To optimize your marketing and sales spend, especially in today’s crowded and noisy market, focus on in-market customers.
Most marketing teams still aim broadly, targeting the full range of personas or firmographics across an ideal customer profile.
But here’s the reality: only 10% of your target market is in an active buying cycle at any given time. That means 90% of your spend may be going toward folks who just aren’t ready to engage.
If you want to see stronger conversion from MQLs to SQLs and ultimately to closed-won deals, you need to invest in processes and technologies that help identify and convert buyers who are already in-market.
Let’s take “Erica” as a fictitious example of a marketing leader who transformed her team’s inbound to outbound alignment and results by doing just that.
1️⃣ Website & Content Engagement: From Clicks to Context
Erica’s team moved beyond email clicks. What they really cared about was time spent engaging with their website—multiple pages visited, content consumed, return visits. They invested $5,000 in a website de-anonymization tool to track real buyer behavior. This first-party data became the foundation for a smarter lead scoring model.
2️⃣ Intent Data: Competitive & Category Searches
Next, Erica allocated $20,000 to upgrade her intent data stack, adding second-party data from G2 and third-party insights from search engines and industry sites. Her team began monitoring 12 high-intent keywords tied to their Real-World Data offering and tracking engagement with four key competitors. These signals revealed which buyers were actively researching and comparing solutions.
3️⃣ Signals of Executive & Team Growth
In-market buyers often show their hand through organizational change. Erica’s team tracked new executive hires, job postings for RWE roles, and LinkedIn headcount growth in research departments. Some of this was automated through their intent package. In other cases, an SDR manually scraped insights to stay ahead.
4️⃣ Account-Level Engagement
Finally, they shifted their lens from individual curiosity to account-level intent. Deep engagement from a single contact could mean anything—from casual research to someone preparing an RFP. But when multiple stakeholders engaged, that was a buying signal. Erica’s team aligned their efforts accordingly—prioritizing accounts where group behavior indicated shared urgency.
With these signals, Erica and her marketing team built an account-level intelligence layer across their 500 top ICP targets—tracking key job titles across clinical, underwriting, medical affairs, and analytics teams in pharma, insurance, and hospital segments.
The result? A smarter handoff from MQL to SQL.
By focusing on real buyer behavior instead of broad personas, Erica’s team delivered more fit-ready leads to sales and significantly improved their conversion rates from the industry average 13% MQL to SQL conversion to a best-in-class 25% conversion rate.
Want better ROI on your marketing spend? Start by asking: Are you able to identify, engage and convert buyers already in motion on a buying process?