What is Readiness to Buy (the axis)?

Readiness to Buy is the axis of the Demand Compass that reads internal momentum: something moving inside this account that makes the problem you solve urgent today instead of someday. You do not get to decide when a company develops an internal reason to buy. The CFO does not free up budget because you wrote a clever subject line. So readiness is not a persuasion problem but a detection problem, and the whole game becomes three verbs: see it sooner than your competitors, read it more accurately, and move faster when it appears.

Signals sort into three levels. The industry level is a regulatory change or a technology trend that moves a whole market at once. The company level is a funding round, a new VP of Sales arriving with a mandate, an acquisition, a public security incident. The lead level is the behavior a person emits while working the problem: repeated visits to pricing and docs, a free-tier signup that gets used, a stack-revealing job post. The signal we trust most is a new revenue leader in their first ninety days; by some counts a newly hired executive spends as much as eighty percent of their early budget inside that window. After a signal like that fires, you usually have thirty to sixty days before the account shortlists without you.

Most teams think they have solved this axis by switching on an intent tool, and then misread it in three ways: treating one signal as readiness when readiness is a composite, reading the signal at the person instead of the account, and ignoring decay. A docs visit this week is live; the same visit seven months ago is archaeology.