Three signals I look at before I pursue a foreign buyer (and none of them are LinkedIn)

People ask me how I decide who to chase. The honest answer is that I have three small tests I run before I'll spend more than ten minutes on a foreign company. None of them involve LinkedIn intent data, none of them involve a CRM scoring rule, and none of them require a subscription to whatever the prospecting tool of the month is. They came out of losses, mostly. I'll explain each one with the loss it taught me.

Signal one: are they importing in my category, right now, at a non-trivial volume

This sounds obvious. It isn't, because the standard prospecting workflow inverts it. The standard workflow says: pick a vertical, find companies in that vertical, qualify them down. My version says: find companies that are demonstrably moving the kind of goods I sell, then figure out which of them are worth pursuing.

The distinction matters because "in the vertical" is a noisy filter. A Polish auto-parts wholesaler might be in my vertical and import nothing relevant for two years because their existing supplier in Italy has them locked in. A French agricultural-equipment trader might not show up in any vertical directory because they sell across categories, but they import six containers a year of exactly what I represent. The second one is the prospect. The first one is wasted afternoons.

I get this signal from customs records, mostly, plus the occasional industry data feed. I've written about my customs-record habit elsewhere, so I won't repeat the practical details. The point here is that "are they actually importing" is signal zero, the one without which nothing else matters.

The loss that taught me: 2021, a German distributor I'd spent six weeks courting. Beautiful website, two factories listed, three trade-show appearances I could verify, a published catalogue covering my exact category. Zero imports in my category in the previous eighteen months according to customs records I checked, far too late, when I finally got the meeting and they admitted they were "re-evaluating" the segment. They had been "re-evaluating" the segment since 2019.

Signal two: have they recently changed suppliers, expanded their range, or moved facilities

The second signal is about movement. Buyers in motion buy. Buyers in equilibrium maintain. If I can find evidence that something has changed for a target buyer in the last six to twelve months, I move them up the list. If I can find evidence that absolutely nothing has changed since 2019, I move them down.

What counts as movement, in my experience:

• A new supplier shows up in their import records, especially in a country they hadn't sourced from before
• An old supplier disappears from their import records for two consecutive quarters
• They open a new warehouse, or take additional registered space, which usually shows up in trade press or local business filings
• They register a new product line with their domestic authority, or appear in customs records with an HS code they hadn't used before (I went deep on this one in the HS-code rabbit hole post, which I'm a little embarrassed by but stand behind)
• Senior procurement staff turnover, which is sometimes visible if you know where to look

None of these on their own is a buying signal. Two of them, stacked, is usually enough for me to invest properly.

The loss that taught me: 2022, a Dutch buyer I dismissed because their import records looked flat. I missed the fact that they had quietly registered a new subsidiary in Belgium that was doing the importing. A competitor of mine spotted it and was in there for six months before I realized. Movement was happening. I just wasn't looking at the right entity.

Signal three: do their public statements match their public behavior

This one's softer and I apply it last. I look at what the company says about itself, in its press releases, in trade-show interviews, on its website, in regulatory filings, in published catalogues. Then I look at what its import records and trade behavior actually show.

When the two match, I'm dealing with a serious company. When they don't, I'm dealing with one of three things, all of which matter:

1. A company that's trying to look bigger than it is, which means the buyer I'd be talking to may not have the budget the website implies
2. A company in transition, where the public narrative hasn't caught up to the operational reality, which is sometimes an opportunity
3. A company that's about to pivot away from my category, and the catalogue I'm staring at is a legacy artifact

The third case is the one that bit me. 2020, a Spanish distributor whose website prominently featured the equipment category I was representing. Their last import in that category had been in 2018. They had quietly moved into a different product line and just hadn't updated the site. I spent three weeks on them before figuring it out.

Why not LinkedIn intent data

I have nothing against LinkedIn as a research surface. I use it for understanding who works where, who recently joined, what their backgrounds look like. What I don't use is "intent data" of the sort that LinkedIn and a hundred sales-tech vendors are now selling: signals derived from content engagement, ad impressions, profile views, group activity.

The reason is simple. That data measures what people are reading and clicking. It does not measure what their company is buying. For a SaaS product where the decision-maker's clicks correlate with their purchase intent, intent data is probably useful. For cross-border B2B, where the buyer is a procurement manager who's never going to click on a thought-leadership post, where the actual purchase is reviewed by a finance director who isn't on LinkedIn at all, and where the decision involves logistics and customs and currency considerations that don't surface in any social signal, intent data is a beautifully presented red herring.

I'd rather have one verified shipment record than a hundred "engaged at the consideration stage" scores. The UNCTAD trade statistics portal has been more useful to me, year over year, than every intent-data tool I've ever trialed.

How I actually run the three checks

It takes me about ten minutes per company once I have my data sources set up. Pull import records for the last 24 months. Look at supplier and HS-code stability. Cross-check against their website, recent press, and registered filings. If signals one and two are present and signal three is consistent, I move them to the active list. If two of the three are weak or absent, I park them.

The exercise has a second benefit, which I didn't expect when I started doing it. It tells me the meeting is going to go, before I've even sent the first email. A buyer whose imports, public statements, and registered behavior all line up is a buyer who will respond to a credible, specific outreach. A buyer where the three don't line up is a buyer where any meeting I get will feel slippery. That feeling, in my experience, has never been wrong.