What is the Signal-Signature Gap?

The Signal-Signature Gap is one of the book's four named laws: the person who emits the signal is rarely the person who signs. The engineer reading your docs, the username in the community thread, the person who downloaded the comparison: in a real deal, almost none of them are the one who signs. The signal and the signature belong to different people. The gap is sharpest with technical buyers. Engineers and security teams clone the repo, read the API docs three times, test the free tier at midnight, and evaluate you for months before they ever touch a form. Then the executive signs the deal, and the funnel confuses the two.

The other half of the gap is that the signer leaves no trace. You can map your decision-maker perfectly, name, title, budget, the quarter her board is watching, and never see her do a single thing. The CFO does not clone your repository. The CISO does not test your SDK on a Tuesday night. The silence is the role, not a lack of interest, and this is where a lot of demand engines get stuck, waiting for a decision-maker who by the nature of her job will never surface. Meanwhile the people actually evaluating you get ignored because they "don't have budget."

The fix is not to wait for the signer but to build a bridge to her. Roll the fragments up to the account: individually each is easy to dismiss, together they are the account-level case, translated into the language of her problem rather than yours. Not "your engineers like our docs," but "you have an initiative forming that we make cheaper, faster, or safer, and here is the evidence it is already underway inside your own walls." That case is what you arm a champion with.