Every buying signal has a half-life. A pricing-page visit, a job change, an intent spike: they all decay, and most GTM teams act on them long after they've gone cold. When 50 senior GTM leaders were asked what needs fixing in their setup, 56% pointed at the same gap: their AI tools don't have access to real-time signals.

In this episode of The Context Layer Tapes, Florin Tatulea and John Lloyd get into why speed, not just data, is where teams fall down. Act on a website visit within 20 minutes and you can lift conversion 2 to 3x. Wait days on a social signal, or months on a job change, and you've lost the buyer's trust before you've said a word. Two clocks are always ticking, the signal decaying and the buying window closing, and the deal is lost when they fall out of sync.

Then the plays. The setup: a connected account plan that meshes first-party and third-party signals across the whole book of business. The trigger: an in-market score built across intent, website and social engagement, firing on the spike rather than any single signal, which took one team's call connect rate from 3% to 12% in a week.

To close, Florin and John cover what makes it possible: identity resolution and first-and-third-party unification, and the part nobody budgets for, owning the process so the signal reaches the rep in time.