Interest is not intent, and the gap between them is where deals go quiet.
A click means someone noticed. Intent forms later, through the pattern of how a buyer keeps learning. This is why DirectReach is built to stay useful instead of treating every signal like a sales invitation.
Two different states, treated like one.
Interest is exploratory. A buyer clicked, read, watched, or returned. It is real and worth noticing, but a single action says very little about where they are in their thinking.
Intent forms in the pattern: the buyer keeps returning, moves from problem questions toward solution questions, shares ideas internally, and begins behaving like someone building conviction. Readiness comes later, when the buyer has enough clarity for sales to confirm fit instead of creating the case from scratch.
That movement happens over weeks or months, usually quietly. A form fill can be one signal, but it cannot tell you by itself whether the buyer has done the internal work required for a productive sales conversation.
Marketing's job is to build the understanding and readiness that make the eventual sales conversation useful. Sales confirms what the buyer has largely worked through already.
Both departments are right, which is the frustrating part.
Marketing says the leads are good, and by their measure they are. Those people were genuinely interested. Sales says the leads are cold, and by their measure they're right too, because interest without intent looks exactly like a bad lead on a phone call.
The gap isn't a people problem or a handoff problem. It's an empty stretch of the journey that nobody was assigned to cover, so both teams keep reaching across it and blaming each other for what falls in.
Somebody has to stay useful while they think.
Not a drip campaign that asks for a meeting every third email. Something useful, roughly weekly, written for wherever they actually are, that expects nothing back for a while.
Do that and you stop treating silence as failure. You can watch the pattern develop and engage when the buyer looks genuinely ready instead of on the week your cadence happened to schedule a call.