The growing need to focus on sales pipeline acceleration in high-growth B2B companies has brought Intent Data to the forefront of conversations, especially among teams driving revenue growth – ABM, Sales, and Customer teams.

Here’s our honest attempt at understanding this fad and decoding ‘Intent Data’ in a way that any sales reps or marketing person can use it as a go-to guide. 

Definition of Intent Data

Sales reps can target prospects based on their online behavioral signals through Intent Data. Prospects could be actively searching for your product or service category through content sources like online communities, social media, blogs or gated content which shows their intent for future purchase. And as they research, they leave behind a digital trail (intent signals) which moves them down the funnel and becomes potential customers for B2B sales reps. 

With a principle understanding of intent data, you would be better placed to pick the right intent data type for your business.

Types Of Intent Data

● First party: Data available within your company CRM, website, sales collaterals, cookies, or app usage generally fall under this category. 

● Third Party: Prospects researching online leave a footprint of their search, which aids in mapping the consumer journey & purchase intent. Third party publications provide access to this journey, giving you a peek into brand searches & competition searches. They also provide firmographic & technographic data sets through website scraping & researching business directories. 

How To Use Intent Data For Conversions

• Pick Interest Signals for Targeted Sales Engagement Outreach – Use offline company-organized events to mine for customer data. Gauge interest signals via questions, questionnaire forms and feedback received.
• Content Personalization – Behavioral insights from company websites, sales collateral enable you to tailor your message for a high intent purchase segment. This way you narrow your search to a select few ready to move through the funnel.
• Create Meaningful Conversations at the Right Buyer Stage – Boosting SDR outreach with individual/account-level insights help your team to strike a conversation even if they are not ready to purchase immediately. 
• Storytelling through Case Studies – Data from your CRM, campaigns, and social media can effectively build case studies that take potential prospects through your process. This way they know you can effectively help them through their problem with a proven solution.
• Asset Tagging: You can tag your assets with specific keywords, and set them on filter search so as to show results only in accordance to client campaign specifications. CALS platform by Marketboats enriches your content by using this asset tagging methodology. Through this, you can schedule campaigns for the right customer segment for greater impact.

Maximizing The Power Of Intent Data for Sales Teams

• Faster turnaround time: Intent Data cuts down on the TAT for any sales rep as they don’t need to get stuck in the rut of cold emails and cold calls, and pursue prospects with multiple follow-ups, as the SDRs can directly target those already in the market actively looking for a solution. 

• Better quality of leads: Intent data bridges the gap between MQLs and SQLs, by focusing on intent-driven messages at the MQL stage thereby narrowing the lead volume to a select few high intent prospects for sales reps.

• Moves users swiftly through the sales pipeline: Since prospects are aligned to your message via intent data, there are lesser chances of users dropping off the funnel.

• Identifies customer pain points accurately: Intent data picks relevant prospect signals early on and removes the guesswork involved in projecting the right message in outreach.

• Pushes for conversions through a targeted approach: With intent data, the prospects reach is narrowed down to those searching for your solution thereby improving sales effectiveness.

• Granular account-level information: Account level information encourages a deep dive into the prospects position in decision making, competitor research, and other pain points they are actively searching for. It builds relationships early on and positions you as the first point of contact during purchase consideration. 

A Boon For Marketing Professionals

Besides SDRs, marketing teams can use B2B intent data to create valuable marketing assets that move a prospect forward towards conversion  

Better understanding of the consumer allows marketers to study:

• Type of content consumed by users
• Frequency of downloading reports, engagement with sales email, ads, and so on.
• Assessing how aware are the prospects about your product or service.

Subtle valuable signals

Marketers can pick cues from sign-ups for sales collaterals, an uptick in website traffic, or ads interaction to know how often the prospects engage with the brand. This helps segment the audience for better product-market fit and personalize for better user experiences.

Intent data Mistakes To Avoid (and ways to overcome them)

While it can help you learn about your prospect better, it is not a quick fix. Here are some mistakes to avoid and ways to overcome them.

#Mistake 1: Overlooking the significance of Data Quality

50% of marketers state obscurity in the quality of the intent data as the biggest challenge they face. They count on first-party intent data more, as it’s proprietary whereas third-party intent data is not always reliable.

Solution: Use intent data from keyword scraping keeping in mind that it can be a hit or a miss.

#Mistake 2: Ineffective Data Unification

Companies even after acquiring high-quality intent data are unable to maximize its use. They experience failure in effectively communicating and acting on it jointly.

Solution: Making intent data accessible to teams by incorporating it in the Martech and sales tech stack.

#Mistake 3: Stopping invigilation of intent after customer conversion

Marketers and salespeople make use of intent data for client acquisition and miss out on using it for existing clients. 

Solution: Tracking the intent of the existing clients, assisting with their needs, and making sure whether they are content with the services. Cross-selling and up-selling become easier in the case of existing clients than acquiring new clients.

Wrapping it Up

Gone are the days of cold outreach and spam mails, hence a deeper understanding of the prospect through Intent Mapping will give you a head-start over competition and aid in personalized outreach. You can draw them to thought leadership pieces, engage them in social media conversations employing a problem & solution approach or even create content assets specifically for them.

At Marketboats, we connect via API with leading B2B intent data providers to qualify and enrich every lead. Moreover, our proprietary Lead Platform CALS uses asset tagging, whereby the prospective outreach list gets qualified to intent-based target account list building a comprehensive lead profile. Reach out to get a Free Demo of our automated Intent Data Enrichment Process.