Too Many Signals, Not Enough Sales: When Data-Driven Marketing Goes Wrong

A recap of our conversation with Kristen van Laren from Peridio and Michael Eggerling from Peak NIL on unifying data and identifying real opportunities.

As marketers, we love saying we're "data-driven." We're drowning in signals, between first-party data, third-party intent signals, lead scores, and sales feedback, there's a fundamental disconnect, between what we're seeing in dashboards doesn't always match what's real for our buyers.

That's why we brought together Kristen, Head of Marketing at Peridio, and Michael, CMO at Peak NIL, to talk about how they're cutting through the noise. Here's what we learned.

What We Covered

• How to prioritize signals when you have too much data
• Building a single source of truth on a $100/month budget
• Why sales feedback beats dashboards every time
• Three behavioral patterns that signal real readiness
• Scaling signal detection without losing the human element

Watch the full webinar here

Prioritizing Signals When You Have Too Much Data

Michael put it bluntly: "If you said you have to give up some of this first or third party data, I'd say pry it from my cold dead fingers. But it is a lot."

The challenge is knowing which ones to act on now. Michael shared his signal hierarchy:

1. Traditional MQLs: Form fills, demo requests, free product usage
2. First-party site signals: Prospects visiting specific use case pages (often better than MQLs depending on context)
3. First-party research data: Industry-specific research like clinical trial signups
4. Channel signals: Engagement through marketing channels
5. Third-party signals: ZoomInfo, Apollo, purchased lists

The key insight: Work through these in order. Once you've exhausted one tier, move to the next.

Building a Single Source of Truth (On $100/Month)

Kristen had the opposite problem, starting at a seed-stage company with no product and no data. Her approach: focus on process before tools.

"I would encourage anyone to think less about what the cool kids are using and more about: what is the absolute most valuable data that if we had it, we could be really effective?"

Her tech stack is simple: Fathom (records calls) → Zapier (pipes transcripts) → Cursor (organizes by date/company with your choice of LLM). That's it. Running reliably for 7 months.

"Our single source of truth is not a dashboard. It's the customer's voice that we're able to extract with very little resources on a budget that's like a hundred dollars a month."

Why Sales Feedback Beats Dashboards

Both Kristen and Michael emphasized that the most critical data comes from sales conversations, not tools.

"Dashboards are good at showing the what. But I have never gone on a call with a sales team and not had a little bit of a spat of 'but it says this' and the salesperson says 'well, not really," Kristen noted.

She shared a reality check: "Engagement doesn't equal readiness."  

She described situations where all the signals were flashing green, like "Christmas lights going off saying this is THE lead", only for sales to have one call and realize something didn't feel right. A reorg happened. The timing wasn'tthere. Data can't capture that.

Three Behaviors That Signal Real Readiness

Kristen shared three patterns that indicate an account is ready for sales:

1. Multiple Stakeholder Engagement For technical products, engineers rarely make purchasing decisions alone. When an engineer is poking around documentation and a business person is browsing the website, that's a green flag.
2. ‍Deep Documentation Engagement Not just visiting "What is Avocado OS?" but drilling into specific technical details like particular Nvidia board documentation. This reveals what they're building and signals active evaluation.
3. The "Question Shift" When conversations move from "What does this do?" to "How does your thing work with my thing?", from capabilities to logistics, interest shifts to intent.

"The best fit things for us are when those signals converge. That's when it becomes compelling for the sales team."

The BD Call Test for Handoffs

Kristen uses a simple threshold: "Could I sit on our weekly BD call and tell my sales team why this company needs us right now? And my answer couldn't be 'they downloaded that white paper, they opened that email 47 times.' That is not a story. Sales would just eat me alive."

A compelling handoff sounds like: "We've got this robotics company. An engineer is poking around our docs, and a product leader is liking all our posts on LinkedIn about Nvidia. Maybe this is something we should sniff out."

Scaling Without Losing the Human Element

Michael's approach to scale: Automation + human judgment. Tools like Warmly, Clay, Unify, and N8N can automate signal detection.  

His advice: hire someone on Upwork who knows GTM automation to build workflows, like how to identify signals, check against CRM, ping the account manager on Slack, create an MQL, all automated.

But Kristen's team still reviews leads line by line: "That feels painful and maybe it's not tenable at scale, but the conversion rates we experience are higher than any other place I've ever worked."

Why? "There is a lot of AI slop, and we're all craving to actually talk to humans."

The Meeting Cadence That Makes It Work

Kristen's team runs two meetings weekly:

• Monday: Executive Sync — Product, marketing, engineering, CEO review priorities. Sales drops breadcrumbs that marketing can earmark.
• Tuesday: BD Standup — Line-by-line review of every deal in the pipeline.

"What changes in a week blows my mind. Things that felt like there's no way this is gonna amount to anything escalate in a way I cannot even predict. And things I was like 'this is closing', gone."

Key Takeaways from the Webinar

1. Prioritize your signals. Create a clear hierarchy and work through them in order.
2. Your single source of truth might not be a dashboard. Sales transcripts analyzed with AI can be more valuable than expensive tech stacks.
3. Engagement ≠ readiness. Only human conversations reveal timing, reorgs, and real intent.
4. Look for signal convergence. Multiple stakeholders + deep engagement + question shift = green light.
5. Use the "BD call test." If you can't articulate why this company needs you now in a compelling way, it's not ready.
6. Meet with sales weekly. Things change faster than dashboards can show.

Wrapping Up

Most teams focus on whatever is loudest or easiest to measure. But the most valuable opportunities don't announce themselves, instead you have to uncover them through both data and live sales conversations.

The goal isn't to collect more signals. It's to agree with your sales team on what's real.

Want help identifying more of those hidden opportunities?  

Schedule Your Demo Today