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.
