07 — Sales operations

What buyer engagement data actually tells you (and why most teams miss it).

Opens, time spent, sections viewed — engagement data on a proposal can tell you which deals are hot, which are cold, and exactly when to follow up. Here’s how to read it.

For decades, B2B sales has run on guesswork. You send the proposal. Days pass. You wonder if they’ve opened it. You craft a follow-up email that walks a tightrope between “checking in” and “annoying.” You time it by feel. Sometimes the deal lands; more often, it goes quiet and you never quite know why.

The strange thing is that most of what you’d want to know is already happening — you just can’t see it. When a client opens your proposal, scrolls through it, lingers on the pricing, comes back the next morning with their CFO, exits without reaching the end — every one of those moments is a signal.

“The problem isn’t that the signals don’t exist. It’s that PDFs don’t transmit them.”

Move the proposal to a trackable, interactive page and the picture changes. The most basic signal is whether the proposal has been opened at all — that alone ends the “did they get it?” loop. But the more interesting number is revisits: a single open is polite, three or four opens over two days, especially from different devices, is a deal being actively shopped. That’s when the deal is being decided. It’s also exactly the moment when most sales teams either fall silent or send a generic “just checking in” email — because they’re guessing.

Hot Deal engagement panel — high views, distinct visitors, recent activity

Duodeal founder portrait — Thomas Saminada photoshoot

How to read the signals

Total time inside the proposal is the closest you’ll get to a single attention score: thirty seconds is a skim, three minutes is a read, eight minutes across multiple sessions is a serious evaluation. But total time matters less than where the time is spent. Four minutes on pricing and zero on terms is a different conversation than five minutes spread evenly across every section — one is a near-close, the other is a buyer still evaluating fit. A trackable page tells you exactly which sections were viewed, how long each held attention, which were scrolled past, which were revisited. And the pattern that matters most is what they came back to.

“Generic ‘checking in’ emails leave that information on the floor.”

A buyer who reads case studies twice needs more proof. One who keeps returning to the pricing table is doing math. One who lingers on the implementation timeline is worried about delivery. Each of these is a different objection. Mobile reads tend to be the buyer themselves, in transit, on a first look; long desktop reads are usually the buyer at their desk evaluating seriously, or someone the buyer has forwarded the proposal to. A mix of both means the proposal is moving through an organisation.

The shift this makes

The point isn’t surveillance — it’s responsiveness. The proposal stops being the end of the sales process and becomes the part of it that finally gives you eyes.

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