A checklist for differentiating warm contacts from historic ones before your next market.
Every distributor has a buyer database that looks impressive on paper: thousands of registered contacts, built up over years of markets, screenings, and introductions. And, while it's tempting to treat that number as your buyer list, it’s really just an archive of everyone who has ever shown up.
The data around what actually drives a sale tells a much narrower story.
Across registered buyer bases, only 1–2% of contacts account for roughly three-quarters of serious evaluation activity: the completed screenings, repeat visits, and internal shares that signal someone is genuinely working a title, not just aware that it exists.
The real story here is about where attention concentrates. The vast majority of a registered base has, at some point, logged in, browsed a catalogue or sat on a mailing list, and then gone quiet. A small fraction keep coming back, digging, and then sharing internally with the people who need to sign off on a deal. That fraction is where evaluation is actually happening.
The uncomfortable part is how easy it is to miss which contacts belong in that group, because a registered list has no memory of recency. A buyer who evaluated three titles last week and one who last logged in two years ago sit in the same spreadsheet, look equally "active", and get the same follow-up email.
Sales and marketing teams already sense this, and it's why "which of these contacts is actually worth a follow-up call" is one of the most common questions on a distribution sales desk. The problem has always been that the answer lived in someone's memory, not in a system. A senior seller who's worked a territory for a decade can often tell you who's warm just from instinct. Everyone else is guessing, and every new hire starts from zero.
That guesswork gets expensive fast and not because reps are chasing the wrong people, but because they're not reaching the right ones. A buyer who's mid-evaluation right now needs a call this week, not next month, and without visibility into who that is, the hottest leads can sit untouched while attention drifts elsewhere. Multiply that across a catalogue and a market season, and the real cost isn't wasted effort — it's missed windows with buyers who were ready to talk.
Before your next round of follow-ups, run your list against these signals. None of them require guesswork. They're all things a buyer's actual behaviour will tell you, if you're able to see it.
Recency of activity. Not "when did they register?" but when did they last open a screener, search the catalogue, or view a title page? Depth, not just presence. A single login says someone was curious. Multiple sessions on the same title, or return visits across several sessions, indicate that someone is actually evaluating it.
Completion, not just clicks. Someone who opens a screener and watches five minutes is browsing. Someone who watches to completion, especially more than once, is doing the work a real evaluation requires. Are you aware of who these people are?
Internal sharing. A buyer forwarding a link or granting access to a colleague is usually building a case internally. That's one of the strongest signals available and one of the easiest to miss without visibility into share activity. Are you tracking this?
Breadth across the catalogue. A contact exploring multiple titles, formats, or seasons is shopping with intent. A contact who viewed one title once, a while ago, is closer to a historic record.
Search behaviour. What someone searches for tells you what they actually want, often before they've said it on a call. Genre and format searches are a stronger signal of live interest than a static profile field ever will be. Is your CRM updating in realtime?
Timing against your own calendar. Activity clustered around a market, a new title drop, or a screener you just sent is a different signal than steady background noise. The former usually means "act now."
Run enough of these together, and a pattern shows up fast: most of the list goes quiet, and a small, identifiable group lights up. That group is your 1–2%.
None of this is an argument for cutting your database down. History has value; a dormant contact today can be a live one at the next market. The point is knowing, at any given moment, which names deserve a phone call this week and which ones are simply on file.
That's exactly the gap ONE was built to close. Instead of a spreadsheet that only tells you who's registered, ONE surfaces what buyers actually watch, search for, and share, so the follow-up list your sales team works from is based on current behaviour and not on historic sign-ups.
Book a discovery call to see how it works with your catalogue.