Intent Signals 101

If you’ve been in GTM for long, you’ve gotten excited about “intent” data. ? The ability to know who is searching for your product and directly target them sounds so powerful. ? And, if you’ve ever seen a demo with bombora data, you probably have said “where can I buy?”? ? But it isn’t that simple and in most cases people are disappointed by the failed promises of “intent.???

This article was inspired by this post + a parallel thread that exploded in the GTMfund slack. ? In the course of writing this article, I’ve talked with 40+ sales and marketing leaders, including the leaders of most intent companies.?

Here is everything I now know about intent and how to leverage it.

To get you excited... here is a wicked good airtable with GTM plays (most driven by intent data) from Ben Salzman @ Zoom Info

Intent Data:? A Quick Definition

Intent data is understanding behavior of your target buyers and (ideally) leveraging that data to improve your targeting and conversion through the early stages of your funnel.??

First, It is important to differentiate between account and contact-level intent data.??

• Account Intent: Tells you that an account is consuming content associated with the business challenge you solve, competitor, or your solution.? It can be hard (and creepy) to ping individuals when you know the account is engaging.? This is valuable mostly at the marketing spend level.? Much of 3rd party intent is at the account level
• Contact Intent: ?Tells you that a specific person is consuming relevant content/taking actions that indicate they may be considering tools such as yours. While this is much more actionable by sales, it can also drive event strategy & help maximize media efficiency in the more expensive channels (CTV, direct mail, video).

Not all intent data is the same.? There are three buckets of intent data:

Other Areas Not Actually Intent Data

Intent data indicates if your prospect/customer is displaying interest in your (and your competitors’) product.? There are a number of other “signals” that aren’t actually intent but which can be useful:

• Job Changes: ?This is becoming commoditized but can help provide a reason to reach out at a key moment.
• Relationship Mapping: ?Looking at the email / LinkedIn graph of your company/champions to figure out the best path.? Vendors here include Connect the Dots , the swarm,vector.co , Bronto…
• Scraping:? Firmographic insights from sending bots out to websites. This includes scraping job listings, website content and 3rd party websites

1st Party Intent: Low Hanging Fruit

Understanding how your target buyers are engaging with your website, product and teams can dramatically improve your funnel.? Some great examples of this include:

• Knowing who is engaging with your content and where they are exploring on the website.? Traditional Marketing Automation Platforms (MAP) like Hubspot and Marketo tell you the behavior of people who identify themselves by filling out a form or clicking on an email link. ? For people who haven’t identified themselves (who fills out forms before they are ready to buy?) you can use deanonymization tools that use IP addresses to infer the company and (in some cases) individual.? Roughly 25% of anonymous traffic can be identified through these techniques, although it can vary widely depending on your buyer. To maximize success look for a provider that waterfalls multiple providers (eg combining 6sense, Clearbit, etc). See MadKudu 's teardown comparing RB2B and Clearbit
• Understanding the behaviors your customers are taking in the product to prioritize which accounts to focus on. ? Product data is complicated with many more data items than a typical MAP can handle.? Product data can range from very simple triggers like "approaching the limits of current plan" and "consolidation of multiple free plans into a team plan" to more complex triggers like "usage of features correlated to the buying intent of an enterprise plan".? Using AI, you can surface the right triggers for sales.
• Marketing Engagement Data: ?What people are engaging with on your website, the events they are attending and other key engagement.??
• There are a ton more 1st party intent data sources.? While the two above are the most common, there are a number of other 1st part sources listed above that you can operationalize (see table above for details list)

“Which intent signals carries the weight depends entirely on the goal. For example. if the focus is finding expansions in existing users you're going to lean heavily on product usage data vs. building pipeline might mean more emphasis on anonymized website visitors data”? Sandy Mangat @ Pocus

2nd Party Intent:? Expensive but effective in certain circumstances

Review sites (i.e. G2, Trust Radius, and Tech Target) sell their data on what visitors are searching for.? This data is highly actionable but expensive.? Before you pay for 2nd party intent data, think about your GTM strategy:

• Are your buyers searching on review sites? ?Do you hear your buyers mentioned G2 …. in Gong calls???
• Have you optimized your profiles on these sites?? It costs very little to do this and assuming these review sites are a part of your buyer’s research, you should definitely do that.
• How big is your TAM? ?If your TAM is huge it is ok if you aren’t in every deal.? Additionally, reps are less likely to prioritize specific signals when the TAM is huge.? If it is small, you can’t afford not to see every deal and may want to consider 2nd party intent
• Are there other ways to be in every deal?? At Culture Amp we used (and improved) on Gainsight’s community strategy to make sure we were in virtually every deal.?
• Is your win rate high on deals you aren’t first to the table? ? If you win a high percentage then your goal should be to be in every deal and 2nd party intent may be a great strategy.? But if you are consistently losing to competition, paying to be in more competitive deals (when people are on review sites, deals are likely to be competitive) likely won’t have a high ROI.? In those cases, invest in your product and competitive positioning.

Ecosystem data is an emerging type of 2nd party intent.? Crossbeam has pioneered the ability to compare your customer list with that of a partner and discover shared customers without sharing any extraneous data.? While some of this data may not be “intent per se” if you are smart about your partner motion, you can use partner relationships to accelerate your pipeline.? From Alex Poulos , here are some fascinating questions you can divine from your ecosystem.??

1. Which partners a prospect is already a customer of?
2. Which partners have a prospect as an open opportunity?
3. What is the impact of this partner in the lifecycle of a customer?
4. Who is the right contact in a partner to help me get a warm intro?
5. Who is the true decision maker in this prospect based on purchasing behavior from my ecosystem?

3rd Party Intent:? Promise > Reality?

3rd party intent is always sexy.? The ability to buy a list of who is searching for what you do sounds amazing BUT:

• It won’t be broadly applicable: ?At any point in time, only about 5% of your potential market is actively looking to make a purchase .?
• You will capture a very low percentage of your TAM:? After you consider the challenges of the data itself (for example: mobile traffic won’t have an IP unless it is logged on to wifi), figure you’ll get data on only 1-2% of your TAM
• If you aren’t in an established category, the data may not be relevant: ?If people are searching to learn rather than with intent to buy, this data won’t be actionable?
• It isn’t binary: ?You have to nail your topics and ensure that they are ones tracked by the vendors. ? And… did you pick the right topics or keywords?
• There are a ton of false signals: Will add examples in future
• If you aren’t in the consideration set, intent data won’t likely change that: ?If a buyer has a few vendors they think can address their needs and you aren’t in it, it is hard to change that.??

Virtually every GTM leader I’ve spoke with struggles to get value out of 3rd party intent data.? However if you want to go down the road, prioritize areas where you can help improve team’s focus vs.? looking at intent data to drive specific leads / deal acceleration

• Marketing ??? 3rd party intent can help improve advertising efficiency by prioritizing accounts with better signals
• Account Executives ??:? 3rd party intent doesn’t accelerate deal cycles and reps often find it unactionable and may not prioritize it
• Prospecting ?? 3rd party intent can help outbound teams on where to focus their scarce time.??
• Expansion/Retention ?? Reps are working with fuzzy signals anyway so intent data can help them further focus

If you are rolling up your sleeves on 3rd party intent, here are some ways to pick intent topics

• Start with 300+ domains that you have closed won deals on and the mo/year that deal closed.
• Look back 12-18 months depending on sales cycle
• Look at the top 12-5o topics consumed by those example 300

“Third-party intent data does not show a lift in response rates from setter outreach, but it does show a placebo effect with SDRs and AEs working accounts more when they are told that there is intent.”? ? Sam Levan , CEO of MadKudu

“Some SDRs, individually, don't see the impact. Going from a 1% to a 2% success rate is a MASSIVE improvement, but moving from 99% to 98% reject or ignore? As an individual, you don't feel that change much. Teams that measure results overall though? They see higher quota attainment.”? Anonymous

If you do start to consider 3rd party intent data, you should audit the data from the vendor as follows:

• Give the vendor a list of domains and SQO dates and look for signals 14-28d before sales qualified opportunity (pipeline) dates.??
• Get the signals they have for those to see if they are in any way predictive
• If a provider can’t give you that… don’t use them

Operationalizing Intent

“Operationalizing intent is so so so important. I talk to so many companies who have 3, 4, 5 intent sources but sellers actually do very little with it.”? Sam Levan , CEO of MadKudu

Once you have the data (see below for more details on each type), you then need to integrate it into your funnel and trigger the right plays for your sales team.? Some key things to think about here include:

• Scoring: Ideally you can merge data from all intent sources into a single lead score that can learn over time. ? This is one of the key reasons I invested in MadKudu early because I loved how the scoring model learned over time and they translated signals into actions.?

“A good scoring model is the foundation of the sales and marketing alignment. You know you have a good model when (1) Sales understands and trusts your scoring (2) your model is updated as your business change (3) it includes all the signals you have, whatever the system they came from and (4) you’ve made it actionable your sellers.” ? Sam Levan , CEO of MadKudu

• Speed: ?Like a demo form, intent decays remarkably fast?

“Intent data needs to be actioned the same day to make the most use of it.? Intent loses a lot of value a week later and is almost worthless a few weeks later.”? Tido , CEO of Koala

• Content:? Once you know that prospects are interested in your solution, you’ll want to build content to engage them.? This later stage “Bottom of funnel” (BOFU) content can drive higher conversions when visitors engage with it (often similar to demo forms).? Typical BOFU content:?
• Marketing optimization:? With this data you can use it to optimize marketing to more engaged prospects.? It has got very challenging to maintain a good ROAS. Display ads is almost dead for most B2B marketers. But you can get great returns by creating audiences based on 1st/2nd party intent, around specific use case and using account/function/seniority targeted ads on LinkedIn for those companies that show intent.??
• Sales Motion:? Warm outbound is all about the value add vs. the cold sell.? Here are some strategies
• Measure ROI: ??A lot of money is spent buying data but it is very hard to monitor the incremental value of this data.? Some ways you can measure this include:

"There's a common misconception in b2b; that intent is a sales thing, and a sales thing almost exclusively. As an ex bombora & ZI revenue lead, I conversely view 3p intent as having the biggest value in mid and upper funnel. If your TAM is 25k accts and we assume 10-20 contact buyer/exec cohort, thats not only a 500k audience but also potentially 10m impressions a month. When thinking about CTV, video, and paid social as more expensive channels, wouldn't you want to invest in those channels IF a brand is showing signs of life on the problem you solve, your product, or your competitors?? Even if you only trimmed off the bottom half of less behaviorally in market, thats a win."? Dave Zahner ? ex Bombora, ZoomInfo, current: The 5x5 Co-op