They're showing you they're in market

Some right-fit prospects won’t request a demo.

Instead, they open every email. They visit your pricing page. They download advanced content from your team. They're doing everything short of raising their hand. And most marketing ecosystems are responding to them exactly the same way they'd respond to someone who just opted in yesterday.

That's the intent signal leak:

The signal is clear.

But there's no plan to say anything different to the person who's clearly further along than the rest of the list.

The hard part isn't always detecting the signal (though privacy laws in certain regions are making that increasingly complex). The hard part is knowing what to say when the signal is detected. You need to have the right messaging ready to go before the moment passes.

This is where many systems fall flat:

When a high-intent contact hits the threshold, nothing changes. They get the same nurture as everyone else.

We solved this for a Forbes Cloud 100 company by mapping the messaging to their buying journey first, so we understood exactly what a contact needed to hear at each step. Then we identified the signals (and associated triggers) to proactively shift the messaging the contact received.

The contacts who were ready to talk to sales got messaging that moved them there. The contacts who weren't didn't.

The difference between a good nurture system and a great one is knowing what to say when someone's behavior tells you they're ready.

'Til next week,

Carolyn

P.S. There’s an extra layer to this work that’s about shifting the message to suit the buying journey without feeling weird to the contact. As marketers, we use the data available to us, but we don’t want to make it obvious that we’re watching our contacts. (I’ve seen this done poorly too many times to count.)