Last week I asked a room of senior marketers in London a question none of them answered the same: what has to be true before a signal is worth someone’s time? A few people admitted they had never written it down, while I nodded along like someone who had.
I hadn’t, so this is me doing the homework I assigned everyone else.
Before the list, one thing worth noting: every revenue team already has an answer to this question. Most of them just didn’t choose it. When nobody writes the definition down, it gets set by whatever is easiest to hit this quarter, and the signals that get worked are the ones closest to someone’s number. Nobody in that picture is doing anything wrong. They’re doing exactly what they’re measured on.
So here’s my attempt at the written version.
Someone can explain why it showed up
A signal that arrives as a name, a title, and a timestamp is really a to-do. The person receiving it has to rebuild the story from scratch: What did they engage with? What else is happening at the account? Is this the first time or the fifth? Most people will do that rebuild a few times before they quietly stop bothering. The bar I’d set is simple: if whoever hands it over can’t explain in one sentence why this account and why now, it isn’t ready to hand over.
It isn’t alone
One person reading one article tells you almost nothing. But when the same account turns up across a few sources over a few weeks with more than one person involved, it starts to look like something. I’ve come around to thinking the number of signals matters less than whether they agree with each other. A pile of unrelated clicks is noise with extra steps. Two signals pointing in the same direction make a pattern.
The person receiving it knows what to do with it
This is the one I think gets skipped most often. Not every signal deserves a meeting request. Some mean call today. Some mean keep an eye on this account for a month. Others mean send them something useful and wait. When every signal gets routed as if it were an urgent call to action, people learn quickly that most of them aren’t, and they start discounting all of them, including the ones that were. Trust wears down fastest when the expected action doesn’t match the signal.
Both teams agreed to it before it arrived
The definition has to live somewhere other than one person’s head, and it has to be shared by the people who send signals and the people who receive them. It also has to show up in how somebody gets measured. A definition that doesn’t touch anyone’s number is a suggestion, and suggestions lose to quotas every time.
That’s my list, though yours should look different in the details. A team selling six-figure deals to a buying committee of eight needs a different bar than a team running a high-velocity motion. What matters is that the bar exists and both sides can point to it.
In a lot of my recent conversations with revenue teams, the signals teams act on and the signals they actually trust turn out to be two entirely different lists. People follow up on activity they privately don’t believe in because the alternative is doing nothing, and doing nothing doesn’t hit a number. Writing down what has to be true is how you close that gap on purpose instead of hoping it closes on its own.
We asked more than 500 marketing and sales leaders across five countries versions of this same question, and the results publish on November 3. I’m curious how my list will hold up against theirs.
If you don’t write down what has to be true, you still have an answer. It’s just the one your comp plan wrote for you.