Whale Radar is showing leads outside my country: how it decides where to look

Every card on your radar shortlist is in the wrong country. You are looking at galas in NYC, Monaco and Great Neck while you work out of Tel Aviv, and every single one of them is labeled "corporate event signal in your metro", which makes it feel worse. The way one customer put it to us: "whales showing only outside of israel, i'm based in israel." This article covers what actually decides the radar's geography, what that "in your metro" line really means, and how to tell when your leads are in the wrong country because of a defect on our side rather than a setting on yours.

What Whale Radar is, and what a card is telling you

Whale Radar (some people call it the whale finder) lives at Marketing > Outbound > Whale Radar. It runs a sweep for the big, high-value opportunities near you and hands you who to contact, why now, and a draft ready for review. It draws on five kinds of signal: corporate events and galas, venue turnovers, conferences coming to town, new money opening up nearby, and the annual events of your own past clients coming due again. It never sends anything. Every draft it writes waits in your Approval Queue, and no setting in KM Hub can auto-send a whale draft.

Each card on the shortlist carries the same set of parts:

• Score band and score: whale or strong lead, with a 0-100 number. 70 and above is a whale, below that is a strong lead.
• confidence: low, medium or high, for how solid the underlying signal is.
• Why now: the dated reason this is worth a move today, for example a gala confirmed for a specific evening.
• Why flagged: which of the five signal families produced the card, whether you have booked with them before, and the rubric behind the score as value x/40, timing x/30, fit x/20.
• A lead, not a promise - verify before you commit: printed under every card, on purpose. See below for why that line matters more than usual here.
• contact found when a reachable email was located, a Source link to the page the signal came from, and either Add to pipeline and Dismiss, or the confirmation In your pipeline - review the draft in your Approval Queue once you have pushed it.

Under the shortlist you may also see a Watch list. Those are real whales with no reachable contact yet, and the radar re-tries them every sweep until there is a contact behind the signal. The same organization can appear in both places at once when one signal behind it has a contact and another does not, so a name showing twice is not a duplicate bug.

Why are my leads not local: the one field that sets the geography

Almost all of the radar's geography comes from one place: the Metro / city & state field at the top of the Whale Radar page, inside the Weekly sweep card. The city you type there becomes the literal location the sweep searches for. If your leads are in the wrong country, that field is the first and often the only thing to check.

1. Open Marketing > Outbound > Whale Radar.
2. In Metro / city & state, type your city into the left-hand box: Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa. The city is the only part the radar requires. Leave it empty and you get the message Tell the radar where to watch when you try to scan or arm the sweep.
3. Leave the State dropdown alone if you work outside the US. It lists the 50 US states plus DC and nothing else, so blank is the correct answer for the rest of the world. An empty state is not what is skewing your results.
4. Optionally set a Value threshold ($, optional). Left empty it defaults to your top package, so the radar only flags work worth your time.
5. Click Scan now. It saves your metro first and then queues a fresh sweep, which starts within about a minute. Flipping the Weekly sweep switch on saves the same settings and arms the recurring sweep.

Two traps worth knowing. First, if you never set a city here at all, the radar falls back to the first city on your Event Scout profile, so it can quietly be sweeping a metro you typed months ago for a different tool. Second, cards from earlier sweeps stay on the page after you fix the city. Press Dismiss on the out-of-country ones so you can see clearly what the next sweep actually brings back.

One family sits outside that field. The new business opening near you cards are recycled from your Grand Openings finds of the last two weeks, so they carry whatever city you typed on the Grand Openings page when you ran it, not the city here. Grand Openings will not run without a US city and state, so outside the US you usually have no such finds at all.

What does not steer the radar

Almost everyone reaches for these first, and for Whale Radar they are all dead ends. If the only thing you are trying to fix is the country your whales come from, skip them:

• Your business address in Settings. The radar never reads it. Filling in an Israeli address changes nothing about which city gets searched.
• Your currency and timezone. Both are worth setting correctly for money and dates, but neither touches the sweep.
• The Who do you want to reach? box on Marketing > Find Leads. That box belongs to the scout, which is a separate tool with its own runs and its own costs. Rewriting it will not move a single whale card, and re-running scouts to test the theory spends real lead-finding budget for nothing.

Why "corporate event signal in your metro" does not mean the lead is in your metro

This is the line that makes the shortlist feel like it is lying to you, and you are right to be annoyed by it. The Why flagged line always opens with a fixed label for the signal family that produced the card. There are five of them, and they never change wording: "corporate event signal in your metro", "venue turnover signal in your metro", "conference coming to your metro", "new business opening near you", and "your own booking history, annual event coming due". The label tells you which scanner found the card. It is not a claim that the location was verified. That is how a gala in Great Neck ends up carrying the phrase "corporate event signal in your metro" while your metro is set to Tel Aviv.

The parts of a card you can trust for location are the Why now line, which usually names the city, and the Source link, which takes you to the page the signal was read from. Open the source before you spend any time on a whale. That is exactly what A lead, not a promise - verify before you commit is there for.

The honest limit if you work outside the US

Three of the five scanners (corporate events, venue turnovers and conferences) work by searching public news and the open web for your city. Your city does go into those searches. The news feed behind them is an English-language US news edition, so US coverage crowds out local coverage even when your metro is set correctly. For a city like Tel Aviv that means fewer local hits and a heavier tail of American and international English-language galas than a performer in Austin would see. This is a real limitation, and it is the most common reason a correctly configured non-US radar still comes back looking American.

One family is not affected at all, and for non-US users it is the strongest part of the tool: the annual events of your own past clients. That scanner reads your own won bookings and flags the ones whose event date comes due again in 90 to 120 days. It does not search the web, it does not care what country you are in, and it works identically anywhere in the world. If you have imported your booking history into KM Hub, that is where your best local whales will come from.

For the record, the US city names used as examples in this help center and in the app's own placeholder text ("Orlando, Tampa, Miami", "wedding planners and venue coordinators in Austin, TX") are illustrations, not a statement that KM Hub is US-only. Currency support includes ILS alongside USD, CAD, GBP, EUR and AUD.

Set the rest of your account to your country too

None of this steers Whale Radar, so do not expect it to change your shortlist. It is still worth five minutes so that the scout, your quotes and your calendar all agree on where you are:

1. Click the Settings gear at the bottom of the sidebar, choose Your Account, then the General tab. Under Localization, set your Timezone from the 11 supported zones and your Currency (USD, CAD, GBP, EUR, AUD or ILS), then click Save Changes.
2. On Marketing > Find Leads, name your country explicitly in Who do you want to reach?, for example "corporate and charity gala organizers in Israel", and list the places you actually work in Areas, comma-separated, for example "Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa".
3. If auto-scout is on, it keeps its own saved copy of who to target, and retyping the box above does not update it. This is the step people miss. On Marketing > Find Leads, open the New mission tab, tick Keep this ongoing (auto top-up my pipeline), then open Advanced auto top-up settings (target, budget, who to target). Name your country in Describe your ideal customer, add the cities you work under Locations, and click Save ICP. Only an owner or admin can change this panel.

Not to be confused with Occasion Radar

KM Hub has a second feature with Radar in the name, and they get mixed up often. Occasion Radar (event anniversaries) lives in the Autopilot Center and enrolls your own won past clients into a re-engagement sequence when their annual event or a child's birthday comes back into range. It never searches the web, it has no metro setting, and it has nothing to do with which country your whale cards come from. It only ever touches people already in your Hub.

When this is a defect, and what to send us

If the Metro / city & state field holds your real city, you have clicked Scan now since you set it, and the fresh shortlist still comes back entirely out of country, stop tuning things. At that point it is a defect on our side and we want to see it. Submit a ticket with:

1. The exact city and state as they are saved on the Whale Radar page.
2. Two or three example cards, screenshotted so we can see the score band and the full Why flagged line including the value, timing and fit numbers.
3. The Source links from those cards, which tell us which scanner brought them in.

What not to do: do not keep rewriting your ICP and re-running scouts hoping the wording lands. That does not touch the radar, and it spends lead-finding budget on a theory we can rule out for you in one reply.

Still stuck? Submit a ticket from this help center and we'll take it from there.