Tuesday morning. 6sense fires a "Stage 4, Decision" alert on FinanceCo. Website visits spiked over the weekend. Three different VPs from the buying group viewed pricing. Intent score: 92.
RevOps routes the alert to the AE on the account. The AE opens it, scans the buying group, opens her cadence tool, and starts queuing personalized outbound, one for the CFO, one for the VP Finance, one for the Controller. Each email references the intent signals, mentions a relevant case study, uses Clay-enriched data to sound personal. Clean, well-drafted, deliverable at scale.
By Friday, she's sent 9 sequenced touches across the buying group. Open rate: 24%. Reply rate: 2.1%. One soft "let me check internally." One "remove me." Seven crickets.
"What we never asked: who from our network already knows these people? Was their CFO our customer two roles ago? Did their VP Finance work with our customer Marcus at his last company? Does our board member sit on a finance association with their Controller? None of that was visible. So we ran the modern outbound play, and it converted at the modern outbound rate."
The intent fired. The outbound went out. Nothing meaningful happened.