WHY SALES SCRAPS 99% OF YOUR LEADS

• The high MQL rejection rate most teams face is a signal interpretation problem.
• Intent data flags that someone inside an account is exploring a problem. It does not say that account is ready to buy.
• When Sales gets nothing but a company name and an intent score, they’re missing the crucial context they need to qualify them.
• The fix starts upstream: building a picture of the buying group before the handoff ever happens.

Because they’re: 1) getting leads that aren’t ready for a sales conversation and 2) missing the context needed to qualify them. The rejection rate is a diagnostic. It's telling you your chasing the wrong leads with the wrong context.

An intent signal means someone, somewhere inside an account, started searching for content related to a problem your product solves. The spark exists. The fire doesn't.

But when that spark lands on an SDR's desk with a company name and an intent score they've learned to distrust, they do the only rational thing they can: size up the account and bin the ones that don't clear their bar. But most don't clear the bar – and that's why we think intent signals aren't working.

A buying group exploring a problem is a different thing entirely from a buying group ready to be sold to. When Sales reaches out to an early-stage committee with a bottom-of-funnel pitch, the result is predictable: no reply, or (worst case scenario) a bad experience that poisons the account.

The handoff is where the failure comes to a head. The cause goes further back.

61% of the B2B buying journey happens in the selection phase, where a buying group is wrestling with two questions: is this problem worth solving? and what category of product solves it? When an intent signal fires, the account is almost always at the start of that phase. Someone is exploring question one. They’re nowhere close to question two.

When a signal fires, Marketing's job should be helping the buying group align – to give every member the content they need to get on the same-ish page so they can make decisions (a massive part of successful revenue marketing). That work has to happen before the handoff, not after it.

Sales should be joining a conversation with people who’ve been warmed up by content, armed with ironclad sales enablement content – not getting dropped into a cold account with a name, a score, and a pipe dream.

The accounts in the SDR rubbish pile aren't necessarily bad fits. They just haven’t been primed enough for effective outreach.

Most intent workflows treat all signals identically: signal fires, SDR gets an alert, SDR reaches out. No triage. No sense of whether the buying group has moved past "aware of the problem" into "actively comparing options." That spells big trouble for pipeline management. To make signals genuinely helpful for Sales, we’ve got to add nuance to them.

Here’s a simple framework for assessing signal maturity:

Early-stage (exploring the problem)

• Single-topic intent cluster around a broad problem keyword
• No named individuals from the account have engaged with your content
• No CRM activity in the last 12 months
• No return visits to your site or content

Mid-stage (aligning around the problem)

• Multiple people from the same account engaging with different content types
• Return visits across multiple assets – particularly category-level and ROI-focused content
• Someone from the account has viewed your pricing page or case study section
• A named individual has engaged deeply (high scroll depth, repeat views)

Late-stage (evaluating options)

• Buying group members engaging with competitive comparison content
• Engagement from senior stakeholders (Director+) alongside practitioner-level users
• Multiple content formats consumed – not just blogs, but webinars, demos, or detailed guides

When SDRs are handed accounts with genuine intent and real context – named individuals, content history, a visible picture of where the buying group is in its deliberation – their behavior changes.

They reach out with relevance. They reference the right problems. They join a conversation the buying group is already having, rather than trying to shoehorn themselves into one that hasn't started. Sales stops treating Marketing's signals as white noise the moment those signals carry intelligence worth acting on. And that's when serious sales pipeline acceleration starts to happen.

Intent data didn't fail you. We’ve just been handing a spark to Sales and asked them to start a fire without kindling. That's what the 99% problem is pointing toward.

Without the right context and relevance, Sales will continue to send leads to the scrapheap at scale. But if we change how we use signals so that we’re handing over the right accounts at the right time to commercial teams?

Everything changes.

The Intent Activation Blueprint

In T-6 weeks, we're launching the Intent Activation Blueprint. It's a report packed with:

• Practical advice on how to operationalize intent data for unquestionable ROI

• Actionable templates to arm you with clear next steps 

• Confessionals from B2B leaders navigating the same thing as you