Most sales teams have a rule that goes something like this: when a company visits the pricing page, tell a rep.
It’s a bad rule.
One visit could be a buyer. It could also be a competitor, a student or a customer checking their invoice, and a rep who gets pinged for all four soon stops reading the pings.
A company that’s in-market (actively shopping for what you sell) looks different. It comes back, it brings colleagues and it reads the pages only a buyer needs.
Which visits mean a company is buying?
The ones to pages only a buyer would bother with.
Anyone can land on a blog post from Google. Very few people read your pricing page twice, open your security documentation or compare you with a competitor by name unless a decision is coming. We’ll call those buyer pages, and they do most of the work in the rest of this post.
Here are the signs, strongest first:
| What you see | How strong | What it usually means |
|---|---|---|
| ✋ A demo or contact form started, then abandoned | Very strong | They were one click from talking to you, and something stopped them |
| 👥 Two or more people from one company on buyer pages in the same week | Very strong | A team is comparing options, not one person browsing at lunch |
| 💰 The pricing page, twice or more in two weeks | Strong | Once is curiosity. Twice is a spreadsheet |
| 🆚 Comparison, alternatives or migration pages | Strong | You’re on a shortlist, next to a competitor they can name |
| 🔒 Security, compliance or terms pages | Strong | Procurement or IT has joined in. Nobody reads a data processing agreement for fun |
| 🔌 Integration pages, API docs or case studies from their industry | Medium | Someone is checking it fits, or building the case for their boss |
| 📄 Blog posts and guides, and nothing else | Weak | They’re researching. Fine to show them ads, too early to call |
These are rules of thumb from watching our own site, not research. Start with them, then adjust once you’ve looked at your own deals.
Don’t go by one row on its own. A company that reads your pricing page twice and then opens your security page is worth more of your time than one that has read ten blog posts. It still has to be a company you could sell to.
(If someone fills in the demo form, you can skip the table. They’ve asked to talk, so reply to them.)
How many visits make a pattern?
More than one, close together, and ideally from more than one person.
A single visit could be anyone, so there’s not much point reacting to it. What you’re looking for is the same company turning up again within a short window. As a rule of thumb, that’s three visits or two different people inside two weeks, with at least one buyer page among them.
It tends to build over a few days. On Monday someone reads a blog post and leaves. On Wednesday the same company is back, on pricing and integrations this time. On Thursday there are two of them, from two different offices, and one opens your security page.
Monday meant nothing. By Thursday you’re looking at a company that’s comparing options.
How far back you look should depend on how long your deals take:
| How you sell | Window to watch | Roughly, a pattern is |
|---|---|---|
| ⚡ Self-serve or small deals, closed in days | 7 days | Two visits, one of them to pricing |
| 📆 Mid-sized deals, closed in one to three months | 14 days | Three visits or two people, with buyer pages in the mix |
| 🏛️ Big deals that take six months or more | 30 days | Three or more people, including security or legal pages |
Patterns go stale, too. A company that was all over your pricing page in March and hasn’t been back since isn’t shopping in May. Treat anything older than a month as history.
If you want better numbers than ours, pull your last 20 won deals. Look at what each company did on your site in the month before the first meeting. Your real pattern is in there.
What looks like buying but isn’t?
Quite a lot, and the worst offenders look perfect.
One of our competitors has been on snitcher.com more than 150 times. Our own scoring gives them an A for fit and marks them as high intent. On paper they’re exactly who we sell to: right industry, right size, reading all the right pages.
One afternoon in September, someone there opened our pricing page 15 times in 13 minutes.
They are never going to buy. (They’re very thorough, though.)
That’s the alert every rep dreams of, and it’s why you check who a company is before anyone celebrates. These are the usual suspects:
| What you see | What it usually is | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| 🕵️ A company from your own market, all over your pricing page | A competitor keeping an eye on you | Tag it and keep it out of every list a rep works from |
| 🎓 A university network reading everything for an hour | A student writing about your category | Nothing. Hope they cite you |
| 💼 Careers, about and team pages | A job seeker | Not a lead. Possibly a hire |
| 🤖 Hundreds of pages in a minute | A bot, such as a search engine’s crawler | Exclude it. Bots don’t sign contracts |
| 🖱️ A visit two minutes after your rep’s email went out | Your rep’s email being clicked | Don’t count it as fresh interest |
| 🔑 Login, docs and help pages from a customer | A customer using your product | Tell their account manager, not sales |
Email opens belong on this list as well. Some mail apps open every message automatically to load the images, so “opened” often just means “arrived”.
Who gets the call?
The companies that fit and are showing a pattern right now. Nobody else, yet.
There are two separate questions here. Fit is who the company is: its industry, its size, where it’s based. That barely changes.
Intent is what it’s doing, and that changes every week. You need both. But a competitor can be an A for fit and show a pattern, which is why you need to tag competitors and keep them off your reps’ lists.
Put the two together and every company lands in one of four boxes:
| 🔥 Showing a pattern | 💤 Nothing yet | |
|---|---|---|
| ✅ Fits | Call today. Right company, right moment | Keep warm. Right company, wrong moment. Ads and a newsletter, and an alert for when it wakes up |
| ❌ Doesn’t fit | Check first. Usually a competitor, a student or a job seeker | Leave it. Really |
Fit matters more than people expect. When we looked at our own customers, the best-fitting accounts converted about 3x as often as the worst-fitting ones. So the same pattern is worth a lot more coming from the right company.
“Call” also means the right person on your side. If the company is an open deal, the pattern goes to the rep on that deal. If it’s a customer, it goes to their account manager.
The fastest way to annoy a customer of two years is to have a new sales rep cold-email them because they looked at your pricing page.
One box deserves a second look now and then. If the same kind of company keeps turning up in “check first” with a real pattern, take it seriously. It may be a market you haven’t decided to sell to yet.
Can you see it while it’s happening?
Yes, and it’s worth setting up. Just be careful what you do with it.
Your analytics has a live view, but it shows you a visit, not a company. Visitor identification puts the company on it while they’re still on your site, and an alert can tell whoever owns the account straight away.
That’s useful for one thing: getting the right person to look while it’s fresh. A rep who hears about a returning deal today can reach out today, which beats finding it in a report next Tuesday.
It is not a reason to phone someone who still has your pricing page open in another tab. And when you do get in touch, write about the problem those pages point to, not about the visit. You don’t know which person was reading, and nobody likes feeling watched.
Send the alert to one person, too. At Snitcher every rep has their own Slack channel for the deals they lost. When one comes back, the alert lands with the person who remembers the deal. A shared channel gets a row of 👀 and no reply.
Do you need to buy intent data as well?
Not to start with. It answers a different question.
“Buyer intent data” is any sign that a company is researching a purchase. Everything in this post so far is one kind, called first-party intent, which is what companies do on your own website.
The other kind is third-party intent. That’s what they read on other people’s websites, collected by a data provider and sold to you. (And to your competitors.)
The two tell you different things. Bought data says a company is reading about products like yours, so it’s good for deciding who sees your ads. Your own website says it’s reading about you, so it decides who gets a call.
If you have neither, start with your own site, because it’s the data you already own and nobody else can buy it.
So, is this company in-market?
Only if two things are true. It’s showing a pattern, which means buyer pages, more than once or from more than one person, inside a couple of weeks. And it’s a company you could actually sell to.
So before anyone picks up the phone, check three things:
- Does the company fit?
- Is it a pattern or a single visit?
- Is it someone who could buy, not a competitor, a student or one of your own customers?
If the answer is yes three times, send it to the person who owns the account, today.
If it only fits, keep it warm and wait for the pattern. Everything else can be left alone, and most of it should be.
Curious which of your visitors are in-market this week? Try Snitcher, set up your ICP and filter on high intent. Then check who’s on the list before anyone celebrates.
