An intent-led lead-to-opportunity system

The setting was a global industrial IoT company selling remote tank monitoring, hardware and software together, in more than 80 countries. Buyers evaluate a technical product over long, RFP-driven cycles, with operational, commercial, technical and executive stakeholders involved, and account values vary widely from one deal to the next.

In a sale like this, the signals that separate a buying account from a curious one arrive in different places: firmographic fit in one tool, engagement in another, intent data in a third. A lean revenue team cannot give every lead the same response, and every program has to hold up in a pipeline review.

As the marketing organization consolidated, I took ownership of demand generation and marketing operations, reporting to the CRO, with two BDRs and a $1.2M marketing budget. The question I worked on: how does a small sales team spend its time on the accounts most likely to become pipeline?

More leads would not have helped on their own. A funnel that cannot rank, route and measure what it already has turns extra volume into extra work for two BDRs. I made four calls before spending on reach.

• One definition of a lead. Lifecycle stages and lead statuses written with sales, so a record says where a lead is, why it qualified, who owns it and what happens next.
• Fit and intent, kept separate. Who the company is and what the person is doing are different questions. Both became properties, and the score combined them.
• Coverage from capacity. Two BDRs set the ceiling, so account tiers decided how much human attention an account received.
• Build in Salesforce instead of buying another tool. The BDRs already worked there. A native work surface cost less than a new engagement platform and kept their day in the CRM they used, with HubSpot synced both ways.

In a long technical sale, trade shows are one of the few places buyers and sellers meet in person. They are also expensive, and most of their value is decided before the doors open and after the booth comes down.

I ran 65 trade shows and events in the US and abroad, from PACEshow in Kansas City and the WMPA Exposition in Las Vegas to Intermodal Europe in Barcelona, with others in Europe, South America and Istanbul. The work covered logistics, international shipping and customs, custom booth design and collateral produced in-house, and the show budget.

• Before the show. Announcements on LinkedIn ahead of each event, so buyers knew where to find us.
• At the booth. Popl turned a badge scan or a business card into a HubSpot contact with the show recorded as its source.
• After the show. Follow-up routed on the same fit and tier rules as inbound, so the best accounts reached a person first.
• In the report. Each show measured on captured leads, meetings and pipeline, in the same view as the digital channels.

I ran lead-generation reviews with the CRO every two weeks from the dashboards the system produced, and a positioning session with product leadership on the same cadence so the messaging kept pace with the product. Segment leaders had their own view of the leads moving through their verticals. The BDRs started each day from a ranked queue, and their dashboards showed follow-up activity against it.

Because scoring, routing and reporting read the same properties, a change to one showed up in the others. Pipeline was reviewed as a number the system produced.

• Write the lead definitions with sales before building anything that depends on them.
• Keep fit and engagement as separate properties. Routing needs both, and reporting needs to see them apart.
• Size coverage to the hours the team has, then automate the rest instead of ignoring it.
• Build on the platform the sellers already use when it is good enough. Adoption decides whether the system works.