Buyer Intent Data is information that reveals when buyers are actively researching online for solutions, including which products and services they are interested in, based on the web content they consume. This data enables marketing and sales leaders to identify which prospects are ready to make a purchase, allowing them to focus their efforts and resources efficiently, avoiding waste on prospects who are not prepared to buy.
Intent data can be categorized into two types: first-party and third-party. First-party intent data is collected directly from your own digital environments, such as your website, CRM, social media efforts, and offline interactions. Third-party intent data, on the other hand, is gathered from external sources, providing a broader view of a buyer's intent through methods like cooperative data from publishers and bidstream data.
Utilizing intent data offers several benefits, such as targeting prospects ready to buy, gaining a comprehensive view of buyer intent, and ensuring ethical and reliable data sourcing. Sales professionals can leverage intent data to identify warm leads, create more effective messaging, and understand interest in specific products. However, challenges may arise in maintaining data accuracy and timeliness, adhering to privacy restrictions, and crafting the right message based on the data insights.
Traditional Lead Scoring relies on demographic and firmographic information, such as job title, company size, and industry, to assign a score to each lead. This method prioritizes leads based on their perceived fit with the company's ideal customer profile.
On the other hand, Buyer Intent Data focuses on analyzing prospects' online activities to determine their interest in specific products or services. This approach provides a more accurate view of a prospect's readiness to buy, enabling sales teams to target those who are actively researching solutions and likely to make a purchase.
To effectively leverage buyer intent data in sales strategies:
Customer retention refers to the strategies and activities a company uses to prevent customer churn and encourage them to continue buying.
Data enrichment is the process of enhancing raw data by adding missing information from other sources, making it more complete and actionable.
Lead scoring models rank prospects by assigning points for their behaviors and demographics, helping sales teams prioritize their outreach.
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is a tool that centralizes customer data to help manage interactions and nurture relationships.
A marketing attribution model is a framework for assigning credit to the marketing touchpoints that lead a customer to convert.
Retargeting marketing is a digital advertising strategy that targets users who have previously interacted with your website or brand online.
Dynamic pricing is a strategy where businesses set flexible prices for products or services based on current market demands and other factors.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the total cost a business spends to gain a new customer. It includes all sales and marketing expenses.
A sales call is a real-time conversation between a salesperson and a prospect, aiming to persuade them to purchase a product or service.
User-generated content (UGC) refers to any form of content, like images, videos, or text, created and shared by users on online platforms.
Sales metrics are quantifiable data points that track and measure a sales team's performance against specific goals and objectives.
Event marketing is a strategy where brands engage directly with target audiences through live events like trade shows, conferences, or webinars.
A Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) API is a web service that uses XML to exchange structured information between different applications.
The awareness stage is the first step in the buyer's journey, where a potential customer realizes they have a problem or an opportunity to explore.
Sales automation uses software to streamline and automate repetitive, manual sales tasks, freeing up reps to focus on selling.
Total Addressable Market (TAM) represents the maximum revenue a company can earn by selling its product or service in a specific market.
Closed Won is a CRM status for a sales deal that has been successfully concluded, resulting in a signed contract and a new customer.
A lead generation funnel is a systematic process that guides potential customers from initial awareness of your brand to becoming qualified leads.
Cold emailing is sending unsolicited emails to potential customers you haven't contacted before, aiming to start a business conversation.
Pipeline coverage is a key sales metric. It's the ratio of your total open pipeline value to your sales quota for a specific period.
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are websites that look and feel like native mobile apps, offering features like offline access and push notifications.
A Salesforce Administrator is a certified professional who manages and customizes the Salesforce platform to meet a company's specific business needs.
A product champion is an internal evangelist who drives a product's adoption and success by ensuring it solves real problems for their team.
A System of Record (SoR) is the authoritative data source for a specific type of data. It acts as the single source of truth for an organization.
Lookalike audiences are groups of potential customers who share similar characteristics and behaviors with your existing, high-value customers.
Sales acceleration refers to strategies and technologies designed to speed up the sales cycle, enabling reps to close more deals, faster.
Integration testing is a software testing phase where individual modules are combined and tested together to verify their interaction.
An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is a software application that manages your entire hiring and recruitment process from a single dashboard.
Competitive intelligence (CI) is the ethical gathering and analysis of market data to inform strategic business decisions and gain an advantage.
Sales partnerships are strategic alliances where two companies co-sell products to expand their reach, generate new leads, and increase revenue.
Buying criteria are the specific requirements and standards a customer uses to evaluate products or services before making a decision.
Warm outreach is contacting prospects with whom you have a pre-existing connection, like a mutual contact, making your message more personal and effective.
The Dark Funnel describes customer buying activities that are untrackable by companies, such as private chats and word-of-mouth referrals.
Process Builder is a Salesforce automation tool that lets you create 'if/then' business processes with a user-friendly visual interface.
"Smile and dial" is a high-volume sales tactic where reps make numerous cold calls from a list, often with little to no prior research.
Email marketing is a digital strategy where businesses send targeted emails to prospects and customers to build relationships and drive sales.
A persona map visually outlines a target customer, detailing their goals, behaviors, and pain points to help your team build genuine empathy.
Sales prospecting software automates the process of finding, contacting, and tracking potential customers to help sales teams build their pipeline.
The lead qualification process is how you determine which prospects are most likely to become customers by evaluating them against specific criteria.
Outbound lead generation means proactively reaching out to potential customers who haven't yet expressed interest to introduce them to your brand.
A Marketing Qualified Opportunity (MQO) is a lead vetted by marketing as a genuine sales opportunity, ready for direct sales follow-up.
A marketing play is a repeatable tactic used to achieve a specific marketing goal, like generating leads or driving engagement.
Marketo is a marketing automation platform used by B2B marketers to manage lead generation, nurturing, email marketing, and analytics.
A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is a prospect who has shown interest based on marketing efforts but isn't yet ready for a sales conversation.
A talk track is a script that guides sales reps during calls. It ensures they cover key points and maintain a consistent message with prospects.
A lead list is a curated database of potential customers (leads) with contact information and other key data for sales and marketing outreach.
Account-Based Sales (ABS) is a focused B2B strategy where sales and marketing teams treat high-value accounts as individual markets of one.
Sales operations analytics is the practice of analyzing sales data to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the entire sales process.
Precision targeting is a marketing strategy that uses data to identify and reach a highly specific audience most likely to convert.
Product-Led Growth (PLG) is a business strategy where the product itself drives user acquisition, conversion, and expansion.
Docker is a tool that packages applications and their dependencies into isolated environments called containers for easy deployment and scaling.
Lead nurturing is the process of developing and reinforcing relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales funnel.
A RESTful API is a web service interface that uses HTTP requests to access and use data, adhering to the constraints of REST architecture.
Learn about B2B intent data, including how B2B intent data enhances sales strategies, sources of B2B intent data, leveraging B2B intent data for competitiveness.
Inside sales is a remote sales process where reps sell products or services via phone, email, and other digital tools instead of in person.
A value statement is a clear, concise declaration of the unique benefits a company provides to its customers, outlining its core purpose.
Consumer Relationship Management (CRM) is a strategy for managing all of a company's relationships and interactions with its customers.
Ramp-up time is the period a new hire takes to get fully up to speed and become a productive member of your go-to-market team.
Cross-selling is a sales tactic of encouraging customers to purchase products or services that are related to what they're already buying.
Application Performance Management (APM) monitors and manages an application's performance, availability, and the experience of its end-users.
A channel partner is a company that works with a manufacturer or producer to market and sell their products, software, or services to customers.
Trigger marketing uses customer actions or events to automatically send highly relevant, personalized messages at the perfect moment.
Buying intent is the collection of online cues and behaviors that signal a prospect is actively researching and moving toward a purchase decision.
Site retargeting is a marketing strategy that shows ads to people who have previously visited your website but left without converting.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) software helps teams coordinate personalized marketing and sales efforts to land high-value customer accounts.
Technographics is data that outlines a company’s technology stack, helping B2B teams identify prospects based on the software and hardware they use.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is a system of integrated software that businesses use to manage and automate their core day-to-day processes.
Sales Engineers blend deep technical knowledge with sales acumen, demonstrating a product's value and solving customer problems to drive revenue.
A User Interface (UI) is the point where humans and computers interact. It encompasses all visual elements like screens, icons, and buttons.
Video selling uses personalized video messages to engage prospects, build rapport, and guide them through the sales funnel to close more deals.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a premium tool helping sales teams find and engage with the right leads and accounts on the LinkedIn network.
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based model where affiliates earn a commission for promoting another company’s products or services.
An Account Development Representative (ADR) identifies and qualifies new business opportunities, creating a pipeline for account executives.
A knowledge base is a self-serve online library of information about a product, service, department, or topic.
A Content Management System (CMS) is software for creating, managing, and modifying website content without needing specialized technical skills.
Lead qualification is the process of determining which prospects are most likely to become paying customers based on predefined criteria.
A commission is a service charge paid to an agent for a transaction. It's typically a percentage of the sale, rewarding performance directly.
Sales enablement content refers to the materials and tools that empower your sales team to engage prospects and close deals more efficiently.
Intent data tracks a user's online behavior—like searches and site visits—to identify signals that they are ready to make a purchase.
Account management is the post-sales practice of building and nurturing long-term relationships with a company's most valuable clients.
Microservices is an architecture where apps are built as a collection of small, independent services that communicate with each other over APIs.
Sales development is the process of identifying and qualifying potential customers to create a pipeline of sales-ready leads for closers.
A Marketing Qualified Account (MQA) is a target company that has shown significant engagement, indicating it's ready for the sales team to pursue.
Shipping solutions are services or software that streamline the logistics of getting products to customers, from label printing to final delivery.
Lead enrichment tools are platforms that automatically add missing data to your leads, like contact info, firmographics, and buying signals.
Rollback procedures are a set of steps to restore a system to a previous, stable version after a failed update, ensuring minimal disruption.
Sales and marketing analytics involves measuring and analyzing performance data to maximize effectiveness and optimize return on investment (ROI).
Regression testing ensures that new code changes don’t negatively impact existing features. It's a key step to maintain software quality after updates.
Network monitoring is the continuous process of tracking a computer network's performance and health to detect and resolve issues proactively.
Intent leads are prospects who show buying signals through their online actions, indicating they're actively looking to make a purchase.
Sales objections are reasons or concerns raised by a potential customer as to why they are hesitant or unwilling to make a purchase.
A canary release is a deployment strategy where new software is rolled out to a small user group first, minimizing risk before a full release.
X-Sell, or cross-selling, is a sales strategy of selling additional, related products or services to an existing customer base.
Programmatic advertising uses AI and real-time bidding to automate the buying and selling of digital ad space, targeting specific audiences.
Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) is the predictable income a company expects to receive from its customers over a one-year period.
An enterprise is a large-scale organization, often a corporation, defined by its complex structure and substantial number of employees.
Mobile compatibility ensures your site or app works flawlessly on mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets, for a seamless user experience.
Learn about B2B, including what is it, its key elements, the benefits of B2B partnerships, the differences between B2B and B2C, and strategies for effective marketing.
Order management is the end-to-end process of tracking customer orders from placement to fulfillment, ensuring a seamless customer experience.
Competitive analysis means identifying your rivals and assessing their strategies to pinpoint your own business's strengths and weaknesses.