud.

Danielle:
Yeah i know and we want to help you be proud too uh and avoid avoid the other angle that that we're starting to see. And I actually experienced, I don't know if I shared this last week, but you know, what we're used to, and it's kind of the joke of the industry, but still happens like every day is, uh, the random call. Like we already said it in this, in this signal, but I, I know most of us have experienced, Hey, you downloaded that thing. Mm-hmm. We hope it was value for you. Like, can we book a call? Like, oh, you mean that thing from eighteen months ago?

Chris:
Yeah. And I just experienced my first AISDR version of that call.

Danielle:
Congratulations. It was probably terrible, wasn't it?

Chris:
It was not good enough to where, I mean, it was different in that it was too clean. I knew it had to be AI. There wasn't a bunch of junk happening in the background, which often happens, but it was like, you could tell it was trying to get to the bottom of the value I received. And as soon as it got to, oh, I was just learning. It's like, thanks, have a good day.

Danielle:
Okay. Wow, so much for that relationship.

Chris:
Right. And you know what? It was from an organization that I respected a lot. So sad. Prior to that, a book that I really appreciate and think is on the right track was And I know if I'm giving the benefit of the doubt, like it's an experiment that a lot of people are trying right now, AISDRs. But it was just like picture perfect example of why this is the wrong place to be enabling, you know, AI to work on your behalf. Like that was my first interaction with anybody in that organization. And I say anybody on purpose. That AISDR was representing that organization, as they called and asked me that question, right? So it says whatever I interpret it to say. In this case, I'm not thrilled about it. But it is the opposite way to use these signals than what we're talking about, right?

So as we look into next week and you know stuff like this is available around the company record in ways that you've always wanted, what do you envision us doing as we dig into HubSpot?

Danielle:
I think if you're implementing the value first path, one of the first things you should do is rework your lifecycle stages, like just relabel all of them. and get that lined up. But then I think mapping all of the other data that HubSpot can collect to those stages. And I'm gonna have to think about it this week, how I wanna do that because you could create views that say like the researcher stage indications, and that's a card that has last page view, how many times they visited your website, those kinds of things, and present it in a way that informs that value first journey using the data that HubSpot already collects. I think it's all there. We just have to restructure it.

Chris:
Yeah, I've got some work ahead of me.

Danielle:
Yeah. Well, you're not alone in that endeavor. A lot of people working on this right now. But what you just brought to mind is like, when I first, you know, especially as I was going to be like, you know, solutions partner a couple years ago, it's like, all right, I'm gonna, I'm gonna track all the things and whole LinkedIn list in here. And I that's gonna mean anything I need to add all these fields so that I know who's friends and who's just acquaintances and whose family and And I made a card that was like engagement, you know, focused or engagement strategy. And it's largely what we're talking about in terms of, and that's the beautiful thing, like inbound versus outbound, like we're on social, we're in Slack, like we're not going to ask you to run into the CRM, like every time you have an exchange to track it. But when it says, when you're on a call with somebody and they say, hey, I saw you in, like you were mentioned in the Slack channel of this specific Slack community, Breeze will put it in that place for you if you've got the place. We have the recorder.

Chris:
Right. So some steps to get there, sure. But it's definitely not as hard as you think.

Danielle:
No, it's all there. We're just kind of doing it. I think we should recruit some Value First friends to join us on this journey, because they're also building stuff. Because it's important. We really feel strongly about there being a better way. I feel strongly about this being a good candidate for a better way. Still got to make it through this practical application phase. but that's where when I see just signals pop up like this, all right, that's another indicator we're on the right track. That during that update today, I think like for buyer intent past thirty days, that's what I refer to as signal-based scoring, right? if you want to do loop marketing and if you want lead scores to actually matter for once. This is where we're going, folks.

Chris:
So thank you for listening to my excitement today, Danielle. I look forward to next week when we're doing some work inside of HubSpot. So thank you for your time today, and everybody have a great week. Thanks so much, Danielle.