[00:00]
Ashley: Hello everyone. My name is Ashley and you are listening to Podcast7.
Ray: And my name is Ray. I hope you're doing great today.
Ashley: I want to start today with a number that I came across in the research stack this week. And I have to be honest, it kind of stopped me cold. It's one of those numbers that makes you wonder if the last 10 years of marketing strategy have just been, well, a polite fiction.
Ray: I have a feeling I know exactly which number you're looking at. You're talking about the 95%.
Ashley: It is the 95%. According to the latest data from 6sense, 95% of the time, the vendor who eventually wins a B2B deal was already on the buyer short list on day one.
Ray: Day one. It's a heavy concept when you really let it, you know, settle in.
Ashley: It's terrifying. It implies that before a potential customer fills out a form, before they talk to a sales rep, before your marketing team launches that incredibly expensive multi-channel campaign—Decision was effectively already made. They knew who they wanted before you even knew they existed.
Ray: It creates this incredible feeling of like futility, doesn't it? But it actually explains so much of the frustration we see in the market right now. It connects directly to what Tom Rousseau calls the "revenue wall". You have these marketing teams celebrating intent spikes—"Oh, look, this account is visiting the website. They're surging on a keyword"—but the deal just stalls.
Ashley: It goes nowhere. Pipeline360 found that 74% of marketers are seeing deals just die in the middle of the funnel.
Ray: Which is a staggering failure rate. I mean, three out of four deals just vanishing.
Ashley: Exactly. And the reason is that the intent they were celebrating was actually history. By the time they saw the spike, the buyer had already made up their mind. So, the marketing team was looking at a ghost.
[03:15]
Ray: So, that is the mission for today. We have a massive stack of research—reports from 6sense, Pipeline360, Gartner, Forrester, G2, and some really sharp commentary from Tom Rousseau. Traditional intent data, that thing we've all been relying on for a decade, is basically on life support.
Ashley: Or maybe already dead and just hasn't fallen over yet. So, we need to figure out: if intent is dead, what replaces it? How do you survive in a market where the CFO is the gatekeeper and increasingly an AI agent is the one doing the shopping? It's a shift from hunting for intent to mastering signal intelligence.
Ray: Let's unpack this "day one" crisis first. Because if the pre-contact favorite wins 80 to 95% of the time, that means the selection phase—the first 60% of the journey—is happening entirely without us.
Ashley: It's happening in the dark. This is where we need to get a little technical about why the traditional view of intent data fails. Think about how most third-party intent data is gathered—usually bidstream data or aggregated topic searches from publisher networks.
Ray: Exactly. By the time that behavior is packaged into a report and bought by your company, you're looking at the past. You're looking at digital exhaust. There's a crucial data point about data decay: static databases often have 40% data decay within 24 months.
Ashley: So, if you're waiting for a high intent score from a provider, you're receiving the signal months after the party is over.
Ray: It's like arriving at a restaurant because you heard it was crowded, but everyone's already paid the check and left. Meanwhile, your sales team is cold calling these people thinking they're hot leads, and the buyer is just annoyed because they signed a contract with your competitor last week.
[06:45]
Ashley: But here is where it gets really interesting. We have a conflict in the data. On one hand, Gartner says 61% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience.
Ray: They don't want to talk to you. They want to self-serve.
Ashley: But then 6sense says buyers are contacting sellers earlier. The point of first contact moved from the 69% mark down to 61%—about 6 or 7 weeks sooner than last year.
Ray: That's the paradox. Why? It's not that they suddenly miss talking to salespeople. They aren't calling for discovery; discovery happened in the dark. They're calling for validation.
Ashley: And this is driven by fear. Economic uncertainty is high, and budgets are tight. Buyers are rushing to spend budget before it gets cut, but they're buying complex, high-risk AI solutions.
Ray: AI is high risk. You need to know: Is this secure? Is it SOC2 compliant? Will it hallucinate and destroy our brand?.
Ashley: So, they're engaging sellers earlier not to learn, but to audit. They are saying, "I've already decided I like you, but now I need you to prove you won't get me fired".
Ray: Precisely. And if your sales rep starts with the classic sales playbook—"So, what keeps you up at night?"—they've already lost the room. The buyer wants an engineer and you sent them a hype man.
[10:30]
Ashley: Now, let's talk about the who behind the research. We are moving toward machine-readable demand gen.
Ray: 74% of organizations are adopting AI agents. We're talking about autonomous agents—digital employees that can research and identify shortlists.
Ashley: G2 backed this up, calling it winning the "LLM-first discovery moment". Tom Rousseau said it best: "If a deal isn't machine-readable for Agentic AI, it doesn't exist".
Ray: Most marketers are obsessed with making things human-readable—emotional headlines and beautiful imagery. But think about a typical B2B asset: it's a PDF white paper gated behind a form. To an AI agent, a PDF is a black hole.
Ashley: If an agent is tasked with finding five platforms that are HIPAA compliant and have usage-based pricing, and your pricing is hidden in a "Contact Us" PDF, the agent skips you.
Ray: So, what's the fix? GEO—Generative Engine Optimisation. GEO is the new SEO.
Ashley: GEO means your content needs to be chunked and schema-rich. Factual feeds of data, specs, and compliance that a bot can summarize. If the bot asks about an integration and your site doesn't state it explicitly in a way the LLM can read, the bot tells the buyer "information unavailable" and you're off the list.
Ray: It's wild that we need to start writing for machines so the machines can recommend us to humans. But G2 shows buyers trust these bots twice as much as they trust salespeople. The bot doesn't have "commission breath".
Ashley: Speaking of using AI to catch these signals, a quick nod to our sponsors [SPONSOR]: Demand7—where AI meets demand generation—and GTM7, for the engineering side of AI execution. Check them out at demand7.ai or gtm7.ai.
[14:15]
Ray: Okay, we're back. So, if we can't rely on intent, we need signal intelligence. What's the difference?.
Ashley: Intent tells you who is looking—a company name. Signal intelligence adds context: what are they doing and why does it matter right now?.
Ray: A stale intent signal is: "Company A visited your pricing page three times last week." That's noise.
Ashley: A signal intelligence approach looks for auditing behavior. If a user suddenly downloads your SOC2 report or spends 20 minutes on your API documentation looking at rate limits, that's not browsing—that's an audit.
Ray: That is a live signal. You need to reach out immediately, not with a sales pitch, but with technical reassurance: "Hey, saw you were checking out the API docs. Do you have questions about our rate limits?".
Ashley: Helpful, technical, specific. Not "Can I get 15 minutes to learn about your business?" That question is death now.
Ray: And it's not just on your site. If you see a surge in an account checking your G2 reviews versus a competitor's, specifically filtering for the one-star reviews—they're looking for the dirt.
Ashley: Uncertainty is compressing deal cycles. If you miss that signal by 24 hours, the budget might be gone.
[18:30]
Ray: But Pipeline360 says marketers have an average of 23 different tools, and only 11% say their tech is fully optimized. It's the Frankenstein stack. We're drowning in vanity metrics—clicks and opens—instead of these revenue signals.
Ashley: So, how do we fix it? Three pragmatic shifts. First: Stop fishing. Stop relying on broad cold outreach based on third-party intent that says someone "might" be interested.
Ray: It destroys your reputation and annoys the 61% of buyers who want to be left alone.
Ashley: Second: Start detecting. Focus on first-party signals. Who is interacting with your validation content—security pages, integration docs, detailed pricing calculators?.
Ray: And third: Optimise for the agents. Ask ChatGPT or Claude about your product. If it gives a vague answer or says "I don't know," you have a content problem. Create public, crawlable pages with clear data.
Ashley: Also, remember that buying groups are 10 to 20 people now. You have to multi-thread. If the IT guy is checking the API, assume the CFO is asking about ROI.
Ray: It's not about finding a lead; it's about detecting a corporate movement. If the IT director and the VP of Finance from the same company hit your site on the same day, that's a deal in motion.
[22:00]
Ashley: We've covered a lot: the death of the linear funnel, the day one crisis, and the rise of the AI buyer. The playbook has to change.
Ray: I want to leave you with a thought to chew on. 94% of buyers are using AI to synthesize your value. They are using bots to summarize who you are before they ever talk to you.
Ashley: So ask yourself: Is your current marketing strategy actually building a brand, or are you just providing free training data for the bots that will recommend your competitor?.
Ray: If your content isn't better than the summary the bot gives your competitor, you might not even make the short list. And if you aren't on that list on Day One, you lose 95% of the time.
Ashley: Thanks for diving in with us. Continue the conversation at podcast7.ai.
Ray: Catch you on the next deep dive
