I've been in B2B sales for over 20 years, and in that time I've been handed some questionable leads. It comes with the territory. But nothing quite prepared me for the pizza van.
I was working at a B2B outreach agency at the time, running lead generation campaigns for clients. The whole job was about finding the right businesses, getting in front of the right people, and handing sales teams pipeline they could actually close. One Tuesday morning I opened my lead allocation for the week and there it was. A single-operator mobile pizza van, sitting in my queue like it belonged there.
I'd love to tell you I saw the funny side immediately. I didn't. I was frustrated, not at the pizza van itself (it's a perfectly respectable business) but at the fact that it had made it through the process at all. We were selling B2B services with deal values that would represent years of revenue for a one-person catering operation. The idea that someone had looked at this lead and thought "yes, that fits" was genuinely baffling.
I raised it with my manager, who to their credit removed it from my allocation straight away. Problem solved, on the surface at least.
The pizza van wasn't actually the problem
Here's the thing that kept nagging at me: the pizza van wasn't a mistake in the traditional sense. Nobody had accidentally fat-fingered a contact into the wrong field. It had come through the same process as every other lead, sourced, loosely qualified, and allocated just like everything else. The process that produced it wasn't broken in an obvious way. It was broken in a systemic way, and the pizza van was just the moment that made it impossible to ignore.
What had actually happened was straightforward. Marketing had a quota to hit. Not a revenue quota, not a quality quota, but a volume quota. A number. X leads by end of month. And they'd hit it, so on paper, mission accomplished. Nobody in that process was measured on whether the leads they generated matched the profile of a business that could actually buy what we were selling, wanted to buy it, or had ever bought anything like it. The metric was quantity, and quality was apparently someone else's problem.
Except it wasn't someone else's problem. It was mine, and it was every rep on the floor. The pizza van was just the most visible symptom of something that was costing us quietly and invisibly every single week.
The leads that hurt you most aren't the pizza vans
That's the real irony of it. The pizza van was easy. I spotted it, flagged it, and it was gone in five minutes. The leads that actually damage a sales team are the ones that look right on the surface: the company that's the right size, the right industry, with the right job titles in the right roles, but something's slightly off. The budget isn't really there. The timing's wrong. The buying process doesn't match how you sell. The champion is enthusiastic but has no actual authority to sign anything.
Those leads don't get flagged. They get worked, for weeks, sometimes months. Meetings get booked, decks get sent, proposals get written, and then eventually, usually at the worst possible moment at the end of a quarter when you really needed that deal, it dies. And when you look back at it honestly, the signals were there from day one. You just didn't have a system for reading them.
That's the version of the pizza van problem that costs companies millions every year. Not the obvious misfits, but the subtle ones that consume time, energy and optimism before quietly going nowhere.
Why this keeps happening
I've spent two decades watching this play out at company after company, and the root cause is almost always the same. Nobody has properly defined what a good customer actually looks like, not based on data, not weighted by what actually predicts a win, and not specific to their company's own history of success and failure. Most companies have an ICP of some kind, usually living in a slide deck somewhere or a line in the sales playbook: "mid-market SaaS, 50-200 employees, Series A or above." But that's a description, not a scoring system. It doesn't tell a rep whether the deal in front of them is an 85 or a 23. It doesn't tell marketing which accounts are worth targeting. It doesn't tell a VP Sales whether the pipeline they're looking at is healthy or quietly full of slow-moving, quota-destroying noise.
It's a starting point that nobody ever finishes.
The frustrating thing is that the data to do this properly already exists. It's sitting in the CRM. Every deal you've ever won contains a pattern: industry, company size, tech stack, deal value, sales cycle length, lead source, decision-maker level. Together, those data points tell you exactly who your ideal customer is, weighted by importance, specific to your company's own history. Not a generic framework built in a strategy workshop, not a guess dressed up as a persona. Your actual data, telling you your actual winning pattern.
For most of my career, extracting that pattern meant weeks of spreadsheet work by someone in RevOps if it happened at all, which meant it rarely happened, which meant most teams kept guessing. And kept getting pizza vans.
Why I built Telepath
I built Telepath because I got tired of watching good salespeople waste their time and talent on deals that were never going to close. Not because they weren't good enough, but because nobody gave them the information they needed to make better decisions earlier.
Telepath analyses your closed-won deals, finds the patterns that predict a win at your specific company, and scores every open opportunity against those patterns. Every deal gets a T-Score from 0 to 100, written directly into your CRM so your reps see it in HubSpot or Pipedrive without changing a single thing about how they work. It's not a replacement for good salespeople. It's what good salespeople actually deserve: the information to back their instincts with data.
It started with a pizza van. But it's for every subtle misfit that's been quietly draining your pipeline ever since.
One question worth sitting with
Think about the last quarter. How much of your team's time went on deals that, in hindsight, were never going to close? Not the obvious ones, but the ones that looked plausible, that had a few good meetings, that sat in the pipeline for two or three months before disappearing. Now multiply that by your average rep cost, across your whole team. That's the real cost of not knowing your ICP.
If you want to see what your own data reveals about who you should actually be selling to, and who your team should stop wasting time on, it takes three minutes and costs nothing.
See your free ICP report → telepath.pro
Tom Pople is the founder of Telepath Pro, pipeline intelligence that scores every deal in your CRM against your real winning patterns. Before Telepath, he spent 20 years in B2B sales and watched great teams lose to the same avoidable problem over and over again.