Over the last two years, our business has gone through a pretty fundamental evolution. What started as a “meetings at all costs” motion has become a disciplined, intent-led revenue engine that’s driving better pipeline, better win rates, and frankly, better relationships with our clients and their buyers.
As the leader of a business, the hardest decisions are often the loneliest ones—especially when you’re choosing conviction over convention. Reflection is how you sanity-check those calls. Stepping back at least once a year with mentors who know you, but aren’t trapped in your day-to-day, is incredibly grounding. They help you see patterns instead of chaos, progress instead of just exhaustion, and remind you why you chose the harder, more principled path in the first place. In a role where you’re expected to have the answers, those conversations quietly refill your conviction tank so you can keep making the right decisions, not just the popular ones.
My Q4 conversations crystallized just how far we’ve come—and why it’s working.
Our journey to buyer intent and pipeline integrity
For years, outbound looked like this: build a big list, throw people into sequences, count meetings, call it success.
The problem? A lot of those meetings were what I now call “artificial, loose, bullshit meetings” that existed mainly to make dashboards look good. Leaders would say, “We started last week, how many meetings do we have?” as if you can brute-force your way into market traction.
What we saw across clients was:
- Bloated top-of-funnel activity
- Weak win rates (10% or worse in some orgs)
- Reps exhausted from chasing the wrong conversations
- Leaders clinging to volume because they didn’t trust their ability to close
About a year and a half ago, the market stopped rewarding that behavior. What had “kind of worked” just… didn’t anymore. We had a front-row seat across multiple engines, and the pattern was too obvious to ignore.
So we made a hard decision:
We would no longer take clients to market by asking people on a “first date” without real intent. If you wanted to be short-sighted and chase vanity meetings, we were not your partner.
The spine of go-to-market
The evolution of our business is really the evolution of our spine – how awareness, nurture, and sales plays interlock.
A few core shifts:
1. Executive-led demand as a first-class channel
Like DataGrail, we saw that organic executive presence on social (especially LinkedIn) was outperforming big paid budgets. When a founder or executive shows up consistently, tells the origin story, and actually has a point of view, several things happen:
- Trust is built before a sales conversation
- Prospects self-select in (and out) earlier
- By the time someone talks to sales, they already understand the problem and your perspective on it
We treat executive influence as one of the deepest, most powerful layers in the program, not a “nice to have.” It sits at the center of our funnel and fuels everything else.
2. A stocked pond, not a random ocean
Instead of “everyone is fair game,” we now:
- Define and build a marketable database that matches the best ICP
- Tier accounts (1, 2, 3…) based on real indicators
- Use tools like Clay to enrich data and listen to signals
- Keep everyone in a light, ongoing nurture, but only elevate a subset into true sales plays
This is where our language of “on deck” and “stocked pond” comes in. You earn your way into more resource-intensive touchpoints through behavior and fit, not just because your email exists in a CSV.
Sales CTAs only after intent.
This is one of the biggest philosophical shifts we’ve made.
What it means
A sales CTA is anything that asks for a “first date”:
- “Book a demo”
- “Schedule 30 minutes”
- “Are you open to exploring this?”
- “Can we walk you through a quick overview?”
Our rule now:
If there is no real intent signal, we do not use a sales CTA.
In other words, we stop pushing meetings on people who:
- Haven’t engaged with us
- Don’t know who we are
- Haven’t indicated that this problem is on their radar
What counts as “intent”
The exact signals vary by client, but examples include:
- Visiting key pages (pricing, integrations, product, comparison pages)
- Filling out a form or requesting a demo
- Repeated engagement with emails (opens, clicks, replies)
- Engaging with executive/brand content on LinkedIn
- Known upcoming renewal with a competitor
- Firmographic/trigger events that suggest the problem is live (funding, hiring, compliance deadlines, new regions, etc.)
We bundle these into tiers (like your top 300 list):
only accounts with enough “weight” on these signals graduate into true sales plays.
What we do before intent
Before intent, everything is:
- Awareness / education / nurture, not “Can we get 30 minutes?”
- Content that earns attention and builds trust
- Executive storytelling, social proof, frameworks, POVs
The CTA at this stage is usually light:
- “If this is helpful, reply and I’ll send you X”
- “Here’s how others approached this problem”
- “Follow along here if you’re exploring this space”
No hard “meet with sales” ask unless they act like someone who might actually want to.
Why this works better
- Buyers feel respected, not hunted
- Reps spend time on people who are actually in-market
- Win rates go up because you’re not stuffing the funnel with fake opportunities
- Brand trust increases because you’re not asking for a call before you’ve earned it
So “Sales CTAs only after intent” is really a discipline line:
we let behavior and signals tell us when to ask for a meeting, instead of our own quota anxiety dictating it.
The stepwise motion: respect first, automation second
Our actual operating motion today looks more like a series of increasingly high-cost, high-value steps:
- Automated nurture & awareness:
- Whole database, light-touch, authentic content
- Executive social content as a core pillar
- No premature hard CTAs
- Automated sequences (with standards):
- People who qualify based on fit + light signals
- Well-crafted, respectful sequences—no “everyone with a pulse” logic
- Social selling via executives and leaders:
- If someone has gone through sequences but hasn’t engaged, yet we’re connected on LinkedIn, we shift to DMs
- Often through executives whose authority and relevance help messages land
- Full account-based, personalized sales plays:
- Only for accounts that truly justify the investment
- Multi-threaded, coordinated outreach, often with executives and SDRs working in tandem
- SDRs prospecting the account thoughtfully, not hammering a generic list
By the time we’re dialing, the volume is small on purpose. You don’t need an auto-dialer when you’re intentionally calling 20–40 people a day who have already meaningfully engaged. At that stage, we expect those conversations to convert into real opportunities at a high rate.
What changed in our business
This wasn’t just a client-facing strategy tweak; it changed how our own company operates.
1. We redefined success
We stopped aiming for “15 meetings a month” and started optimizing around:
- Meeting-to-qualified conversion
- Opportunity-to-win conversion
- Integrity of pipeline
- Targeting most profitable company ICPs
Across clients, we’re now seeing:
- 75% conversion from meeting booked → qualified opportunity
- Roughly a 1 in 3 to 1 in 5 win rate, depending on industry
Compare that to the 10% win rates we often encounter when we first walk into environments obsessed with raw meeting count.
2. We built a fractional department, not an outsourced task
We position ourselves as a fractional team with full-department impact, typically reporting into a sales or revenue leader.
Our model:
- 6-month initial contracts, then month-to-month
- Average engagement of ~16 months
- Each lead strategist runs 3–4 accounts, supported by creative marketers and our SDRs in the background
- We own the whole thing: ICP, database build, tiering, Clay configuration, HubSpot setup, nurture, plays, and attribution back to revenue
Our internal goal: 50–75% of pipeline should come from the marketing enablement engine we build, with the rest self-sourced by AEs.
We’ve also learned to protect our own integrity: if a client wants us to inflate metrics with low-quality activity, we’re upfront that it’s misaligned and often part ways.
3. We took a stand after doing (a lot) of homework
One of the most important leadership decisions I made was when to go loud.
We started seeing the cracks in the old motion about a year and a half ago. We tested. We measured. We ran side-by-side comparisons. We watched reply-to-meeting ratios change when we waited for intent instead of forcing conversations on the wrong timeline.
Only after that did I email our client base and say, essentially:
“We’re converting everybody to this new model. If you need us to keep doing it the old way, we might not be the right partner.”
That line in the sand was scary, but it’s also where the major wins started to compound.
The wins this evolution unlocked
For us and our clients, this shift has created several meaningful outcomes:
- Cleaner, more honest pipeline:
Fewer “zombie” opportunities and far less wasted energy on deals that were never real. - Healthier win rates:
When you go from 1 in 20 to 1 in 3, you don’t just hit numbers; you rebuild confidence in the sales org. - Happier reps and leaders:
AEs spend more time in qualified conversations. SDRs work smarter lists with better context. Leaders can finally trust what the funnel is telling them. - Faster late-stage cycles:
When people have been properly nurtured, educated, and influenced before they ever talk to sales, the back half of the funnel accelerates. We’ve literally seen reply-to-meeting ratios tighten dramatically just by waiting until the timing is right. - Stronger long-term relationships with clients:
We’re no longer just “the outbound agency.” We’re a strategic operating partner involved in how they define ICPs, tier accounts, build attribution, and even transition marketing teams.
Where we’re headed next
Conversations with leaders behind the curve are becoming more frequent. Operators are waking up to the same reality: the market has changed, buyers have changed, and if you don’t change your go-to-market with them, you get left behind.
Our evolution, from volume at all costs to intent-led, executive-fueled, integrity-first pipeline has been messy at times, but the results speak for themselves. It’s forced us to:
- Say no more often
- Be brutally honest about what works and what doesn’t
- Treat trust as a core KPI, not a side effect
And it’s made our work more fulfilling. We’re no longer chasing noise. We’re building demand engines that respect the buyer, empower our clients’ teams, and generate pipeline that actually closes.
We’ll keep refining the spine – especially around attribution, executive enablement, and how AI fits responsibly at the right stage of the journey. But the big lesson is clear:
You can’t brute-force your way to growth anymore. You have to earn it…with relevance, patience, and intent.