How to leverage B2B competitive intelligence to find qualified leads

How do your leads perceive your product or service? How does it compare to your competitors? What are your ICP’s purchasing priorities?

To answer these questions (and many more), we turn to competitive intelligence. It’s all very well believing you have the best solution, product, and go-to-market strategy, but taking a closer look at your competitors can help you see things from your prospect’s point of view and identify who's in the market to buy. 

In this blog, we’ll dive into some competitive intelligence and buying intent techniques and tools that can help you get an edge over your competitors and identify some of your hottest leads. We’ll draw on the expertise of our Head of Customer Success, Cara, to explain how Amplemarket can integrate this sophisticated intelligence into your everyday selling.

What is B2B competitive intelligence?

Broadly speaking, competitive intelligence is used to define your business’s positioning in your market and how you compare to competitors. That means collecting data such as:

• What your competitors are currently developing
• Who they’re talking to - whether it’s other companies, partners, or customers
• Metrics on competitor marketing performance (think website traffic, social media growth, SEO)
• Customer satisfaction on competitors

All of which can help you consolidate your Ideal Customer Profile and refine your sales pitch according to:

• Where your product or service sits in comparison
• What your unique value proposition is
• Exactly who you should be targeting
• How you can reach your customer base ahead of competitors
• When is the best time to reach out to prospects
• Whether your pricing is reasonable and realistic

These are critical considerations that too many B2B GTM plans gloss over! But being aware of the competitive landscape around your product or service doesn’t just help you create a more convincing sales pitch in general; it also means you’re better prepared to deal with buyer objections and to highlight how you’re the best at solving particular pain-points.

And obviously, competitive intelligence isn’t just important for your sales team. It’s crucial for your product team to ensure your offering remains competitive, relevant, and in-demand. It’s also invaluable for marketers, who can use keyword research, retargeting campaigns, and lookalike audiences to get you noticed over competition.

Using B2B competitive intelligence for purchase intent

Asides from giving you a clearer picture of what your competitors are up to, competitive intelligence can also help you identify prospect buying intent - or in other words, which leads are particularly likely to make a purchase soon.

These are “golden leads” because they’re already:

• Pain-aware: aware of a pain-point they need to solve
• Solution-aware: actively researching or engaging with solution-providers
• Potentially sales-qualified: if they’re demoing or negotiating competitor products or services, they’re seriously considering a purchase.

…All of which means they skip your TOFU (top of funnel - get up to speed on your sales funnel here) and are much further along in your sales cycle; a conversion may be just around the corner!

In our previous blog, 6 Buying Intent Signals to Optimize Your Outbound Process, we covered some basic techniques for finding some of these golden leads. Now we’ll show you how Amplemarket can help you identify even more qualified prospects through more advanced buying intent analysis.

Advanced B2B buying intent signals

By the time you’re considering purchase intent, you should have a thorough understanding of your Ideal Customer Profile (your target market). 

Amplemarket allows you to search according to all your ICP characteristics, as shown here:

This gives you a list of leads that match your ICP - but how do we know which have higher buying intent right now?

Amplemarket helps you identify these leads via the Buying Signals section of the searcher:

The results will detail which competitor each lead has engaged with, as well as the exact detection date:

Using buying intent for personalized outreach

From here, you can create new Customer Profile lists for hyper-specific, personalized messaging, using their interest in your competitor as a hook:

• You know the prospect is considering a specific competitor, so you already have an idea of their pain-points; how and why are you better-placed to help them? 
• If they’re a current or previous customer of your competitor, what has their experience been like? What can you offer that would make things better?
• If they’re looking to make a new purchase, you might be able to leverage their urgency. 35-50% of B2B sales will go to the most responsive product or service providers, so could be an opportunity for you to prove yourself more reliable than your competitor. You might also consider special time-limited offers or discounts to encourage faster decision-making in your favor.

With Amplemarket, you can use liquid syntax in dynamic messaging templates to personalize the details of each message automatically. Alternatively, you can use the Amplemarket AI Copywriter to create a hyper-personalized first touch message in just one click!

How to get started with Buying IntentSignals

Getting up and running with Buying Intent Signals is very simple, especially if you’re already familiar with basic purchase intent signals. As Cara explains, our Customer Success Team can help you confirm your ICP and form a list of competitors you want to keep tabs on, and the Amplemarket platform will take it from there. You'll even receive a summary of your Buying Signals updates via email every week.

When it comes to purchase intent, these articles will help you make sure you’ve got all your bases covered:

• How to Identify Purchase Intent with LinkedIn Sales Navigator
• How to Uncover Timing and Budget when Generating New Leads

Want to learn more about Amplemarket’s Intelligence features? Discover how Vanta closed 6 figures and achieved 9x ROI within the first 3 months of using Amplemarket Buying Signals.