Signal Intake Triage (Onboarding)

Signal Intake Triage (Onboarding)

1. 01

   Define the client's decision horizon before any feed is connected

   Ask what the client must decide in the next 30, 90, and 180 days. A signal that cannot change one of those decisions is noise for this account, regardless of how fast it is growing.

2. 02

   Assign each monitoring lens a named owner and a review cadence

   Trend discovery, page-change detection, and curated people digests answer different questions. Split them across team members so one analyst is not reading six dashboards on a Friday afternoon.

3. 03

   Set a baseline snapshot of the client's category, competitors, and search footprint

   Capture current rankings, pricing pages, and messaging before monitoring starts. Without a baseline, every later alert looks like a trend.

4. 04

   Write the relevance filter as a short written rule, not a feeling

   State in one paragraph what qualifies as actionable for this client: a named competitor move, a regulatory change, a shift in buyer language. Reviewers apply the same rule, which keeps the retainer conversation about decisions rather than opinions.

5. 05

   Cap the number of sources per account and record the cap

   Agencies that connect every available feed end up ignoring all of them. Six to ten sources per client is a workable ceiling for most delivery teams.

6. 06

   Confirm who on the client side receives a signal and who can act on it

   Route alerts to the person with budget authority, not the distribution list. Copy the account lead so the agency sees the same signal the client does.

7. 07

   Schedule the first calibration review for 30 days out

   At that session, drop any source that produced zero acted-on signals and add one source the client asked for by name.