I used to live in an apartment where the smoke detector had been installed by someone who, I can only assume, had never cooked food. It was mounted on the hallway ceiling, about a meter from the kitchen doorway, directly in the path of any warm air that came off the hob. There was no extractor fan. There was no window that I could open in the kitchen. The kitchen was essentially a sauna with a stove in it.
Cooking anything involving heat triggered the alarm. Toast was a coin flip. A stir-fry was a guarantee. Frying onions was a five-minute negotiation with the upstairs neighbour, the downstairs neighbour, and a man on the second floor who I never met but who was, by sheer volume, having a terrible time.
The detector was doing its job. It was detecting smoke. There was smoke. The smoke was the cooking, and the cooking was the reason I had a kitchen.
I did not move. I did not install an extractor fan. I did not call the building owner, who was, in fairness, unlikely to act on a request that began with “the smoke detector keeps doing the thing smoke detectors do.”
What I did was deal with the alarm.
First I waved a tea towel under it until it stopped. This worked at the cost of an hour of arm fatigue per week and a slowly developing repetitive strain injury in my right shoulder.
Then I took to removing the battery before cooking. I would put it on the counter next to the salt. Most of the time I remembered to put it back. Some of the time I did not, and the detector spent a quiet weekend doing nothing about a problem I could not be paid to think about.
Eventually I bought a small electric fan, plugged it in next to the cooker, and pointed it at the detector. The fan blew the smoke away from the detector and toward the living room, where it just was, now, instead of being on the ceiling.
The smoke was still there. I had simply rerouted it past the place where it was being measured.
Every B2B company I have worked with does a version of this with leads.
The number is too low. Pipeline coverage is below where it needs to be. The CEO mentions it in the Monday meeting. Sales mentions it in the Friday meeting. Marketing puts it on their slide.
Nobody likes the number.
So we deal with the number.
We add a campaign. We add a channel. We hire two more SDRs. We push out an extra LinkedIn series. We sponsor another podcast. We launch a webinar. We retarget the people who did not open the last email. We A/B test the subject line of the email about A/B testing.
For a few weeks, the number goes up. Activity produces motion. Motion produces a small lift in the metric. The alarm quiets down. The CEO stops mentioning it in the Monday meeting.
What we have not done is talk to the people the leads were supposed to come from.
We have not asked whether the message that all this activity is amplifying is one that anyone is recognising as their problem. We have not asked whether the segment is the right segment. We have not asked whether the thing we are selling is the thing they would buy.
We have, in essence, blown a fan at the smoke detector.
The smoke is still there. The cooking is still happening. We have just made the alarm easier to live with by overwhelming the signal with noise of our own making.
This works for a while. It works longer than it should. New activity always produces some movement, because some percentage of any market is in pain at any moment and will respond to almost anything. The early bump from a new campaign is real. The campaign itself is not the reason; the bump is people who were already going to respond now responding to whatever you happened to send.
Then the activity flattens. Then it requires more activity to maintain the same number. Then it requires more again.
The smoke detector is going off less often now. But only because there is a fan permanently aimed at it, and the fan is on a budget line, and the budget line is up for review.
The detector wasn’t the problem.
The smoke was.