by Christina | Jan 20, 2026 | 2026, Blog
Most of your best buying signals show up late in the sales cycle, but they’re invisible if the right contacts never make it into your CRM.
This problem has plagued sales and marketing organizations for as long as these functions have existed. Companies invest massive amounts in Martech stacks and sales databases, only to see them underperform – not because of the technology itself, but due to poor input.
Specifically, the issue is qualified, highly engaged contacts held tightly – like clutched pearls – by the sales force.
For years, the prevailing theory has been that sales doesn’t want marketing anywhere near its most valuable relationships. Sales executives often attribute the issue to competing priorities or a general lack of interest in “data entry.” Interpret that however you’d like.
The visibility gap
I’ve encountered this problem repeatedly when trying to map content consumption to the buying journey. Typically, we’re only able to connect 10%–15% of sales contacts to any measurable marketing engagement, such as content downloads, event attendance, or other interactions.
Recently, however, we had the opportunity to take a closer look under the hood.
A client shared their contacts, intent data, engagement data and – most importantly – sales email correspondence tied to active opportunities across more than a dozen accounts. The data covered hundreds of emails exchanged over a seven-month period. In some cases, we observed opportunities at inception; in others, we jumped in midstream and followed them through to close.
We mapped the emails chronologically and tracked every individual included in the conversations. It was only after reviewing the full arc of these communications that the real reason sales reps don’t enter new contacts into the database became clear.
Where are all these names coming from?
The first question we wanted to answer was simple: Where do these new contacts come from – and why?
What we found was remarkably consistent. As deals progress, new contacts tend to appear at three distinct points in the sales process:
- Demo requests: These typically expand the buying group by an average of seven to 10 people.
- Trial setup: This stage typically introduces an additional three to five contacts, often including stakeholders from other geographies within global organizations.
- Final presentation: Procurement and finance frequently enter the picture at this stage, and if the presentation is on-site, even more participants tend to appear.
Why don’t reps enter the names?
Contrary to popular belief, this isn’t about laziness or disinterest. It’s about focus.
As opportunities near closure, activity between the prospect and the sales rep increases – sometimes dramatically. Last-minute trial configurations, contract negotiations and master services agreements consume nearly all of the rep’s time and attention.
The excitement of a potential win – like the smell of blood in the water for sharks – puts reps into a sales frenzy. Their behavior becomes almost entirely reactive.
New contacts who aren’t directly participating in the email threads are viewed as peripheral. In practice, they become invisible. This blind spot is especially pronounced at the very moment when insight matters most.
Why enter them at all? What’s the upside?
What most reps don’t realize – given their narrow focus on closing the deal – is that these late-stage participants are often scrambling to get up to speed.
They visit the corporate website.
- They search for case studies.
- They download white papers.
- They watch on-demand videos.
Their goal is simple: become informed enough to influence the final decision.
That behavior is precisely what makes them valuable.
If – and it’s a big if – reps take the time to enter these contacts into the database, their sudden spike in activity can surface powerful intent signals.
A real-world example
In one opportunity, a CEO entered the buying process shortly before an on-site presentation. The decision came down to the incumbent vendor and our client.
That CEO searched for a specific term more than 35 times over two weeks.
Because the contact was identified, that insight surfaced. The sales team redesigned the final presentation to focus heavily on that topic and directly connect it to the client’s value proposition.
They won the deal.
The fix is cultural, not technical
This isn’t a Salesforce problem.
It isn’t a HubSpot problem.
And it certainly isn’t a marketing problem.
It’s a process and mindset problem.
The most valuable buying signals often appear late in the sales cycle, introduced by stakeholders who weren’t part of the early conversations. When those contacts never make it into the system, organizations lose visibility at the exact moment insight can influence outcomes.
Sales teams don’t need more tools – they need a clearer understanding of the upside. Capturing late-stage contacts isn’t about helping marketing run better reports. It’s about giving sales an unfair advantage: real-time visibility into what decision-makers care about most.
When those contacts are entered, intent data lights up. Content consumption becomes visible. Messaging can be adjusted. Presentations get sharper. Win rates improve.
Until organizations address this blind spot, marketing will continue to look ineffective, intent data will appear incomplete, and sales teams will unknowingly leave leverage on the table.
by William Walsh | Feb 28, 2024 | 2024
As previously published on 2/28/24 in MarTech
When he was a kid, Scott Gillum dreamt of running a business. He made his dream come true with a company focused on work/life balance.
MarTech columnist Scott Gillum runs his business Carbon Design from his home in Raleigh, N.C. He knew from a very young age that running a business was what he wanted to do. He just wasn’t sure what that meant. That led him on a circuitous path to learning a lot about business and marketing, and then having to unlearn some of it.
Q: How far back does the business thing go?
A: As a kid, I always dreamed of having my own company. I would wake up and remember having these very vivid dreams that I built a hotel or restaurant. I’d tell my mom about it, and she’s like, “You know, you should be an architect. You always think about building things.”
And so I always knew I was going to do something in business. So here’s my strategy in high school to figure out what I was going to do with my life: I was reading the Fortune 500 and I saw that most of the CEOs in the top 200 companies had their JDs.
And I thought, “Well, that’s it. If I want to get to the top with a company, I should go to law school because they all have their JDs.” So my college career was designed to get on the path to going to law school. I was a political science and economics major and I did two internships at law firms and realized, “Oh my god. I hate this.” So I got a bit smarter and realized what I really like is business, and it isn’t the law.
Got around to figuring out how I could go to grad school and get my MBA and get somebody to pay for it and that sent me on the path to where we are today.
Q: I can’t remember any of my dreams from high school, but I’m pretty sure they did not involve starting a business. What attracted you to it?
A: What I liked about it was the problem-solving, figuring things out was the appeal of it.
It wasn’t until I was 52 that I started a business of my own. With two kids in private schools or private universities. So the worst time to do it, but that’s when the opportunity was there, right? And the two years after starting the business were the hardest years of my life.
Part of the reason for that is that If you’ve been in a certain type of workplace for 30 years you’re accustomed to having a paycheck every week. You’re accustomed to understanding how you’re going to pay your taxes. How you’re going to get your insurance, right? All these things just happen. And you’ve been conditioned that way. It took two years of being an entrepreneur to figure out how to unwind that mental model of how I should think about making an income and a living. Figuring out there’s a different way that you can make a living.
That’s maybe the hardest part of being an entrepreneur. There are different ways that you can find insurance. You can figure out how to pay your taxes. But there’s a big hurdle for people trying to leave where they are working for someone else. In the current environment, where you’ve got a home, you got a mortgage payment, you got kids in college, to flip that upside down and become an entrepreneur, it’s very, very difficult.
Q: What do you like about marketing?
A: I like trying to figure out why things don’t work. And so when I founded Carbon Design, I founded it because of two things that don’t work right. The original idea for it was backward in terms of starting a business. I focused on the people and not the clients.
While I was working, I saw this next generation, the millennials, come in, and I came to the realization that their work styles are very different. And not in a bad way.
For example, I was doing a big rebranding project for a client. We just finished one phase and I was looking for the creative director and he was gone. We’re going to the next phase, and he was down backpacking through South America. And bells started going off in my head.
Q: Like that sounded pretty cool?
A: Yeah, I thought about the experiences I had when I was in management consulting. We would lose people when they became most productive. When they got five, six, seven years of experience under their belts, they would get married, and then have a family, and then we would lose really talented associates. They would try to come and work part-time, but they never felt like they could balance work life. They’re always feeling either like they were disappointing the client or disappointing themselves as a mother or father or whatever it is.
So the founding of Carbon Design was built around the idea that people really need a different way to work. They need to put their lives first and get that straightened out, then the work will come, and it’ll be really good. If you don’t have your life right, the work is going to suffer. And that’s the foundation of the company.
We’re on demand. We’re remote. We’re all freelance contractors. And you make your own time. You do work where you want. All we care about is your deliverables. Good quality work on time, it’s all we care about. So I started the company backwards with that. I figured if I get a good core base of people, then we’ll get clients and we’ll do really great work and we’ll retain them and get referred.
So the first question was really why aren’t people engaged in work anymore? If you looked at the Gallup poll before COVID, work engagement has never been above 32% in 20 years. I wanted to know if we can find a way to get people engaged again.
Q: That’s the first thing that didn’t work. What’s the second?
A: The second question relates to B2B marketing. There’s been all this investment in technology in data and insights, but performance hasn’t improved. Why? Why are we not improving performance? That got us on another journey, and we developed some proprietary, performance-based marketing tools. They allow us to understand people as individuals and to look at the softer side of sales and marketing. Because, if our job as marketers is to get somebody to take action, we have to understand their motivations and beliefs.
So we do a lot of psychographics. We use AI personality profiling tools. We know preferences in terms of content. We know preferences in terms of visualization. We’re starting to take in the people component, not just the title or a role. You add that in, you start to get better performance.
Q: What are you looking forward to in terms of marketing?
A: I’m glad you asked. We’re on our third version of an AI tool. And this one, I think, is really exciting and fun. We are using an AI tool called Cassidy. It’s a business development assistant and a project manager assistant.
The nice thing about this tool versus some other tools is that other tools are always prompt-driven. And the output was only as good as your prompting, and who has time to figure out what the right prompts are?
With Cassidy, you feed it knowledge. It sits on top of our Google Suite, on top of the knowledge and extracting the knowledge out of our drives. And it also reads our website, it picks up our tonality, our brand voice. So for me, what’s very exciting is that we are a business that operates with no overhead.
The way our organization is built, we’re very flat. We can scale up quickly and scale down, and we don’t have any overhead. What we try to do is we price efficiently, and we try to get most of the fees that we collect to our freelancers. So we have a model that means you make a lot of money working for us.
Now we have an assistant to aid people coming to work with us. We plug them into our G Suite, and they know where to find this proposal or this project, We’re super excited about it.
by William Walsh | Apr 11, 2023 | 2023
By Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 5 Minutes
Last week we finished a new website for a client. It’s the third time in the last 2 years we’ve been the “rescue” vendor on a website build that had gone wrong.
If you are thinking about updating your website, and/or are an agency building sites, here’s what we’ve learned through those experiences that you need to know.
- Building a new or “refreshing” a website is not just a website build – it is also a rebranding, repositioning and a messaging project. Know that going in and plan for it. You may also want to scope in a competitive assessment.
- Don’t build anything until everyone that counts has a say or has reviewed a page, content, images, etc. To hell with project timelines, don’t do a thing until the right people are on the same page.
- Make it “paint by numbers.” Use pre-designed templates, provide direction on what you need from the client and be specific….”We need 250 words that describe your corporate culture.”
- Scope in a copywriter. You’ll need one to either fill the gap on content or at a minimum, edit copy.
- Give the client access to the staging server. Let them see the site as it is being built. Full transparency, do not wait to the end to share the site. At each client update meeting, walk them through the new updates and get their input. This is a collaborative effort.
And finally, if you offshore or nearshore the build, see the paint by numbers point. Give exact and specific directions to your developers. Stay on top of the development at each stage of the process. Plan reviews before showing anything to your client. Look at EVERY single detail.
by William Walsh | Aug 13, 2022 | 2022
By Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 5 Minutes
The third installment of our four part series on how to navigate decision making blockers.
Nothing sets off lead nurturing scoring system alarms more than the presence of a C-level Influencer hitting content. They’ve got the right title, hit your content, probably more than one and you’re thinking there has got to be intent. But unfortunately that’s not the case, here’s why.
Influencers are information seekers to the extreme. In fact, you probably know one in your personal life. They’re the first to find out about a new restaurant or a new band. They’re your go to when you’re looking for a weekend getaway or vacation spot. And they love to do it. Influencers are motivated by being the first to know and sharing the information with others.
And that’s why there is no real intent. The information that they are consuming or downloaded is going to someone else. Recently we found a C-level Influencer that forwarded an email invitation to a webinar over 30 times! Influencers often are a “false position” – giving off a signal of intent, but the real need or opportunity is with someone else.
Influencers are great MQL’s, but terrible SQL’s
The upside of Influencers is that they are a key channel for introducing new ideas into organizations. Even better, they’re great at selling people on ideas. They consume a tremendous amount of information from a vast amount of sources, online and offline. Marketers this is your number one personality type to target, but they have a unique preference when it comes to content.
Sales, the good news is Influencers keep a loose schedule and enjoy meeting new people, but don’t chase them. Because of their position in the organization (often senior exec), and their personality type they are off to the next thing.
Influencers don’t usually own projects or budgets, their staff does, and that’s who you need, especially a “Champion” personality. The good news is that they often come back into the deal at the end to deal with any resistance from others in the buying group.
Here’s how to get the most out of leveraging Influencers in the account.
- Give them the right assets. Influencers prefer short highly visual content that travels easily. They LOVE short (30 sec or less) animated videos that they can forward. An interactive infographic that they can play around with it like a moth to the flame. Short, visual content pieces that convey information easily work with them. Additionally, opportunities for people to learn about something like events or webinar invitations also travel well as I mentioned.
- Find them in your data. Since they have a habit of forwarding information, it’s easy to spot them in your data. Look for emails that have been opened multiple times over a 2-3 days period. Once you’ve identified them, see if that pattern repeats on other occasions.
- Tag and track them. You can also use PURLS or forms to track where they’re sending information. This is a key insight, sharing (or forwarding) is a much better indicator of interest than a download or click thru. But that comes with a caveat, where the information lands has to resonate or address an issue that person has currently. Unfortunately, because of the Influencers behavior mentioned above they have a tendency to forward information that never gets actioned.
- Sell them on the idea, not the solution. In all of our research over the years we have only found an Influencer being a blocker on one occasion and it provided an interesting insight. Influencers want credit for the idea.
- Give away ideas. One of our most important clients has an Influencer personality and a CMO title, but he’s never signed a contract. Give away free advice. It will usually come back to you in business from others within the organization.
- Use them to remove blockers. Influencers are present at the beginning of the buyers journey, and they will reappear at the end. In particular, to reinforce the value of the idea or solution. Influencers (hence the name) are very good at selling others on the idea, keep them posted on your progress and use them to get past Blockers in the buyer group.
B2B marketing campaigns are often DOA before they even launch. Why? Because of the influence of sales, we often target titles, roles and budget owners. Sounds pretty common, right? And that would be fine if marketing’s job was to sell…but it’s not.
Our goal as marketers is to grab someone’s attention and have them take action (click on this link, download a piece of content, and register for a webinar). Targeting roles or titles alone doesn’t give us the best opportunity to make that happen. Do you know what does?
Targeting Influencers, but know that they love your ideas or solution more than they love you, your company or brand. It’s nothing personal…it’s just the personality. Influencers play an important role for us as marketers. They react and take action. It’s not personal for us either, it’s just the type of personality that gets us the performance we need.
To read the previous installment of the series, 6 Ways to Engage Champion “Blockers” click here.
by scott.gillum | Nov 2, 2021 | 2021, Marketing
It started with a simple question: why hasn’t B2B sales and marketing performance improved?
Despite advances in strategy and the industry’s massive investment in technology, the needle simply hasn’t moved over the last 10 years or longer.
Our curiosity led us to investigate this performance challenge. We noticed that our tools – mostly glorified task lists and activity trackers – were only picking up on rational factors. So we started to explore what wasn’t being tracked and discovered a “hidden buyer journey”.
As we explored buyer behaviors, motivations, and personality types, we found that purchase decisions made by buying groups were driven by individuals’ personal motivations, not titles or roles.
For two years now, we’ve been using research on buying groups and AI-enabled Personality-Based Marketing to help clients improve their sales and marketing efforts.
This eBook shares our insights and how you can apply Personality- Based Marketing to improve your B2B marketing performance – at last.
Download the E-Book now!
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