The Repo-Signal Qualification Standard: Route, Nurture, or Discard

Deciding whether one public repository signal about a prospect is qualified enough to hand an AE for outreach right now is a pass/fail call, and most teams make it by feel. This guide is the written definition of done: the criteria a repo-derived buying signal must meet to be graded Route, Nurture, or Discard, plus the checklist to verify it. It is for founders selling their own product, AEs, SDR leads, and partnerships teams who want two SDRs to reach the same verdict on the same signal instead of one routing a stargazer and another sitting on a competitor-repo PR from a funded buyer.

This is not a reference on what signals mean, nor a playbook for building account lists from manifests. It is the bar. Adopt it as team policy.

What "qualified enough to route" means

A repo signal is qualified enough to route when four conditions hold together: the actor is attributed to a named in-ICP employer, the event is fresh, the signal is consideration-tier or higher, and dedup is clean. Miss any one and the ceiling drops to Nurture or Discard. No single condition earns a Route on its own.

The reason this matters is economic. Product-qualified leads convert at five to six times the rate of marketing-qualified leads, and one benchmark set puts PQL-to-paid at a 32% median against a 19% MQL-to-SQL median. That lift is real, but it only survives if the signal is attributed and fresh. A signal worked at day 45, when intent has lost half its predictive value, is roughly a half-strength lead wearing a full-strength label.

5-6x

Three grades, and nothing in between:

• Route. Attributed to an in-ICP employer, event fresh (14 days or under), signal consideration-tier or higher, dedup clean. Hand to an AE inside SLA.
• Nurture. Real but not routable now: awareness-tier, decaying, in-ICP but under-corroborated, or attributed but unfunded. Keep warm, wait for a second signal.
• Discard. Unattributable, stale past the hard gate, out-of-ICP, or a dedup collision that belongs to someone else's motion.

Who owns this standard, and why it has to be written down

The standard has to be codified because the people who can write and interpret it are scarce relative to the people who execute it. In Refolk's index of professional profiles there are about 22,541 people holding SDR titles in the United States against roughly 388 in Revenue Operations and 295 in Developer Advocate or DevRel roles. Routing judgment cannot depend on those specialists being in the loop for every signal.

That is a ratio of one RevOps or DevRel person per 58 to 76 SDRs. The person who sets the routing rules and the person who reads repo context are structurally rare, so the grading logic has to live in a checklist an SDR can run alone, not in the head of someone who is not on shift.

Counts from Refolk's index. The read: interpretation is scarce, execution is not, so the standard must be tribal-proof.

Routing capacity also differs sharply by market, which matters if your signals span geographies but your team does not.

Counts from Refolk's index. A US-heavy signal flow into a UK-staffed team will back up unless the Discard bar does real work upstream.

number: 22,541
label: People holding SDR titles in the United States (Refolk's index)
note: Against roughly 388 RevOps and 295 DevRel, so the grading logic must be self-serve.