Most SaaS companies set up Orbit, search for one or two obvious topics, and stop there. They’re leaving 80% of the value on the table.
The power of Orbit isn’t in a single audience. It’s in building a portfolio of audiences that covers every buying signal in your category - competitor researchers, category explorers, tech stack evaluators, and people actively looking for alternatives.
Here are five audiences that every SaaS company should have running in Orbit. For each, I’ll walk through the exact topics to select, the ICP filters to apply, expected audience sizes, and what to do with the results.
If you’re new to Orbit, start with our launch announcement or the guide on how person-level intent data works.
Audience 1: Competitor Researchers
People actively researching your competitors by name.
This is the highest-intent audience you can build. Someone researching your competitor’s specific product name is either evaluating them, already using them and considering a switch, or comparing options in your category. All three scenarios are outreach-worthy.
How to Build It
Topics to search for:
Search each competitor’s product name and brand in Orbit’s topic browser. For a CRM company competing with HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive, you’d search:
- “HubSpot CRM”
- “Salesforce CRM”
- “Pipedrive”
- “HubSpot alternatives”
- “Salesforce alternatives”
Most competitor names will have dedicated topics in Orbit’s 20,735-topic taxonomy. Select all that match.
ICP filters to apply:
| Filter | Recommended Setting |
|---|---|
| Seniority | Director, VP, CXO |
| Company Size | 50-500 employees (your target) |
| Department | Marketing, Sales, Revenue Ops |
| Geography | United States |
| Contact Availability | Has business email |
Expected audience size: For well-known competitors, expect 2,000-15,000 people per competitor topic. With ICP filters applied, you’ll narrow to 200-2,000 highly qualified prospects.
What to Do with the Results
This audience goes straight to your sales team for personalized outreach. The messaging angle is clear: “I noticed you’ve been researching [Competitor]. Here’s how we compare on [key differentiator].”
Feed the exported contacts into your AI SDR workflow or Clay waterfall for enrichment and sequencing. The intent signal means these aren’t cold leads - they’re actively evaluating.
Pro tip: Set this audience to refresh daily. When someone’s intent score spikes from 40 to 85 overnight, it usually means they’ve moved from passive browsing to active evaluation. That spike is your signal to reach out.
Audience 2: Category Buyers
People researching your product category, not a specific vendor.
Category research is earlier in the buying journey than competitor research, but it’s still high-intent. Someone searching “project management software” or “email marketing platform” is actively exploring solutions. They haven’t picked a vendor yet - which means you can be the first to reach them.
How to Build It
Topics to search for:
Search for your product category and related terms:
- Your category name (e.g., “CRM Software,” “Marketing Automation”)
- Category variants (“Customer Relationship Management,” “Email Marketing Platform”)
- Problem-oriented topics (“Lead Management,” “Sales Pipeline Management”)
- Feature-oriented topics (“Contact Management,” “Email Sequencing”)
ICP filters to apply:
| Filter | Recommended Setting |
|---|---|
| Seniority | Manager, Director, VP |
| Company Size | Your target range |
| Department | The department that buys your tool |
| Industry | Your strongest verticals |
| Contact Availability | Has business email + phone |
Expected audience size: Category topics typically have broader audiences - 10,000-50,000+ people. ICP filters are essential here to avoid drowning in volume. With proper filtering, expect 500-5,000 qualified prospects.
What to Do with the Results
Category buyers need education, not a hard sell. Use this audience for:
- Content distribution: Share your best comparison guides and how-to content
- LinkedIn ad targeting: Upload the audience to LinkedIn Campaign Manager for thought leadership ads
- Nurture sequences: Add to a 3-5 email sequence that positions your category expertise
The key difference from Audience 1: these people are still forming opinions. Your goal is to be the trusted voice that shapes their criteria, not to close a deal immediately.
Audience 3: Tech Stack Evaluators
People researching tools that integrate with or complement your product.
This audience is less obvious but incredibly valuable. If you’re a CRM, people researching “Zapier,” “Slack integrations,” or “HubSpot API” are likely building or upgrading their tech stack. That’s a buying signal for adjacent tools.
How to Build It
Topics to search for:
Think about the tools your product integrates with, and the broader tech categories your buyers also evaluate:
- Integration partners (e.g., “Zapier,” “Segment,” “Slack”)
- Complementary categories (e.g., “Sales Engagement,” “Data Enrichment,” “Marketing Analytics”)
- Platform topics (e.g., “HubSpot Integrations,” “Salesforce AppExchange”)
You can also use Orbit’s website analysis feature: paste a competitor or partner URL, and Orbit extracts relevant topics automatically.
ICP filters to apply:
| Filter | Recommended Setting |
|---|---|
| Seniority | Manager, Director, VP |
| Company Size | 50-1,000 employees |
| Department | IT, Engineering, Revenue Ops |
| Geography | United States |
| Contact Availability | Has business email |
Expected audience size: Integration and platform topics tend to have large audiences. Expect 5,000-20,000 before filtering, 300-2,000 after ICP filters.
What to Do with the Results
Tech stack evaluators respond well to integration-focused messaging:
- “We integrate natively with [tool they’re researching]”
- “Teams using [complementary tool] typically also use [your product] for [use case]”
- Share integration guides and API documentation that demonstrates your platform’s extensibility
This audience also works well for co-marketing partnerships. Share the audience insights (not the contacts) with your integration partners to plan joint campaigns.
Audience 4: Decision Makers in Growth Mode
People whose companies are showing multiple growth signals simultaneously.
This audience combines intent topics with company-level signals to find decision makers at companies that are actively growing - and therefore more likely to be buying new tools.
How to Build It
Topics to search for:
Combine multiple signal types:
- Hiring-related topics (“Recruiting,” “Talent Acquisition,” “HR Software”)
- Growth-related topics (“Series B,” “Revenue Growth,” “Business Scaling”)
- Technology evaluation topics (“Software Evaluation,” “Vendor Selection”)
The key is topic overlap. Someone researching BOTH “recruiting” AND “CRM software” is at a growing company that’s actively building its go-to-market stack.
ICP filters to apply:
| Filter | Recommended Setting |
|---|---|
| Seniority | VP, CXO |
| Company Size | 20-200 employees (growth stage) |
| Revenue | $5M-$50M |
| Department | Executive, Sales, Marketing |
| Contact Availability | Has business email + LinkedIn |
Expected audience size: Multi-topic overlap naturally reduces audience size. Expect 500-3,000 people with strong overlap scores. These are your highest-quality leads.
What to Do with the Results
These are your A-list prospects. Route them to your best reps for personalized, multi-channel outreach:
- LinkedIn connection request with a reference to their company’s growth trajectory
- Personalized email addressing the specific tools they’re evaluating
- Phone call for the highest-scoring prospects
The multi-signal nature of this audience means your outreach can be genuinely relevant. “I noticed [Company] is scaling quickly - we help teams at your stage [specific value prop]” lands differently when you know they’re actually evaluating tools.
Audience 5: Churning Competitor Users
People researching “[Competitor] alternatives” topics.
This is the most actionable audience you can build. Someone searching for “[Competitor] alternatives” has already decided to leave. They’re not exploring - they’re actively looking for a replacement. Your job is to be in front of them at this exact moment.
How to Build It
Topics to search for:
- “[Competitor] alternatives” (e.g., “HubSpot alternatives,” “Salesforce alternatives”)
- “[Competitor] vs” comparison topics
- “[Competitor] pricing” (pricing research often signals dissatisfaction)
- “[Competitor] review” or “[Competitor] problems”
These topics tend to have smaller but extremely high-intent audiences.
ICP filters to apply:
| Filter | Recommended Setting |
|---|---|
| Seniority | Director, VP, CXO |
| Company Size | Your target range |
| Department | The department that uses your tool |
| Contact Availability | Has business email + phone |
Expected audience size: “Alternatives” topics typically surface 500-5,000 people. With ICP filters, expect 50-500 prospects. Small audience, massive intent.
What to Do with the Results
Speed matters here. Someone researching alternatives is making a decision in days or weeks, not months. Your response needs to be immediate:
- Day 1: Personalized email referencing the specific competitor they’re evaluating against
- Day 2: LinkedIn connection with a brief value proposition
- Day 3: Follow-up with a comparison resource or case study from a customer who switched
This is where Orbit’s daily refresh matters most. New people enter this audience every day as they start their evaluation. If you check weekly instead of daily, you’re letting competitors reach these buyers first.
Pro tip: Create Slack alerts for this audience so your sales team gets notified the moment a new high-intent prospect appears.
Putting It All Together
Here’s how the five audiences map to your pipeline:
| Audience | Intent Level | Typical Size | Action |
|---|---|---|---|
| Churning competitor users | Highest | 50-500 | Immediate outreach |
| Competitor researchers | High | 200-2,000 | Personalized sequences |
| Category buyers | Medium | 500-5,000 | Content + nurture |
| Decision makers in growth mode | High | 500-3,000 | Multi-channel outbound |
| Tech stack evaluators | Medium | 300-2,000 | Integration messaging |
Run all five simultaneously. Orbit’s daily refresh means each audience updates automatically as new intent signals arrive. Your Monday morning routine becomes: check each audience for new high-score entries, route the hottest leads to reps, and export weekly batches for email sequences.
The 15-Minute Weekly Cadence
- Monday 9:00 AM: Review Audience 5 (churning users) for immediate outreach targets
- Monday 9:05 AM: Check Audience 1 (competitor researchers) for new high-intent prospects
- Monday 9:10 AM: Export Audience 4 (growth-mode decision makers) for rep distribution
- Monday 9:12 AM: Review Audience 2 and 3 for nurture campaign additions
- Monday 9:15 AM: Done. Your pipeline is fed for the week.
Compare that to buying a stale list from ZoomInfo and cold-calling your way through it. Orbit gives you people with proven, current research behavior - not contacts who match a firmographic profile but may have zero interest.
Bonus: How to Measure Audience Performance
Once your audiences are running, track these metrics to optimize over time:
| Metric | What to Track | Target |
|---|---|---|
| Audience growth rate | New entries per week | Steady or growing |
| Intent score distribution | % of audience above 70 | Over 30% |
| Reply rate by audience | Response to outreach per audience | 8-15% |
| SQL conversion rate | Qualified meetings booked per outreach | 3-5% |
| Time-to-response | Hours between export and first contact | Under 24 hours |
The most important metric is reply rate by audience. If one audience consistently outperforms others, shift your outreach resources toward it. If an audience underperforms, adjust the topics or tighten the ICP filters.
Over time, you’ll develop an intuition for which topic combinations produce the best leads for your specific product. That’s competitive advantage that compounds - your competitors using company-level intent data can’t replicate this level of precision.
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Related Articles
- Orbit Is Live: Person-Level Intent Audiences
- Person-Level Intent Data: How It Works
- Intent Data vs Visitor Identification
- AI SDR Data Stack: Anonymous Visitor to Booked Meeting
- SDR Playbook for Identified Website Visitors
- Build a Custom AI SDR with Leadpipe and OpenAI
- How to Add Visitor Identification to Clay Waterfall
