Signals helps sales teams act on real buying intent by surfacing meaningful events across target accounts and prospects. Instead of guessing when to reach out, you can monitor the signals that matter to your business, get notified when something changes, and turn those events into actionable leads for outreach.
With Signals, lemlist continuously monitors your watchlists, detects relevant events, enriches them into usable leads, and helps your team follow up with more context through manual review, tasks, and campaign variables.
To get started, open Signals from the left sidebar, then click New watchlist to create a new signal watchlist.
What Signals helps you do
Spot real buying intent earlier
Track important changes across your target accounts
Monitor people, companies, competitors, and custom topics
Turn detected events into leads your team can action quickly
Reach out with better timing and more relevant messaging
This makes Signals especially useful for teams who want to prioritize timing, relevance, and context over high-volume outreach.
How Signals works
Create a watchlist for a signal type you want to monitor
Choose the segment, accounts, or people you want lemlist to track
Let lemlist continuously scan for matching events
Review newly detected signals and act on them in your workflow
When a signal is detected, you can use it to prioritize outreach, assign follow-up, enrich leads, and personalize messaging based on what just happened.
Available signal types
When creating a watchlist, you can choose from several signal types depending on the kind of intent or trigger you want to monitor.
Signals currently include:
Company is hiring — Identify companies hiring for specific roles and use job openings as a buying-intent signal.
Website visitors — Detect companies visiting your website and engage warm traffic already showing interest.
LinkedIn profiles — Monitor engagement with specific LinkedIn profiles.
LinkedIn topics — Track engagement around specific topics on LinkedIn.
New hire — Know when a new decision-maker joins a target account.
Contact changed jobs — Track when past champions or known contacts move to a new company.
Competitor’s new connections — See when competitors connect with accounts in your target market.
Company raised funds — Identify companies that recently secured funding.
M&A activity — Spot merger and acquisition events that may indicate change, budget shifts, or new priorities.
Technology change — Detect when companies adopt, replace, or remove technologies from their stack.
Custom signals (BirdDog) — Define your own signal criteria and monitor the web daily for the events that matter most to your niche.
Each signal type has its own dedicated setup and troubleshooting article. This article is intended as a high-level overview of the feature and its use cases.
Credit consumption by signal type
Signals use credits differently depending on the signal type. Some are billed only when a signal is successfully identified, while others are billed monthly for active monitoring.
Signal type | Credit usage |
Company is hiring | 100 credits per signal identified (billed on success) |
Website visitors | 20 credits per successfully identified company (billed on success). Each company is billed only once per team. |
LinkedIn profiles | 400 credits per monitored profile per month |
LinkedIn topics | 400 credits per monitored topic per month |
New hire | 100 credits per signal identified (billed on success) |
Contact changed jobs | 100 credits per signal identified (billed on success) |
Competitor’s new connections | 100 credits per signal identified (billed on success) |
Company raised funds | 100 credits per signal identified (billed on success) |
M&A activity | 100 credits per signal identified (billed on success) |
Technology change | 100 credits per signal identified (billed on success) |
Custom signals | 200 credits per account per month |
Why teams use Signals
Signals is designed for outbound teams that want to reach prospects when timing is strongest. Instead of sending cold outreach without context, reps can start conversations based on real-world events such as:
A company expanding headcount
A champion moving to a new role
A target account raising capital
A competitor becoming active around your accounts
A company changing its tech stack
A niche business event only your team cares about
This helps create outreach that feels timely, relevant, and informed rather than generic.
Custom signals
Custom signals let you go beyond predefined event types. Instead of waiting for standard intent triggers, you define what matters to your business and let lemlist monitor the web for it daily.
Examples include:
New partnerships
Market expansions
Compliance updates
Product launches
Industry-specific news or business changes
This is especially useful if your sales motion depends on niche events that are not covered by standard signal categories.
Plan availability
Signals is available on all plans:
Free Trial
Multichannel Expert
Enterprise
Best practices
Start with a focused watchlist: Monitor your highest-priority accounts or segments first.
Choose signals that match your motion: For example, fundraising and hiring can work well for expansion plays, while job changes are ideal for champion tracking.
Act quickly: Signals are most valuable when outreach happens soon after the event is detected.
Use the signal in your messaging: Reference the event naturally so your outreach feels relevant and timely.
Review signal performance regularly: Over time, you can see which signal types lead to the best conversations and pipeline outcomes.
In summary
Signals helps your team move from generic outbound to signal-based outreach. By monitoring real events across companies, contacts, competitors, and custom business triggers, lemlist gives you the context to reach out at the right moment with a message that lands.
If you need step-by-step instructions for a specific signal type, refer to that signal’s dedicated help article.