Friday, August 22, 2025 by Shelley Hirst
Your sales team should be closing, not doing the heavy lifting qualifying MQLs. But for too many companies, sales teams are stuck working lists, chasing ghosts, clicks, and spending precious time on calls that will never go anywhere because it's too soon.
It’s not just inefficient, it’s expensive. Every hour your salespeople spend calling so-called leads because they clicked on a piece of content, maybe even only once, is a tax on your revenue, and it’s completely avoidable.
There are many tools and plugins on the market to help you do better, and boy do you need to be because buyers are streets ahead of you in terms of what they expect when they're looking around the market. It's up to you to be on top of that so when you do manage to get one of these coveted individuals on the phone, you've already removed as much guesswork as possible.
Our approach uses buyer behaviour tracking, intent scoring, and progressive profiling to ensure every lead passed to sales is warm, contextual, and worth their time.
And, these buyers come back to us week after week because they're part of our community where they can find information about the topics that are relevant to them in cyber security, cloud technology or infrastructure or telecoms.
Redefining what qualifies
Ditch the hang up with quarters. Buyers don't care about our quarters, when your marketing budgets are released, why you disappear because you're fully stacked out preparing for an event. You disappear from their radar and there are plenty of competitors who will step right in just as you've started to pique their interest. If you treat every download as someone ready to buy and every click as a lead because you think you can rush them through your process, you are already in a place of diminishing returns.
What you should be figuring out long before it even hits the sales call queue are factors such as the depth of engagement, repeat behaviour, longevity. Any directional signals that indicate, "I’m not just browsing, I’m exploring and starting to get interested" is vital and we we don't think anything else constitutes a lead. Consequently, it should not be dumped into the laps of sales teams.
A warm lead isn’t just a name in a spreadsheet, it's
- A buyer who already fits your target profile,
- Who’s shown repeated interest in relevant topics,
- Who’s spent meaningful time with the right content
- Has all the context credentials ready to pass along to your sales team
Because good conversations don’t start with a name, they start with intelligence.
Alignment that works
Going back a step further, you’ve heard “sales and marketing alignment” a hundred times, but the real test is "do sales follow up on the leads sent them?" There's plenty of research out there that states that as many as 40% of marketing leads only get called once. If they don't get through, hit voicemail, or don't manage a reply of some sort of sales outreach, they are put on the discard pile.
That's 40% of the money and effort you've spent in marketing wasted because sales are working on their own cadences deemed to be more valuable.
Sales should be efficient, not exhausted
Many larger businesses already have high levels of sophistication built into their marketing systems. As many don't, or rely on a partner channel which, for the most part lacks the levels of sophistication needed to track modern buyer behaviour. Much less are they able to, offer the transparency back up the line to report and track their ROI.
Even if you use an outsourced telemarketing agency to set appointments, they will do so much better if, having sat there hour after hour making hundreds of dials, they are focused on those with high intent signals.
Whether you do it yourselves, or look to outsource, it's time to stop wasting SDR's time and morale getting them calling every marketing lead when only a fraction are worth the call. Once you can identify those and they can be prioritised, you are already starting to be more efficient
All the tech is out there to take the heavy lifting out of the process, but do you have the skills, resource, budget to do it, or should you switch to a service model?
Want to see how we score it?
If your pipeline is cluttered with "leads" that no one wants to call, it’s time to reset the standard.
Whether you’re a vendor trying to improve follow-up, a channel partner drowning in low-quality lists, or a growth-stage business that needs smarter conversion, you may need more leads, but they need to also be better leads.
Let’s give your reps what they need: warm conversations with buyers who are ready to talk.
Our platform:
- Filters low-quality contacts based on behaviour
- Surfaces the highest-intent buyers
- Offers the option for us to book meetings or give to your SDRs to complete. Either way, they'll have complete contact engagement profile, timings and content trails.
Our handover:
We don’t just pass names and clicks, sales teams see everything we see and is presented to them in a way they can prepare for informed conversations.
- Integrated diaries
- LinkedIn connections
- Teams properly briefed
- Full access to marketing and sales materials in one instance
- Categorised intent scores - choose to only call high intent or not
- Meaningful insights for better informed sales conversations
Our platform:
- Filters low-quality contacts based on behaviour
- Surfaces the highest-intent buyers
- Integrates with most CRMs, pull the leads down only when you want them
- Optional call management for greater visibility of call actions
Now your reps aren’t being inefficient, they’re converting.
Market Activation Overview
Demand-as-a-Service™ gives you instant access to a proven, high-performing go-to-market system.
Reach already engaged IT and Security buyers, generate qualified and intelligence-backed leads, and scale across regions. It’s fast, flexible, and built to deliver the results your team needs.
Guide: MQLs To Closed Deals
Struggling to turn marketing leads into real sales?
This guide breaks down what’s missing in the processes and what to do about it. Discover the difference between demand and lead generation, avoid common pitfalls, and build trust with buyers from first touch to close.
Download now and sharpen your go-to-market strategy.
Frequently Asked Questions
Market Activation identifies in-market buyers (via intent data, behavioural signals) and immediately engages them with tailored outreach (nurture tracks, one-to-one advisor sessions, community invites).
Demand Engine: Targeted outreach (email, ads, sponsorships) that scores clicks → qualified leads → sales-ready appointments.
Performance Dashboard: Real-time visibility into open rates, CTOR, CPL and lead progression via our online sales portal.
Content Amplification: Thought leadership shared in The Amigos Network drives deeper engagement and social proof.
Peer Validation: Prospects get candid feedback from peers on your solutions, shortening the evaluation cycle.
Pipeline Catalysis: Warm introductions and referral paths within the community fuel high- intent conversations.
- Top-of-Funnel: Build credibility through community content and events.
- Mid-Funnel: Leverage peer case studies, expert Q&As, and live demos to answer deep technical questions.
- Bottom-of-Funnel: Invite high-intent members to advisory councils or private 1:1 sessions, often the final nudge before purchase.
- Interesting content: We originate, curate, and syndicate different types of content we know our audiences want to engage with and tell them it’s there.
- Sponsored content: We use sponsored content to drive engagement with individual brands.
- Promotion: We promote that content via multiple channels such as email, social media, YouTube, and so on.
- Identification: We ingest company-level engagement signals and combine it with known contacts that may be researching key topics.
- Segmentation: Members are bucketed by level of intent (high, medium, low) plus ICP fit and company size.
- Activation: High-intent members receive prioritised community invitations (events, focus groups, product deep-dives) to accelerate deals.
- Purchased data highlights who’s in-market.
- Community engagement reveals what questions they’re asking, so your nurture can be hyper-relevant.
- Result: A 2–3× lift in meeting acceptance and pipeline velocity vs. cold outreach alone.
- Marketing owns the nurture tracks, community invites, educational content, and event promos.
- Sales intervenes only at “high-intent + active community engagement” thresholds, with account-specific demos and peer introductions.
- Outcome: Fewer wasted calls and a higher win rate on truly qualified opportunities.
- Engagement Metrics: Community log-ins, event attendance, content downloads.
- Intent Conversion: % of intent-scored members who join private roundtables or request demos.
- Pipeline Velocity: Time from first community touch to opportunity creation.
- Revenue Impact: Contribution of community-sourced deals to overall bookings.
- Average Weekly Open Rate: 40%
- Average Weekly Click-to-Open Rate: 70%
- Average Cost-per-Lead: £45
- Minimum ROI: 500%
- Average Dwell Times: 1 minute 45 seconds
About Market Activation™
There's truth when they say "it's not what you've got, it's how you use it"
You might have great products, strong partners, and a solid plan and team to back it up, but if you’re not turning that into real conversations and real pipeline, what’s the point?
Whatever your size or ambition, we built Market Activation with you in mind. It's powerful, flexible, and actually built by people who know the channel, because we’ve lived it. Whether you’re trying to boost direct sales, give your partners a serious edge, or just get to market faster without wasting time or budget, we’ve got the engine.
The only question is, how do you get it to run?
