intent, not volume

Great sales campaigns don’t start with cold leads.

They start with great marketing, and a system built to catch the interest it creates.

Last week, I spoke to six different founders. All of them were struggling with the same thing.

Not pipeline volume, necessarily, but momentum.

There was activity across the board: LinkedIn posts, paid ads, email newsletters, SEO efforts. Some of them even had decent traffic.

But when it came to actual meetings? Crickets.

It’s easy to look at that and assume it’s a demand gen problem.

“We just need more reach,” one founder said.
Another was considering doubling their paid budget.
A third was already talking to a content agency.

But after digging in, it became clear they didn’t have a lead gen problem.
They had a capture problem.

The demand was already there.
They just weren’t catching it.

People were seeing their content.
They were hitting their website.
They were engaging silently, indirectly.

But there was no system watching for it.
No one enriching.
No one following up within 15 minutes while the signal was still hot.

No routing logic. No Slack alerts. No outreach mechanism that says,
“Hey, someone from your Dream 100 account is raising their hand right now.”

Instead, they waited.
Let it sit.
Checked HubSpot at the end of the week.
Threw another post out, hoping it would land.

All that hard-won attention? Gone.

Now, let’s be honest.
A lot of companies aren’t even getting to this stage.
They’re not generating real demand at all.

They’re putting out content no one cares about.
Chasing impressions, not resonance.
Running ads without a story.
Sending emails to dead lists.

But for the teams that are getting attention - and still not seeing pipeline?

It’s not a content issue.
It’s not a messaging issue.
It’s a capture issue.

The irony?

Most of these teams are still sending cold outbound.
Still scraping lists and blasting sequences into the void,
while warm leads scroll past their posts and bounce off their homepage.

Great outbound doesn’t replace great marketing.
It rides on top of it.

When outbound works - when reply rates are high, meetings are qualified, and deals move fast - it’s almost always because of intent.

The person was already warmed up.
They knew the brand.
They saw something that stuck.

They’re not cold - they’re just unconverted.

The best GTM teams I know aren’t obsessing over how to generate more attention.

They’re obsessed with capturing the attention they already have.

Who clicked that case study?
Who visited the pricing page and dropped off?
Who liked the founder’s post but never filled in the form?

And how do we reach them before they forget?

That’s what we install.

We use RB2B and Vector to identify anonymous site visitors.
We use TeamFluence and Trigify to monitor ICP engagement on social.
We route everything to Slack with context - not just “someone viewed your site,” but:

“Someone from X company in your target vertical viewed this page.
Here’s the right contact.
Here’s their buying signals.”

Then we follow up. Fast.

With messaging that’s relevant and sharp, because it’s built on actual behaviour, not guesswork.

That’s what turns attention into pipeline.

Not more content.
Not more ads.
Not even more emails.

Just a better way to catch what’s already happening.

So if your pipeline’s dry and your team’s talking about “doing more demand gen,” pause for a second.

You might not need to generate anything new.

You might just need to stop letting it go to waste.