Remember – a good lead at a bad company is ultimately a bad lead.
Everyone benefits from having a list of all the people and companies that have been actively searching for your product or service this week, right? That’s been the promise of Intent data. GTM teams rely on that Intent signal and often waste even more of their valuable time and resources chasing down what amounts to bad leads. Clearly, intent models don’t work very well – they should’ve just trusted their gut, right?
Wrong. They should’ve trusted the data. As in, all the data. Not just intent. Relying on intent data alone is the error that pushes some many sales and marketing teams away from it. You need to remember, intent alone doesn’t paint the full picture necessary to target deals in the B2B world. In fact, intent data can even point us in the wrong direction and encourage our sales people to confidently jump into a rabbit hole that goes nowhere fast. Let’s explore how to use intent data effectively and avoid diving head-first into a pit of bad leads.
Why doesn’t Intent data work by itself?
Regular intent data identifies which companies are searching for selected topics but lacks specificity about who within the company is searching or where the searches are coming from. For example, if DoResearch Inc. is searching for one of your selected high-priority topics, you know there’s interest at the company level but not who specifically is searching for it or where the searches are coming from.
So how can you know where the searches are coming from? Metro-level Intent data delivers this by narrowing searches to a specific metro area. It provides metro-level signals saying that the search is coming from either a city area in the U.S. or countries globally. This means that the rep can look at the contacts or prospects in a city area and deduce that perhaps the interest is coming from a particular buyer.
To take targeting to the next level, businesses can determine whether a company is actually a good fit for their product – the needs, budget, industry alignment, or characteristics of past successful customers. Intent alone doesn’t reveal whether a company is likely to buy. To prioritize closeable business, sales teams need deeper insights beyond basic search activity, filtering potential buyers based on key qualifiers in the right order.
The cost of getting it wrong.
The opportunity cost of aiming at the wrong company and person when time is of the essence is significant. Start with the marketing investment for ABM media or event targeting. Add to it the sales teams spending hours a week in activation. Then add to it the hard cost of money spent on license costs from popular sales list vendors (such as LinkedIn Navigator), etc. It all adds up. Investing those resources would be worth it if the business was closeable, but with intent alone, salespeople don’t even know if it’s closeable!
What kind of insights does Intent data provide?
To get the absolute most out of your intent data, it’s important to understand the types of intent data, the insights they provide, and their limitations.
What Intent signals tell you:
- Buying Readiness: B2B intent signals indicate where a prospect is in the buying journey—whether they are in the awareness, consideration, or decision stage.
- Account Engagement: Tracking website visits, content downloads, and event attendance can reveal how engaged a target account is with your brand.
- Pain Points & Interests: The type of content a prospect engages with provides insights into their challenges and priorities.
- Decision-Making Influence: Different stakeholders within an organization interact with content differently, helping you identify champions and decision-makers.
- Competitive Research & Buying Timeline: If a lead is engaging with competitive comparison pages or looking at ROI calculators, they are likely evaluating multiple options.
What Intent signals don’t tell you:
- Budget & Decision Urgency: Just because a lead is engaging doesn’t mean they have an approved budget or immediate timeline.
- Internal Dynamics & Barriers: Intent signals don’t reveal internal blockers like competing priorities, leadership buy-in, or procurement roadblocks.
- Relationship Strength: A lead showing strong engagement might not necessarily favor your solution over competitors. Relationship-building is still crucial.
- Likelihood to Close: Intent data suggests interest but doesn’t guarantee conversion. Follow-up conversations are needed to validate and qualify further.
There are four types of Intent worth leveraging. Each has its own use case, but can also be leveraged against each other to gain a much deeper level of granularity in terms of figuring out how much interest a company or person has in your type of product or service.
Company Intent: See the companies that are searching your topics and competitors this week to know who is in the market.
- Know who is looking to buy and reach them first. Prioritize your outreach by knowing who is in the market now. Company Intent gives you a quick move on which companies are looking for you or your competitors. Some companies use the strength of these scores to indicate timing – score of thirty means to start engaging, fifty means likely within 90 days, 70+ means the deal is likely to close in 30-60 days.
Metro-Level Intent: Use their locations to identify the specific people you need to engage with at a target account.
- See which U.S. city or country is the source of that intent. Metro intent signals take global intent signals and make them local. By leveraging metro-intent data with engagement scores, GTM teams can figure out the specific people in a region who are already engaged and significantly enhance their sales and marketing efforts with more targeted campaigns, leading to better customer engagement, higher conversion rates, and ultimately, increased revenue.
Product Intent: Know which product they’re searching to understand the problems they’re looking to solve for personalized outreach.
- Know when someone is searching for each of your specific products with product-level Intent signals to gain valuable insight into the specific problems a target is looking to solve.
Website / First-Party Intent: See who has been on your website – get an idea of how strongly they’ve considered your solution.
- Website / First-Party Intent: See company and personal IP addresses visiting your website. Our website visitor intelligence delivers real-time identity matching from tens of millions of IP addresses to give actionable insights for personalized response management.
How to leverage intent data effectively.
As mentioned earlier – by using it in combination with the rest of your buying signals.
For intent data to work, it’s critical that it’s applied in conjunction with other predictive models at the right stage as you sort your opportunities to prioritize closeable business:
Step #1: Use a Propensity / Fit model across your Total Addressable Market (TAM) to identify the companies with a High-Fit score, meaning they firmographically match your ICP (to identify the right companies).
Step #2: Use an Intent model to score those High-Fit companies, looking for all the companies with High-Intent scores (to identify the ready companies).
*High-Fit companies with Medium or Low Intent should be put into nurture campaigns.
Step #3: Look at all the people within those High-Fit / High-Intent companies and use a Persona model to score them – focus on those people with the highest Persona scores (to identify the right people).
Step #4: Take the people who have the highest Persona scores from High-Fit / High-Intent companies and sort them by your first-party Engagement scores (to find the ready people).
Remember, always start with Fit or lookalike scores. If the company does not Fit your ICP, it doesn’t matter how much intent or engagement they have. – pursuing them will be a waste of time and resources. Most companies fail to carry out this critical step.
Additionally, intent alone doesn’t take you all the way to the specific person or buyer to pursue within a company. To find the right people we need to apply persona and engagement scoring models to our High-Intent companies. This means looking at whether the buyer is “your kind of buyer” and that they’ve been active on your website or marketing programs.
By leveraging intent data at the right stage in our prioritization efforts, we can identify the right person within the right company at the right time. By optimizing our lead or prospecting prioritization efforts with all four models, we can significantly improve our odds of closeable business and minimize the waste spent on pursuing leads that aren’t likely to pan out.
Stay tuned for more Intent blogs where we’ll dive deeper into the types of insights you can gain from leveraging all four types of Intent. In the meantime, check out Leadspace’s Intent Guide for more information about Intent.
