The calling operation was built for coverage. As the company scaled, the instinct was to reach every lead and let none slip, and for a long time that was right. Then the volume outgrew the capacity to act on it. More leads arrived than the team could ever call, and coverage quietly stopped being a strategy.
The real question was no longer how to call more, but who to call first, and that is a question about intent, not volume. I came at it from the marketing side, where the leads were generated, and worked across into how the calling actually ran. Using what we already knew about a lead at the point of enquiry, I found a way to rank them by how likely they were to convert rather than how recently they had arrived.
That became our first intent tiers. It was a coarse cut, built on a thin slice of what we could have known, but it was the moment the operation started prioritising on intent instead of coverage. What it could not yet tell us was which calls were not worth making at all. That came next.