My phone buzzed four times during dinner last week. Four different apps, all convinced I needed to drop my fork immediately. I looked at none of them until dessert was gone.
Nothing bad happened. The emails were still there. The world kept turning.
I think about that a lot when I talk to sales leaders about lead scoring, intent data, and the fifteen other signals someone swore would change everything. Every dashboard looks like my phone at dinner. Everything blinking “urgent.” Almost nothing actually is.
Here’s the pattern I keep running into after a fall full of conversations with revenue teams across three continents. The teams who are actually good at this don’t have more signals than everyone else. They trust fewer of them, and they’ve done the work to know why.
One ops leader told me her team used to chase every intent spike that crossed a threshold. Now they ignore single signals entirely. It takes two or three lining up before anyone picks up the phone. Fewer calls, better calls. Her words, not mine, but I’ve heard a version of this from enough people this quarter that I’ve stopped treating it as an outlier.
The uncomfortable part is that most of us built our systems the other way around. More signals felt like more intelligence. More intelligence felt like more control. What it actually produced, for a lot of teams, is noise dressed up as insight, and a sales team that’s learned to ignore the dashboard entirely.
That’s the real cost nobody puts in a board deck. Not wasted MQLs. A rep who’s stopped believing the system is worth checking.
I’ve got a theory about what separates the teams who get this right from the teams who are still drowning in alerts, and it’s less about the technology than I expected going in. More on that in nine days.
For now, here’s the smaller thing worth trying this week: ask your sales team which signal actually got them to pick up the phone the last time a deal moved. Then ask what your dashboard was telling them to prioritize instead. If those two answers don’t match, you’ve found your starting point.