You Have The Signals, So Why Are You Still Missing The Moment?

InnovationYou Have The Signals, So Why Are You Still Missing The Moment?ByKimberly Bloomston,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)May 19, 2026, 07:15am EDTKimberly Bloomston is the Chief Product Officer of 6sense, a revenue intelligence company. getty​As product leaders, we've gotten very good at collecting signals. We have not been as deliberate about what happens next.In many systems, signal collection has effectively become the product. The assumption is that if enough data is captured, the right actions will follow. In practice, that handoff breaks down more often than we’d like to admit. The intelligence is there, but it doesn’t consistently show up in a way that a human can use.I was reminded of this when I changed jobs recently.Three vendors reached out. Each one had a signal. None of them had context.The first got my title wrong. He sent a cold email congratulating me on becoming CEO (I’m CPO) and pitching a product that a CEO would never buy. They had the job change, but they didn’t understand who I was.The second was a vendor I had worked with across two companies. I had been a champion for them. But then things went south, and we churned them—one of their earliest and largest customers to do so. Sixty days after I joined my current company and became the decision maker again, they scheduled an onboarding call. I had to tell them it was already a churn conversation. They had every signal they needed to know that: the relationship history, the job change, the previous churn. They just couldn’t connect them in a meaningful way.The third missed a cross-sell opportunity entirely. The signals were there. They just never surfaced at the moment they were needed.The Gap Between Signal And Context: Where Trust Breaks Down Most business-to-business (B2B) intelligence products are built to collect signals....