A Paradigm Shift with Top of Funnel Strategies

Shifting the Focus

From Website Visitors to Identifying Individual Prospects within your ICP who are In-Market

The latest high-momentum technology in marketing focuses on identifying the individuals visiting your website. The premise is simple: potential buyers researching your solutions on your site represent high-quality leads you should prioritize, even if they remain anonymous. However, while these visitors are valuable for your top-of-funnel strategy, they only make up a fraction of your potential audience—limited to those who have already discovered your brand.

But what about the far larger universe of potential customers who haven’t yet landed on your website? They’re out there, actively researching solutions to their business challenges, but they may not know your company exists—or they might not associate your brand with the solution they need.

This is where the game changes. The real opportunity lies in resolving the identities of those off-domain prospects: the actual individuals with the right titles that are in your target accounts, anonymously conducting research on the problems you solve.

ABM and Buyer Intent Solutions: The Gap in the Funnel

Legacy Account-Based Marketing (ABM) and buyer intent platforms have fallen short. While they’ve helped narrow the focus by identifying in-market companies, they remain suboptimal. These tools rely on aggregated signals to show which organizations are researching solutions related to your offerings. Though groundbreaking at the time, they still leave a critical gap: identifying the specific individuals within the buying group conducting the research—especially early in the buying cycle.

Without this clarity, sales teams are left guessing who’s driving the interest, often engaging too late in the process when prospects have already shortlisted vendors. Timing is everything. Studies show that the first vendor to engage a potential customer wins the deal 60% of the time.

Resolving Individual Buyer Intent: The Next Frontier

The latest technology is unlocking a new level of buyer intent precision: identifying the individual buyers actively searching for solutions online. By analyzing off-domain intent signals, these tools can pinpoint the specific people within a buying group of the ICP prospective account, who are researching your solution categories.

Here’s why this matters:

Target the Right Individuals: Instead of relying on broad account-level insights, you can identify the individuals who are part of the buying group and demonstrating intent, ensuring your sales teams have coverage for all relevant personas within the account.

Engage Early in the Buying Journey:

Engaging with the influencers at the start of the buying cycle enables you to position your brand as a trusted partner, significantly increasing your chances of making the vendor selection short list. No longer does the sales team need to spend valuable time trying to identify who is doing the research.

Personalized Engagement at Scale: Knowing the personas within the buying group who are conducting the research allows marketing teams to deliver hyper-targeted content and sales teams to craft personalized outreach strategies. It is no longer about generic pitches or email sequences—it is about delivering contextual messages to the levels within the buying group as they are anonymously researching solutions.

From Reactive to Proactive: The Competitive Advantage

The businesses adopting individual-level intent identification are flipping the script. By proactively identifying potential buyers earlier than ever before, they are engaging buyers at the right moment within the buying cycle and building stronger brand awareness with key influencers and decision-makers. This is not just a shift in tools; it is a shift in mindset. It is about focusing your marketing and BDR/SDR tactics to those that are in market vs engaging in generic outreach campaigns against lists of companies within a target market!

The Future of Buyer Intent

While website visitor data will always be valuable, the bigger opportunity lies in understanding who is searching for solutions off-domain. The ability to resolve individual buyer intent signals marks the beginning of a new era in demand generation.

As these technologies mature, businesses that adopt them early will have a distinct advantage—engaging buyers earlier and winning more deals. The future of marketing and sales is here, and it’s laser-focused on identifying and activating the individuals driving the buying process.

A Paradigm Shift with

Top-of-Funnel Strategies

Todd Abbott, Co-Founder & CEO

The world of B2B marketing and sales is on the brink of a seismic shift, one that will redefine how organizations drive top-of-funnel lead velocity. Today’s dynamic—marketing handing off Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) that are often little more than “anything with a pulse” only to have sales fail to follow up—has created a cycle of frustration that plagues most companies. CEOs can’t identify whether it is a marketing issue with poor quality leads or is it sales not executing against these MQL’s.

Poor quality at the top of the funnel followed by highly inefficient spend to convert these leads, delivers a questionable ROI on marketing campaigns, and a disconnect between marketing and sales that has left organizations seeking a better way. For years, the strategy for generating leads has centered around creating lists of targeted accounts to put into sequences of emails and BDR/SDR outreach. This scattershot approach has proven to be inefficient and, frankly, ineffective. Here’s why:

Ineffectiveness of Digital Advertising: Spraying ads into a market segment and hoping it is delivered to the prospect when they are in market, is highly inefficient. The industry average click-through rates (CTR) for digital ads hovers below 1%. With numbers like these, it’s no wonder that executive management questions the value of digital ad spend during every quarterly budget meeting ... and it is the first to get cut in tough times.
Email Inboxes are Overloaded: Getting your email sequences to be contextually aligned and targeted to the persona and at the stage of their buying cycle, is most difficult yet critical to getting through the clutter. Even with carefully curated lists, the odds that a cold email or outbound call will be align with a prospect’s needs and timing are slim, even if you get through to them. The open rate on emails is now also below 1%.

The Shift to Conversation Qualified Leads (CQL)
New technology is transforming this model by enabling organizations to identify true CQLs. A CQL is an individual within the buying group of an account in your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), who is actively researching solutions or products you offer. They are in-market, but their research is most often being done anonymously as they decide which venders to engage with. A CQL is not a form-fill from your web site or an attendee to your webinar or even a connection by a BDR from a cold account list. Instead, they are:

A Prospect that is in-market. Individuals within the buying group that are actively researching solutions to their business challenges and the extent of their web search activity demonstrates they are in a buying cycle and likely to convert to an opportunity with proper activation of the prospect.
Prospects that might not know you exist or worse, have discounted you. These prospects aren’t visiting your website and may have not been exposed to your brand … yet they are researching your competitors and need to be educated and convinced to include you on the vendor short list.

Why Timing is Everything

The first vendor to engage a potential customer wins the deal 60% of the time. This statistic underscores the importance of identifying and activating CQLs at the earliest stages of their buying journey. Waiting for prospects to visit your website or respond to outbound campaigns, simply isn’t good enough anymore.

The Impact of CQL Technology

CQL technology enables marketing and sales teams to direct their efforts against the specific individuals within target accounts who are already in the market. This is a game-changer, and here’s why:

Hyper-Targeted Outreach: With detailed insights into who is researching what, marketing can craft tailored campaigns that resonate with the roles and needs of specific individuals within the buying group. Sales teams can reach out with personalized messaging that speaks directly to a prospect’s search behavior.
Efficiency and Focus: By narrowing the focus to individuals who are truly ready for engagement, teams can eliminate wasted effort on low-quality leads. Every interaction becomes meaningful and strategic as they are ready to converse.
Alignment Across Teams: CQLs provide a common ground for alignment with the marketing and sales tactics deployed. The result is a continuous improvement focus on developing effective tactics to convert with the right content, at the right time.
Better ROI: Redirecting your marketing spend from broad-market digital ads and cold targeted outreach to a prioritized focus on CQLs with hyper targeted tactics will lead to higher conversion rates and a more efficient funnel development process.

A New Era of Demand Generation

The transition from MQLs to CQLs represents a paradigm shift in how organizations approach lead generation. It is no longer about generating demand for your solution; it is about competing for the mind share with prospects that are already demonstrating demand for the solution you provide. By identifying and engaging prospects earlier in their journey and focusing on the right individuals within the buying group, businesses can achieve unprecedented levels of efficiency and conversions.

This isn’t just an incremental improvement; it’s a fundamental change in how we think about demand generation. Marketing and sales teams that embrace this shift will not only outperform their competitors but also set a new standard for what’s possible in B2B engagement.