Last week I named three friction points and said I’d come back for the middle one. Here it is: intent signals lose precision the deeper you get into a deal.
I think this is the most expensive mistake in B2B marketing right now, and the reason it’s so easy to miss is that it looks like data.
The early signal is real. The problem is what happens next.
Someone downloads a guide, opens a few emails, shows up on your pricing page twice in a week. Early on, that’s genuinely useful. It tells you interest exists where it didn’t before, and that’s worth something.
The trouble starts when we keep using that same read on a deal three weeks later, or three months later. Interest and progression get treated as the same signal, and by the time a deal is mid-funnel, they’ve quietly become two different things measuring two different realities.
A deal can look busy and go nowhere
I’ve watched opportunities generate a steady stream of activity, opens, clicks, a webinar registration here and there, for months while the actual deal sat completely still. Nobody made a decision. Nobody moved anything forward. But the dashboard looked healthy, because the dashboard was counting motion, not movement.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. Motion is anything that happens. Movement is a deal getting closer to a decision. A deal can have plenty of the first and none of the second, and if your read on deal health comes primarily from activity volume, you will not catch that until sales tells you the deal went quiet, or worse, it just disappears from the forecast.
Why this keeps happening
Part of it is that activity data is easy to get and progression data is not. Intent signals show up automatically. Whether a buying group actually reached internal alignment does not show up automatically anywhere. So we default to what we can measure, and we let it stand in for what we actually need to know.
The fix isn’t a new tool or a better dashboard, though I understand the appeal of that answer. It’s asking a different question at the point you review a deal: not “how much activity happened,” but “what changed.” If nothing changed, the activity was noise, however much of it there was.
What this looks like in practice
This is exactly the kind of thing that’s easy to nod along with and hard to actually act on, which is why we built it into the guide with specific questions to ask at each stage rather than a general principle to remember. If you haven’t grabbed The Messy Middle yet, this is the section to read first.
I’ll leave you with this. The next time a deal feels stalled but the activity report says otherwise, trust the stall. Activity is not evidence of progress. It’s just evidence that something happened.