The First Thing You Did Was Score Me
I want you to imagine something. You walk into a room — a real room, with real people — because you are curious about something. Maybe someone mentioned an idea that resonated. Maybe you read something that made you think differently about a problem you have been carrying. You show up because you are interested.
The first thing that happens is someone assigns you a number.
Not a name tag. A score. Based on your job title, the size of your company, and the industry you work in. Before anyone has spoken a word to you, before anyone has asked what brought you here or what you are hoping to learn, you have been categorized, rated, and placed in a queue.
If your score is high enough, someone will talk to you. If not, you will be added to an automated sequence and contacted later — not because anyone is curious about you, but because an algorithm decided you were worth a follow-up.
This is what the technology industry calls demand generation. This is what I call the Leads Trap.
The Language of Dehumanization
Language shapes how we see people. And the language of modern B2B sales is designed, almost perfectly, to make people disappear.
Marketing Qualified. Sales Qualified. Working. Nurturing. Converting. Closed.
Every one of these terms describes what the organization is doing to the person, not what the person is experiencing. The person is not "marketing qualified" — they read an article. They are not "sales qualified" — they asked a question. They are not being "nurtured" — they are receiving emails they did not ask for. They did not "convert" — they made a decision that felt right at the time.
As we explore in Chapter 4 of Surviving the SaaSpocalypse, the Leads Trap is not just a bad process. It is a worldview. It positions the organization as the active agent and the person as the passive object. The organization captures. The organization scores. The organization qualifies. The organization nurtures. The organization closes.
The person? The person is processed.
How the Trap Gets Built
No one sets out to dehumanize people. The Leads Trap gets built incrementally, with reasonable-sounding decisions at every step.
First, someone says: "We need to track who is coming to our website." Reasonable. Understanding your audience matters.
Then: "We need to know which of these visitors are serious." Also reasonable. Attention is finite.
Then: "We need a way to score them so sales knows who to call first." This is where it turns. Because now we are not understanding people — we are sorting them. And the sorting criteria are not based on what the person needs. They are based on what the organization wants.
Then: "Anyone below this score goes into an automated sequence." Now we have two classes of humans. The ones valuable enough for real attention, and the ones who get the machine.
Then: "We need to optimize the sequence to improve our qualification rate." And now we are optimizing the machinery that processes humans, as if the goal were efficiency rather than understanding.
Every step felt logical. The result is a system that treats people as raw material to be refined into revenue. And the people inside the organization stop noticing, because the language — the scores, the stages, the qualification criteria — creates enough abstraction that you forget there are humans on the other end.
The Qualification Gauntlet
The Leads Trap has a partner — the Qualification Trap. Together, they form something I think of as the gauntlet: a series of gates that people must pass through before an organization will take them seriously.
Do you have the right job title? Gate one.
Is your company the right size? Gate two.
Are you in the right industry? Gate three.
Did you engage with enough content? Gate four.
Did you fill out the form with your real phone number? Gate five.
Every gate is designed to filter people out. The stated purpose is efficiency — "we can't talk to everyone." The actual effect is that organizations systematically exclude the people who do not fit their predetermined profile of a valuable relationship.
Think about what that means. A person from a small company who is deeply engaged, deeply thoughtful, and genuinely ready to do the work — filtered out because they do not meet the revenue threshold. A person with a non-traditional title who is actually the decision-maker — filtered out because the scoring model does not recognize their role. A person who attended three events, read twelve articles, and recommended you to a colleague — invisible because they never filled out a form.
The gauntlet does not find the best relationships. It finds the ones that look most like the template. Everything else gets automated sequences and the hope that someday their score will be high enough to deserve a real conversation.
What Signals Actually Tell You
There is a different way to understand people, and it starts by throwing away the scoring model.
Instead of assigning numbers to people based on demographic data, you pay attention to what they are actually doing. Not to score them — to understand them.
A person who reads three articles about organizational complexity and then attends an Office Hours session is telling you something. Not that they are "qualified." They are telling you that they have a problem, they are taking it seriously, and they are looking for a different kind of help. The signal is in the behavior, and it means something only if you are willing to listen rather than calculate.
This is what the Value Path framework describes — not stages that people are pushed through, but a natural progression that people move through on their own terms. From awareness to research to raising their hand to committing resources. Each transition happens because something changed for the person, not because a workflow moved them to the next stage.
The difference between scoring and signal recognition is the difference between judgment and understanding. Scoring says: "Is this person worth our time?" Signal recognition says: "What is this person telling us about where they are and what they need?"
One of those questions builds relationships. The other builds machinery.
The Cost Nobody Calculates
Organizations that run the Leads Trap are meticulous about measuring its performance. Qualification rates. Stage progression. Time-to-close. Revenue per qualified interaction.
Here is what they never measure: the cost of every person who was treated as an object and walked away.
Not the ones who explicitly said no. The ones who simply stopped engaging. The researcher who was sprayed with sales emails after downloading a white paper and quietly unsubscribed. The hand-raiser who filled out a form and received a generic follow-up from someone who clearly had not read what they wrote. The person who attended a webinar, felt the energy shift the moment they were identified as a "small account," and never came back.
These people do not show up in lost deal reports. They were never deals. They were people who were curious, who showed up, and who were processed instead of understood. They left without complaint, without feedback, without leaving a trace in any dashboard.
But they remember. They remember what it felt like to be scored instead of welcomed. And they tell other people. Not in dramatic ways — in quiet ones. "Yeah, I looked at them once. It was... salesy." That single sentence, repeated across hundreds of quiet departures, is more expensive than any lost deal.
The Alternative Is Not Complicated
I want to be clear about something: the alternative to the Leads Trap is not ignoring the fact that some relationships are deeper than others. Of course they are. A retainer engagement is different from someone reading an article. The question is not whether differences exist — it is whether you use those differences to filter people out or to understand how to serve them where they are.
The Value Path has eight stages. Every stage is legitimate. A person in the Audience stage — someone who just discovered you exist — is not less valuable than a Buyer. They are earlier in their journey. The appropriate response is not to score them and automate them. It is to be genuinely useful to them, right where they are, without demanding that they reveal themselves before you will help.
This means giving freely. Publishing substance, not gated teasers. Answering questions without requiring a form submission. Making Office Hours available because people learn by showing up, not because attendance generates qualified interactions.
It means reading signals instead of assigning scores. Noticing when someone's engagement shifts — from passive reading to active research to explicit questions — and understanding that shift as a human experience, not a stage change in a workflow.
It means, fundamentally, treating every person who shows up as a person who showed up. Not as raw material. Not as a score. Not as a potential transaction. A person.
The Leads Trap survives because organizations convince themselves that scale requires dehumanization. That you cannot possibly pay real attention to everyone, so you must automate the many to focus on the few.
But attention is not a zero-sum resource that must be rationed through scoring. It is a practice — a way of building systems, creating content, designing interactions, and showing up — that treats every person's journey as worthy of respect. Not every person needs the same depth of engagement. But every person deserves to be seen as a person.
That is not a technology problem. It is not a process problem. It is a decision about what kind of organization you want to be.
The Leads Trap is always a choice. So is the alternative.
