👋 Hey! I’m Alex - a GTM Engineer at Clay. Not a subscriber yet? Join nearly 5,000 GTM Operators from the likes of OpenAI, HubSpot, Airtable, Ramp, and others who subscribe for battle tested GTM Prompts & content on GTM Engineering.
Objective of this Week’s Prompt
Clay just launched Custom Signals - a capability that enables you to turn nearly any custom data point into a signal.
I’m totally stoked about this and believe it’s the future of GTM: Ideal Customer Signals (ICS).
We can no longer rely on ICP, Personas, or general campaigns.
To find GTM alpha, you gotta get to your target customers at just the right time and before your competitors.
What are these? Ideal Customer Signals are changes in your prospect accounts behavior and environment that indicates the company has an objective, pain, or situation that is ripe for your solution or services. They often leverage unique data points about your ICP and Personas.
It links the timing of a sales or marketing play to your ICP & Personas.
The purpose of this Chain-of-Thought prompt is to help you find your company’s Ideal Customer Signals.
Then you can start building custom signals in Clay to operationalize ICS.
Example Output (Company = Datadog)
The output is too long for this post. But check out some of the examples sections:
Signal summary table for Datadog
Provides a summary of the top 10 must read articles on Datadog
The Prompt
👉 Copy and past this into ChatGPT. You can also experiment with Deep Research for a more more detailed output.
👉 If it stops short and doesn’t include the last section with relevant news, then just ask it to finish the running the prompt.
👉 Ask AI follow up questions.
🧠 Ideal Customer Signals (ICS) Deep-Dive Generator
🤖 AI Persona, Context & Research Process
Definition – Ideal Customer Signals (ICS):
ICS are observable changes inside a target account’s environment that indicate a business objective, pain point, or buying readiness that the input company can solve.
You are a Go-To-Market strategist tasked with identifying the best-fit target accounts based on signals that originate from external companies — i.e., potential buyers of the input company, not the input company itself.
Your goal is to uncover timely, actionable, and verifiable signals that suggest a target account is likely to need the input company’s solution soon.
🔍 Chain of Thought Reasoning (Before Surfacing Signals)
Use structured reasoning to identify what triggers a company's need for this product or service. Think across first-order and second-order effects.
What problem does the input company solve? Who benefits most?
Define the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP):
Industry verticals
Company size and maturity
Typical tech stack and infrastructure
Identify Key Personas:
Roles, titles, and departments most impacted
What KPIs they care about
Where budget authority lives
List Internal Triggers of Need:
Org restructuring or headcount growth
Technology migrations or stack changes
Compliance, security, or efficiency goals
Pattern Match & Synthesize:
Combine signals into repeatable patterns
Prioritize recency, verifiability, and relevance
Consider both explicit intent (e.g., job posts) and inferred intent (e.g., leadership changes)
Avoid Product Bias:
Think from the buyer’s perspective
Describe signals objectively
Don’t assume solution-fit without a trigger
🧶 Signal Prioritization Criteria
Give higher weight to signals that are:
Originating from mid-market or enterprise accounts
Recent and verifiable (within ~90 days)
Tied to budget owners or key influencers
Related to internal change, urgency, or growth
Detectable via public or third-party data sources
📚 Data Sources to Use
👥 People & Org Changes
LinkedIn job postings, team growth, org charts, promotions, leadership changes
Executive announcements via press releases or blogs
Team size trackers (e.g., LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Revelio Labs)
🧰 Tech Stack & Tooling Shifts
BuiltWith, Wappalyzer, StackShare, G2 Stack
Mentions in job descriptions (e.g., “experience with Terraform”)
Product release notes or migration blog posts
💼 Hiring Trends
Greenhouse, Lever, Workable, SmartRecruiters
ZipRecruiter, Indeed APIs (for volume-based hiring signals)
Hacker News “Who is hiring?” threads (for early-stage tech indicators)
📈 Strategic & Financial Signals
✅ SEC filings (10-K, 10-Q, 8-K): strategy shifts, spending priorities, risks
Earnings call transcripts: transformation, compliance, GTM priorities
Investor presentations and IR pages
Fundraising and M&A data: Crunchbase, PitchBook, CB Insights
🔐 Compliance & Security
SOC2 / ISO / HIPAA readiness or announcements
Public security disclosures, breach reports, or compliance updates
Vendor trust pages (e.g., trust.salesforce.com)
🌍 Market & Industry Signals
TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Yahoo Finance, PRNewswire
Analyst reports (Gartner, Forrester, IDC)
Subreddits, Twitter, public forums for pain point chatter
🧠 Intent & Behavioral Signals
G2, Bombora, 6sense: category research, solution interest
Similarweb, SEMrush: traffic shifts to solution/competitor pages
Webinar attendance or conference sponsorships
🛠 Developer & Product Ecosystem
GitHub: repo launches, dependencies, forks/stars
DockerHub, NPM, Terraform Registry: package downloads or updates
Stack Overflow trends or spike in topic searches
🗓 Output Format
🔹 Executive Summary
Key Trigger: What external pattern indicates growing need? (Provide 5 themes)
Top Segment to Target: Persona + industry + likely use case
GTM Risk: Where might targeting or timing friction occur?
🧹 1. Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Field | Description |
|---|---|
Personas | [Insert personas most likely to engage] |
Industries | [Insert ideal industries] |
Company Size | [Size range of most successful customers] |
Tech Stack Fit | [Common enabling or adjacent tools] |
Sales Motion | [Outbound / Inbound / PLG / Sales-Assist] |
📍 2. External Signals from Target Accounts
Break signals into categories. Include:
Signal Description
Why it Matters
Relevant Persona
GTM Play to Trigger Outreach
Examples of signal categories:
Hiring-Based Signals
Tech Stack or Infrastructure Changes
Compliance & Risk Motions
People Movement or Leadership Shifts
Strategic Initiatives or Public Commitments
Intent & Behavioral Data
🚀 3. High-Impact Signal Examples (10 Minimum)
Signal | Persona | Stage | Insight | GTM Play | Detection Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
[Insert] | [Insert] | [Insert] | [Insert] | [Insert] | [Insert] |
🧹 4. Signal Clusters (10 Minimum)
Cluster Name | Indicators | Why It Matters | GTM Play |
|---|---|---|---|
[Insert] | [Insert signals] | [Insert reasoning] | [Insert GTM angle] |
📊 5. ICS Scorecard (10 Minimum)
Signal | ICP Fit | Conversion Likelihood | Detection Ease | Strategic Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
[Insert] | [Insert] | [Insert] | [Insert] | [Insert] |
🧠 6. Signal-Driven Narrative Hypotheses (10 Minimum)
Create hypotheses combining 2–3 signals per account or persona. Example structure:
[Target Account] is [doing X, adopting Y, or hiring Z].
This likely signals a shift toward [desired outcome or mandate].
Their pain points may include [1–2 pain points].
GTM Play: [Message or campaign angle]
📰 7. Top 5 Recent News Articles on [Input Company]
Title: [Headline] – [Source]
Summary sentence 1 (what happened).
Sentence 2 (why it matters).
Sentence 3 (implication for GTM, product, or market).
👉 [Link]
(Repeat for 5 articles)
Let me know if you'd like this formatted as a Google Slide deck or used as the base for a custom GPT with automated outputs.