What if you ignored your “high intent” signals – didn’t follow up, didn’t call, didn’t email – just to see if leads would self-identify and reach out to you?
It sounds counterintuitive, but if a lead is really interested (at least according to your scoring tools), they should eventually fill out a form or call you, right? That’s the experiment we’ve been running.
For the past six weeks, we’ve been quietly tracking web traffic and running a test we know many of our clients would love to try but can’t. No outbound, no follow-ups – just observation.
The Setup
Using Warmly, we set our parameters around ICPs, buyer personas, and first- and third-party intent signals. For this experiment, visitors had to meet two criteria:
● Spend at least 28 seconds on the site
● Visit at least 2 web pages
The Results
After filtering out competitors and consults, 15 visitors from the last 45 days fit the criteria:
➖ 10 Moderate confidence lead
➖ 3 High confidence lead
➖ 2 Very high confidence lead
(“Lead” comes from the platform, not us. )
Our “highest intent” visitor came back to the site 24 times over two weeks, spending a total of 26 minutes across pages like Team, Services, Solutions, and Blogs. That person sounds like a qualified lead, right? We’re still waiting on a form submission.
So… Why Haven’t They Converted?
We dug deeper and found a few possible reasons:
1. Bad Data – when we looked into the contact records, some were miscategorized – for example, individuals associated with a company but are no longer employed there.
2. Wrong Personality Fit – using our proprietary personality profiling tool, we found that some visitors’ motivations were likely exploring on behalf of someone else, or just passively learning.
3. The Nature of Our Business – we don’t sell widgets. We offer services – thoughtful, consultative, relationship-driven solutions. Our sales cycle is longer and leans heavily on word-of-mouth. It takes time, trust, and timing.
Now let’s play this out and say we did hit the button on pushing them into Hubspot as a lead, as many organizations do every day.
The “leads” would make their way over to sales and be assigned to SDRs for follow up. Here’s the dirty little secret that marketing and sales knows but they don’t talk about.
Marketing knows those leads aren’t qualified but has a “lead target” to hit so off they go. Sales also knows that marketing knows those leads are qualified, but they have SDRs that need to be fed. This is the game that is being played across sales and marketing organizations every day.
Marketing with an increasingly vast number of tools and ways to capture anyone who merely glances at a website or email are able to capture more contacts than ever before. Tool providers using the wrong term “lead” for what is maybe at best a “response” are complicit in this charade.
Sales, which in the past would ignore (and still do in some ways) these non-qualified responses are now stuck with sales capacity they need to make productive. They’re using reps to qualify “leads” that aren’t leads, in the hope of making them leads. Sounds ridiculous right, because it is.
Even though they know the chances of a conversion are low, I’ve never met a sales manager that will give up sales resources voluntarily. The mentality of “the more reps I have, the better shot I have of making quota” is pervasive.
All of this to hopefully expose the charade so that sales and marketing can have a candid conversation about how ineffective the game is and finally take steps towards realistic performance goals.
The winner in all of this? Potentially everyone – marketing, sales and most importantly prospects who are just trying to learn who you are. and what you do, or to simply just read some content that you have posted.
Just because you can track every visitor doesn’t mean you should hand them off. Let your prospects explore. Let them learn about your company, your services, and your value – at their own pace. Let them raise their hand when they’re ready.
It’ll save your team time, effort, and energy – and likely lead to better conversations when the moment’s right.
