The "Intent" Illusion & The Permission-to-Act Gap

Most “intent” signals tell you what happened yesterday. By the time your data shows a deal is in trouble, it's often already slipping away. But the biggest issue isn't the data, it's that teams suffer from an "action gap." Reps and managers often see a deal going sideways in the CRM, but no one feels authorized to pull the emergency brake and change the strategy. So, the system records the awareness, but the behavior stays exactly the same. Deals die because buyers stop making decisions.

Check out our last newsletter where we broke down how to better align signals to the buyers journey.

Decoding the Signals

Based on the latest community conversation and experiments the smartest revenue teams are abandoning vanity metrics and looking for real friction:

→Early risk looks like handoffs breaking, next steps becoming vague, timeline drift, or buyers suddenly worrying about how to use the product.

→Don't wait until the deal is lost. Win-loss interviews are great for finding out why you lost but you need real-time signals while the deal is still active and saveable.

→Highlighting a risk is useless if there isn't a clear, pre-planned next step to solve it. You have to separate small, fixable issues from major dealbreakers (like budget limits) so you don't waste time on a losing battle.

Operationalizing Your Deal Risk

Here is how to bridge the gap between catching a signal and actually changing the outcome of the deal:

→Use targeted LLM prompts to summarize meetings and extract exactly what is missing. Flag deals lacking concrete next steps, missing executive buyer sign-off, or showing new implementation risks. Roll Signals into Strict Risk Categories: Group your conversational and CRM signals into clear categories such as "Features", "Pain/Price Mismatch", "Poor Product Fit" or "Priority Project".

→Review sales calls to find out exactly what is missing to close the deal, like a lack of clear next steps or a missing approval

→Take these deep-funnel, legit signals and use them to unify your entire GTM motion. When Sales, Marketing, Content, and Enablement are all deriving their strategies from actual, validated buyer pain, alignment happens naturally.

Bottom line: Alignment, Action and Deals Won

When you clearly define who handles what and build automatic responses to common risks, you remove all the confusion. You catch problems before they ruin your pipeline and give your team the power to act immediately when a deal starts to stall.