Sales keeps asking for better leads.
Marketing keeps pointing to engagement, intent signals, downloads, and website activity.
Then everyone ends up in the same meeting wondering why so little of it is turning into qualified sales conversations.
The part that gets under Marketing’s skin comes next—Sales works the leads, gets nowhere, and the verdict somehow becomes that Marketing didn’t deliver enough good opportunities.
After a while, “better leads” starts to sound a lot like “send us people who are already ready to buy.”
And you’re sitting there thinking, “You asked for leads, I brought you leads, and I gave you the intelligence to work with. What else do you want from me?”
Then your credibility takes another hit, and you’re expected to somehow make the same people warmer before Sales takes another run at them.
The problem is that nobody established whether there was a problem the buyer cared enough about to discuss.
There’s still plenty of assembly-line thinking left over from Predictable Revenue: Marketing produces leads, SDRs turn them into meetings, Sales takes it from there, and everybody watches the stages move across the CRM.
That process works best when the buyer already understands the problem and is actively trying to solve it.
Most buyers aren’t there yet.
True inbound is pretty rare now. Most still require research, useful content, and repeated touches before they’re ready for a serious sales conversation.
I’ve had people sit in our database for more than a year without giving me much reason to contact them. Then something changes: they start engaging, visiting the site, or showing some other signal.
That’s when I pay attention.
I’ll research the company, look at what changed, what executives are talking about, where they’re investing, what they’re hiring for, and where they may be struggling to make progress.
The engagement gives me a reason to investigate. The research gives me a reason to reach out.
A download, an intent signal, or a few website visits can tell you an account deserves attention. They can’t tell you whether the buyer sees a problem, how serious it is, or whether it matters now.
Before anybody starts arguing about lead quality, Marketing and Sales need to agree on the problems that tend to produce real sales conversations, the conditions that create them, and the signals that suggest one may be developing.
That makes the handoff much clearer.
Marketing can say, “Here’s an account worth investigating, here’s what changed, and here’s the problem we think may be developing.”
Sales can take that information and test that hypothesis.
Now build the argument around those problems.
That gives you a useful Challenger narrative: establish problem agreement, challenge the current approach, and offer a reframe.
Marketing can build content around those problems so buyers recognize them earlier and people already dealing with them have a reason to engage.
Sales can use the same argument to test whether the problem exists, how serious it is, and whether anything needs to happen now.
Some buyers are just becoming aware of the problem. Others already know they have it. A few are ready to act.
Once Marketing and Sales agree on that conversation, the definition of a lead gets a lot less mysterious.
AI is far more useful here than it is writing another fake-personalized first sentence.
Start with whatever caught your attention, then investigate the account: announcements, hiring, executive interviews, acquisitions, launches, expansion plans, leadership changes, and anything else that might explain why the problem matters now.
Then investigate the account.
Look at announcements, hiring, executive interviews, acquisitions, launches, expansion plans, and leadership changes. Pay close attention to what the CEO and other executives say publicly about growth and priorities.
Suppose the CEO says the company is expanding into two new markets while someone at the company starts engaging with content about service reliability.
You don’t know there’s a service problem.
But you have a useful hypothesis: can the current service operation support the expansion?
That gives Sales something much better than, “Saw you downloaded our guide.”
Ask AI to separate sourced facts from reasonable inferences and unanswered questions. You want a credible reason to start a conversation, not a made-up crisis dressed as research.
If your BDRs sit under Marketing, this investigation can be part of their job. If they report to Sales, the same process applies.
When Marketing passes an account to Sales, the rep should know why it deserves attention and what to do next.
A useful handoff includes:
- Why this account: Fit, signal, source, and recency.
- What may matter: The suspected problem, the evidence behind it, and what remains unknown.
- Who may care: The people likely to experience the problem, own the outcome, or influence a change.
- How to begin: A question that tests the hypothesis, along with a useful insight, relevant content, or customer example.
And that gives you a much better standard for when to pass a lead.
If the account fits, the signals are meaningful, and the business context supports a specific problem worth investigating, it’s ready for individual outreach. Sales knows why the account matters, what to test, and where to start.