Pass-around detection: when your prospect carries the box into their boss's office

On every B2B revenue team I have worked with, there is a moment in the sales cycle that nobody knows how to instrument. The champion takes whatever you sent them — a deck, a demo recording, a printed report — and walks it into their boss's office. Or their CFO's office. Or onto a Zoom with the entire buying committee.

That moment is the strongest signal you will ever get from a deal in progress. It means a real person at a real company decided your material was worth showing to a second human. It means your buying committee has expanded by one, and the expansion happened without being asked.

Until boxli, you had no way to detect it.

The shape of pass-around in the wild

We see three modes of pass-around in pilot data:

• Champion → boss in the same office. The box gets carried to another desk in the same building. Different IP, sometimes different floor, but the geo bounding box overlaps.
• Cross-site internal share. A regional VP gets the box, then carries it to HQ on a Tuesday flight. New scan, new place, same send.
• External share. Less common, but a recipient takes the box to a partner meeting or shows it to a peer at a different company. Different geo, different network.

All three look the same in our data: the same send_id reports engagement events from two or more distinct places.

How we detect it

Every engagement event carries an optional place_id and place_label, resolved from the device's lat/lng via Google Places before the event hits the ingest endpoint. If place resolution fails, we fall back to the raw coordinates with a coarse rounding tolerance.

The trigger config that ships by default looks like this:

{
  type: 'pass_around',
  config: {
    distinct_places_threshold: 2,
    window_days: 14,
    allow_repeat: false
  },
  actions: ['slack']
}

On every event, the evaluator pulls the touched contact_engagement_rollup row, checks whether places_shared just crossed the threshold, and fires exactly once per send. The rollup view does the heavy lifting:

COUNT(DISTINCT place_id)
  FILTER (WHERE place_id IS NOT NULL)
  AS places_shared

That's the entire pass-around detection — one aggregate column on a per-send rollup. The complexity is in the upstream telemetry: making sure the brochure firmware reports geo on every play, that the QR redirect captures the IP-to-place at scan time, and that NFC tap events surface the device's coarse location when the recipient permits it.

Why we ship it on by default

Most engagement scoring stacks weight three or four signal types equally. Pass-around shouldn't be one of those — in every operator funnel I've modeled, sends that trigger pass_around close at multiples of the rate of sends that only ever surface a first_scan or re_engagement event. We'll publish the actual multiplier from our pilot cohort once it graduates; we're deliberately not throwing a number out before the data backs it.

Even before the pilot data lands, the logic is straightforward. Pass-around isn't a proxy for "they liked the box." It's a proxy for they showed it to someone with budget.

The follow-up play

When pass_around fires, the rep has a 30-minute window to act. The play we recommend on demos:

1. Don't reach out to the original recipient first. Wait. They're busy talking to the second viewer.
2. Look up the second place. If the geo resolves to a known office of the same company, you have a named site for the second viewer. Pull it from your HubSpot company record.
3. Send a same-day follow-up to the original recipient: "Saw your team got the box — want me to send a second one to [name of second viewer if you can guess from the location]?"
4. Offer a meeting that includes both people. The buying committee just expanded; meet them where they are.

Tuning it for your funnel

Two knobs to turn:

• distinct_places_threshold. Default 2. If you have a lot of field reps who travel with samples, bump to 3 to filter internal-only pass-around.
• window_days. Default 14. Longer windows catch slower-cycle deals; shorter windows catch the "same week" champion pushes.

Both are editable from the campaign settings panel. We'll keep the defaults conservative — better a missed alert than a noisy Slack channel.

If you want to see pass-around detection on your own pipeline, apply for a pilot. We'll set the triggers up for you on the kickoff call.