Buying intent 101: How to accelerate your growth with best-fit leads

Selling from cold takes time, patience, and perseverance. But what if you could skip ahead in the buyer journey? What if you could see who was already in-market for your solution and target them directly?

Outbound sales doesn’t just equate to cold-emailing and cold-calling. With the right intelligence, you can focus your outreach on leads whose purchase intent is already warm and accelerate your sales processes accordingly.

B2B buyer intent data enables you to do just that. In this blog, we’ll explore the power of purchase intent, how to measure its value, and how B2B sales teams can use it to fuel revenue growth.

Benefits of using B2B intent data

Of your total addressable market (TAM), only a small proportion of prospects is actively considering a purchase at any one time. This is especially true for high-value B2B products or solutions, where many things (budget, business priorities, pain points, etc.) have to align in order for a purchase to be made.

What you’re looking for is known as the “Zero Moment of Truth” (ZMOT): the time at which your prospect is really ready and willing to buy. Finding a solution has become an active priority for them and they’re converging on making a purchasing decision.

Buying intent data allows you to pinpoint that small proportion of your TAM who are in the market to buy and nearing that ZMOT. By leveraging this data to inform your go-to-market strategy, refine your pitching tactics, and feed your pipeline, you can boost your sales productivity and focus on closing deals faster.

Types of B2B intent data

There’s no shortage of B2B intent data providers in the market today - but they don’t all offer the same insights.

So what is intent data specifically? B2B intent data comes in two forms:

1. Predictive intent or predictive analytics

Historical data and analytics are used to make predictions about future purchasing trends. Data modelling of this kind can help you strategize around longer-term buying trends and informs marketing teams who want to anticipate customer interests. However, it’s not so actionable for sales teams who want to identify specific, high-intent leads.

2. Intent data or intent monitoring

This is the data left in the digital footprints of your prospects and your competitors. Billions of behavioral signals are collected across the internet that show who's engaging with your competitors, the type of content prospects are consuming, what they're showing interested in, etc. 

Intent data can also be categorised according to where it is sourced:

• First-party data is the information your organisation captures internally via your website. This data might be actively submitted if your prospect fills in a form) or passively recorded (through analytics or tracking software).
• Third-party data is information compiled externally from a range of sources (such as cookies, IP data, social media etc.)

The problem with relying solely on first-party intent data is that though it might be more reliable (coming directly from the source: your prospect), it depends on your prospect already being aware of your business and actively visiting your website.

Third-party data, on the other hand, gives you visibility over new leads who are in the market to buy but might not be aware you exist yet. 

Finding the best B2B intent data provider for your sales

The next question is: how do you find the best intent signals for your business? Or, to put it another way: what do you want your buying intent signals to look like?

You need your intent signals to be precise and detailed enough for them to be actionable. The data provider should save you time on manual intent research and lead qualification, so if they're unreliable, your productivity could actually suffer.

And of course, if your signals are too vague, you’ll struggle to hit prospects at their Zero Moment of Truth.

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So as a salesperson, you need signals that take into account:

Context: how confident you can be that the prospect has high intent?

What is the signal based on?

Many intent data providers rely on companies searching for keywords on the internet and turn this into intent signals. 

Keywords can indicate buying intent, but they don’t always give you enough context to be very reliable. Keyword searches are traced back to domain and IP addresses, but not to the individuals who conducted the search.

You also have to consider the fact that not all keywords represent equal levels of intent; whilst transactional keywords (eg. "Amplemarket pricing", "buy Amplemarket now") can indicate strong immediate intent, other commercial keywords can be more vague (eg. "sales enablement tools" "ai platform for sales") and hard to verify.

You should always look for intent signals that give you strong context for your prospect’s interest.

Example: Amplemarket's Buying Intent Signals show you which prospects actively engaging with your competitors and showing an interest in their product or solution:

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Timing: prospects who are looking to purchase soon.

You're trying to get a clear picture of where your prospect currently sits in their buying journey. The more precise your intent signals, the more timely and impactful your outreach will be.

Example: Amplemarket allows you to detect high-intent prospects in a specific date range:

Relevance: prospects who are qualified for your solution and would derive value from it.

Understanding exactly what your prospect is looking for allows you to anticipate their needs and start preparing your approach.

Example: With Amplemarket, you can search for leads engaging with specific competitors. From this information, you can organize your pitch to factor in how your solution trumps your competitor's.

Some B2B intent data vendors will only provide you with account-level signals; for instance, "someone at Company XYZ is looking at solutions like yours". The issue with this is that it can be hard to pin-point the appropriate decision-makers you should be approaching in large accounts. 

In contrast, Amplemarket allows you to identify the precise individuals engaging with your competitors (as shown above) so you can reach out to the relevant contact straight away.

How to use intent data i nB2B sales

By now you’ll understand how quality intent data enables you to focus on the most high-priority leads. Here’s what that means in practice:

1. Supplementing your pipeline

Buying intent data allows you to fuel your pipeline with high-intent, qualified leads at the middle of the funnel and improve your ICP penetration. It offers an alternative to top-of-funnel (TOFU) lead generation that helps ensure your business is consistently fuelled by new opportunities and growing sustainably.

2. Shortening sales cycles

Lead generation, qualification, and other TOFU processes are energy and time intensive. Intent data enables you to pick out prospects who are more advanced in the buyer journey and accelerate your sales processes for better productivity.

3. Competitive intelligence

Understanding who’s talking to your competitors should be a key part of your go-to-market strategy. You can segment your approach or identify new markets where you notice people engaging with specific competitors for specific reasons.

4. Churn prevention

Intent data isn’t only useful for new lead generation; it also offers insights into your existing customer base. You can identify early signs of churn if you notice customers engaging with competitors and take steps that address their concerns to safeguard your business.

Implementing B2B intent data in sales processes

Meeting prospects at the Zero Moment of Truth is the key to growing your business sustainably, efficiently, and effectively. Whether you’re identifying brand new prospects, identifying churn risks, or engaging with competitor’s customers, buying intent data gives your selling strategy a new level of precision and helps you focus your efforts in the right place at the right time.

If you’re not yet leveraging buying intent data, you could be missing out on your next best opportunities!

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Learn more about Amplemarket’s Buying Intent Signals here or sign up for a free demo to learn how next-level intelligence can benefit your business!