Intent data is a guess. Our data is human-verified.
Signallo Methodology

We get the truth from real people inside your target accounts.

Our Research Associates call real people at your target accounts and ask about their current vendor: how satisfied they are, what's frustrating them, and whether they're considering a switch. Because we're researchers with nothing to sell, people actually tell us.

See Why It Works → Book a Call
The method
Live phone conversations, not surveys or scraped signals
Why people talk to us
Because we aren't trying to sell them anything
Our reputation
Over 300k successful research calls since 2021
How We Do It

The four steps behind every engagement.

Every Signallo project follows the same process: decide who to research, decide what to learn, make the calls, and deliver what was confirmed.

01
Build the account list
First we determine which accounts to research. If you have a target list, we work from it. If you don't, you describe the characteristics of the accounts you want researched and we build the list for you. We research accounts in the SMB and lower midmarket space exclusively.
02
Define the data points
The starting point is a simple question: what do you wish you knew about these accounts? The four data points we collect at scale are current vendor, satisfaction with that vendor (NPS), the biggest pain point with that vendor, and additional feedback in the respondent's own words. Clients regularly ask us to collect data points well beyond these four, and we narrow the wishlist together based on what's realistically collectible on a call.
03
Reach the right person
Our Research Associates call each account, introduce themselves as independent researchers, and ask for the person responsible for the product or service in question. A salesperson typically gets stopped here, because keeping salespeople out is the gatekeeper's job. A researcher collecting quick feedback usually gets transferred through. This is the first place our results separate from everyone else's.
04
Have the conversation
When we reach the right person, what follows is a conversation, not a survey. Our Research Associates work through the data points naturally, following the threads people share, and recording what was actually said. This is the part of our process nobody else can replicate, and it's covered in detail further down the page.
The Deliverable

What you actually receive.

After the calls are complete, every record goes through QA and formatting. You receive a CRM-ready CSV file: each row is an account, each column is a data point.

target_accounts_research.csv
Account Current Vendor NPS Pain Point Additional Feedback
Keystone Dental Group TechFlow IT 3 Response Time "Tickets sit for days unless we call twice"
Harbor Light Logistics Summit Managed 6 Cybersecurity Coverage
Meridian Physical Therapy 8 "Happy enough, no plans to change anything"
Brightway Insurance Grp NorthPoint IT Proactive Monitoring
Calloway & Finch CPA
Lakeview Property Mgmt Cascade Networks 4 Strategic Guidance "Feels like we're paying for a help desk, not a partner"

Notice the blank cells. If a data point wasn't confirmed on a call, the field stays empty, and some accounts yield nothing at all. That's the nature of phone research. We'd rather hand you honest blanks than a file padded with guesses.

Why It Works

Phone research fails at two points. We've mastered both.

Getting past the gatekeeper, and getting honest answers once we're through. Here's how different callers fare at each one.

01
Getting past the gatekeeper
A survey robocall
Dead on arrival.
Most people hang up before the first question finishes. Nobody owes a machine their time.
A salesperson
Stopped at the front desk.
Keeping salespeople away from decision makers is the gatekeeper's whole job.
A Signallo researcher
Transferred through.
We're independent researchers, we aren't selling anything, and we've said it will be quick. People generally want to be helpful.
02
Getting honest answers
A survey robocall
Guarded box-checking.
Anyone who does stay on gives short, surface answers just to get it over with.
A salesperson
The guard goes up.
The moment people sense a pitch, answers turn polite, vague, and strategically unhelpful.
A Signallo researcher
People open up.
No pitch, no agenda. People relax, vent about their vendor, and say what they actually think.
01
The gatekeeper

Every research call starts with the same obstacle: the person who answers the phone. Their job is to keep salespeople away from decision makers, and they're good at it. Our Research Associates introduce themselves as independent researchers collecting quick feedback, which is true, and which changes the math for the gatekeeper. Nothing is being sold, it won't take long, and people generally want to be helpful. So we get transferred through at a rate salespeople can't touch.

02
The conversation

Once a Research Associate reaches the right person, the call becomes a genuine conversation, not a survey read off a script. Our conversational method draws on academic work in persuasion and elicitation, including techniques developed in the intelligence community, and our Research Associates have refined it over hundreds of thousands of calls. None of it involves tricking anyone. We identify ourselves honestly, we don't pressure people, and we never go after proprietary information. We're simply very good at making people comfortable enough to say what they actually think about their vendor.

The completion rates surprise our clients, especially the ones who tried this kind of research before finding us, whether in-house or through a call center. The questions were never the hard part. Getting honest, complete answers is, and that's the part we've spent years getting right.

Our Standard

If it wasn't confirmed on a call, it doesn't go in the file.

The most common failure mode in "data work" is pretending to know. We made a deliberate decision to go the other way. These are the rules that govern what ends up in your deliverable.

Verified, not inferred
Every data point in a Signallo deliverable was confirmed in a live phone conversation. We never infer satisfaction from a company's size, vintage, or tech stack. We ask, and we listen to the answer.
Blanks over guesses
If a contact couldn't or wouldn't answer a question, that field stays blank. We'd rather deliver a slightly shorter file than pad it with speculation. Your decisions deserve a reliable foundation.
Account-level only
All intelligence we deliver is account-level. We report what's happening at the organization (vendor relationships, satisfaction, pain points) without attribution to any individual contact name or title.
Nuance preserved
When answers are more complex than a simple score, we keep that complexity. A "6 out of 10, but they just hired a new IT director who loves the platform" is a different signal than a flat 6. We capture the difference.
The Bottom Line

Digital signals tell you what.
Conversations tell you why.

Intent dashboards, technographics, and job postings are directionally useful, but they can't tell you whether a vendor is valued or merely tolerated, or whether there's a pain point inside the account that you can actually solve. Those answers live with the people inside the account, and the only reliable way to get them is to ask.

At Signallo, that's exactly what we do.

See how Signallo compares to intent data →
FAQ

Common questions.

Something not answered here? Book a consultation. No question is too small and there's no hard sell.

A lead list tells you an account exists. Signallo tells you what's happening inside it: what vendor they use, how satisfied they are, and whether they'd consider switching. It's the difference between a directory and actual intelligence.
Because the signals that matter most aren't visible from the outside. Vendor satisfaction, internal pain points, switching intent: none of these are published anywhere. They exist only in the heads of the people inside the account. The phone is the only reliable way to access them, and a trained researcher is the only reliable way to get an honest answer.
No, and the distinction matters. A survey call sends people running. Our Research Associates are trained to have real conversations that feel nothing like being surveyed. We've developed proprietary methods for building trust and eliciting candid, detailed responses that an untrained researcher or an automated survey would never get. The result is a significantly higher rate of genuine disclosure, and meaningfully better data quality.
They could try, but they'd hit a wall most of the time. The moment a prospect realizes they're talking to someone from a vendor, the guard goes up and answers get short, polite, and strategically vague. We call as independent researchers collecting feedback, not as anyone with something to sell, so people relax and engage openly. That neutrality is exactly what lets us surface the candid pain points, real satisfaction levels, and switching signals your own reps would almost never get on the same call.
No. All Signallo intelligence is delivered at the account level. We report what's happening at the organization (vendor relationships, satisfaction, pain points) without attributing any of it to specific individuals. This keeps our deliverables clean, actionable, and focused on the account-level signals your GTM team actually needs.
We make multiple contact attempts across different times and approaches before marking an account as unreachable. For any account we can't complete, we don't guess or fill in fields with assumptions. We simply report the account as unresearched. Our Quality Guarantee covers this in detail.
Every data point was sourced from a live conversation with someone at the account who has direct knowledge of the vendor relationship. We don't infer, guess, or model answers. If it's in the deliverable, someone said it. Our 4.8-star rating on Clutch and our Quality Guarantee reflect that commitment.
Get Started

Ready to see what's actually
happening inside your accounts?

Explore our off-the-shelf Segments lists, or book a consultation to scope a fully custom Dedicated engagement. All deliverables are covered by the Signallo Quality Guarantee.

Book a Consultation → Browse Segments

Questions? Reach us at info@signallo.com