Insights / Demand Generation
What makes a lead worth pursuing?
Intent, fit and timing: a simple way to decide which enquiries deserve sales attention, and why.
Your team gets an enquiry. Then another. A pricing guide download. A newsletter sign-up. A vendor report saying a company in your territory is “surging” on a topic you sell.
Which one gets a call today?
Most businesses answer that by gut feel, or by whoever shouts loudest. Sales chases the wrong people, the right ones wait, and both sides blame the leads.
Intent matters. But intent alone doesn’t make a lead worth pursuing. Someone can be very interested and a terrible fit. Someone can be a perfect fit and two years away from buying.
The question isn’t “is this person interested?” It’s “do they fit, do they need it, and is now the time?”
Not all signals are equal
Intent shows up in different forms, and each deserves a different level of trust.
| Signal | Example | What it tells you | How much to trust it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Declared need | A form, call or email that describes a problem | What they want, in their words | High. Still confirm fit. |
| First-party actions | Visits to pricing or service pages, a guide download, replies to your emails | Interest in what you sell, from someone you can contact | Medium. Depends on the action. |
| Third-party account intent | A data provider reports an organization researching a topic | Someone at that company may be researching | Low to medium. A prompt to look, not a lead. |
| Anonymous visits | Sessions in your analytics with no form or contact | That pages are being read | Low. You don’t know who. |
Your own data will shift these. Track which signals actually become opportunities.
What intent data can’t tell you
Some lead advice implies you can see who visited your site and which competitors they looked at. You can’t.
Your analytics shows what anonymous visitors did, not who they are. Some tools guess the organization behind a visit from network data. Those guesses are often wrong or vague, and they never name the person. Nothing on your website shows you a prospect’s browsing on other sites.
Third-party intent data works at the account level. A provider infers that people at an organization are reading about a topic. It doesn’t tell you who, why, or whether they’re buying. Before you rely on it, ask the provider how the data is collected, what consent it rests on, and how accurate it has been for accounts like yours.
Treat intent as a reason to look closer, not proof someone is ready to buy.
A simple qualification framework
Check the fit.
Is this the kind of customer you serve well? Industry, size, location, the type of problem. Write the criteria down so sales and marketing use the same ones.
Confirm the need.
Have they described a real problem you solve, or just shown interest in a topic? A declared need beats any behavioural signal.
Read the intent.
Which first-party actions have they taken? A pricing page visit and a reply to an email count for more than a single blog view. Weigh account-level intent as context only.
Gauge the timing.
Is there a trigger, a deadline, a budget cycle, a contract ending? If they’re a fit but not ready, nurture them instead of chasing them.
Decide the next step.
Sales now, nurture, or disqualify. Every lead should leave this step with an owner and an action.
False positives to watch for
Strong signals can still point at the wrong people.
- A student downloading your guide for a school project.
- A competitor checking your pricing page.
- A job seeker reading every page before an interview.
- An existing client on the pricing page to check an invoice.
- A company “surging” on your topic because someone there is writing an article.
None of these deserve a sales call. All of them look like intent on a dashboard. Fit and need are what filter them out.
Hand off with context
Say you run a 20-person IT services firm. A manufacturer in your region fills in your contact form about replacing an ageing server, has visited your managed services page twice, and opened your last two emails. That’s fit, need and intent together. It goes to sales today, with the form, the pages and the emails attached, so the first call starts from what the prospect already told you.
A good handoff includes why the lead qualified, what they did, and the deadline for a first response. Agree on that response time and who owns it. Many good leads are lost after the enquiry, not before. If your CRM isn’t helping, read why a CRM alone won’t fix follow-up.
And if the problem is earlier, too few good enquiries or too many poor ones, start with where your lead generation is breaking down.
A lead is a person, not a signal.
Check the fit.
Confirm the need.
Respect the timing.
Then call.