AI Intent-based Marketing Leads:
Why I Started
MD LeadFlow
MD LeadFlow
For most of my career, salespeople wanted one thing from me: leads, leads, and more leads.
They didn’t care about brand voice. They didn’t care about consistency. They didn’t care about the strategy behind the campaign that produced the lead in the first place. They were hungry, they knew how to work a list, and they wanted more names to call. As a marketing and brand strategist, that used to drive me crazy.
And then — almost every single time — I’d hand them leads, and they’d complain about the quality.
So which is it? Do you want more leads, or do you want better leads? Because in my experience, nobody could ever quite answer that question honestly. It’s the same argument playing out in conference rooms and Zoom calls at companies everywhere: marketing says the leads were good and sales didn’t follow up fast enough. Sales says the leads were garbage and marketing doesn’t understand the buyer. And underneath almost every one of those arguments is the same excuse: the data was dirty.
That’s the part that eventually became my obsession. Not creative. Not brand. Not campaigns. Data — and data verification. Because data doesn’t lie. A verified email either bounces or it doesn’t. A phone number is either connected, or it isn’t. A person is either actively researching or they aren’t. Once you can prove that, the argument is over.
I watched a lot of my friends and colleagues — marketers and salespeople both — land in the same place over the years, usually the hard way. Our breed of marketer just keeps adding tools to the belt, learning to pivot, learning what actually holds up under scrutiny. I got genuinely good at chasing down lead quality. It was also an enormous amount of manual work — building lists, vetting sources, cross-checking contacts, trying to build something sales would actually trust.
Then AI changed the math.
What used to take a team of people manually verifying and enriching contact data can now happen in real time, at a scale no human team could match. That shift is what opened the door to intent-based marketing — and it’s the reason MD LeadFlow exists.
So What Is Intent-Based Marketing, Actually?
Most marketing still starts with a guess. You pick a demographic — say, homeowners aged 35 to 55 in Florida — and you hope enough of them happen to be in the market for what you’re selling right now. You’re broadcasting to a crowd and hoping the right people are standing in it.
Intent-based marketing flips that. Instead of guessing who might be interested, it identifies the specific, named person who is already showing you they’re interested — the homeowner who just spent 20 minutes reading about mortgage refinancing across three different sites this week. Real behavior, not demographic assumption. A name, a verified contact, and a score that tells you how seriously they’re shopping right now, before they ever pick up the phone or fill out a form.
It’s the same instinct that drove me crazy about the leads-vs-quality fight for twenty years, just solved properly: you don’t have to choose between volume and quality anymore, because the targeting itself is built on proof of interest instead of a hopeful guess.
That’s the short version of why I built this. The longer version — how it actually works, what it costs, and where I think the real, durable advantage is once everyone eventually has access to the same underlying data — is coming in the next post.
Meg Dubbs is the founder of MD Marketing & Design, helping businesses align strategy, design, marketing, sales, and technology to scale with purpose and clarity.