Here's your guide to unlocking a new lever for business growth!

Building your business thanks to intent data is basically the opposite of the spray-and-pray approach.

It’s a method that aims to turn cold outreach into warm outreach thanks to timely, accurate data regarding a target’s current willingness to purchase your solution.

Strategically using intents starts by acknowledging that you can understand – and respond to – people’s real-time needs, wants and willingness to buy.

It continues by actually defining, finding, and distributing the data you need.

And that data’s out there, we promise! So read on for the foundations of turning intent data into higher conversion rates and growing revenues.

What is B2B intent data?

Intent data is information – information that reveals a target account is likely open to the idea of converting to your solution.

Traditionally, intent data has been understood as relating to four main categories:

• Demographic: age, geography, job title, etc.
• Sociographic: going one step further, looking at social/lifestyle characteristics such as hobbies, interests, values
• Technographic: analyzing your target’s technical capabilities and needs to ensure that they match your solution
• Firmographic: does the target match your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) criteria

Today, you can go further by turning to web intent data, which reveals certain actions taken by companies or individuals:

• Interactions (website visits, searches, …)
• Social media (posts, likes, group membership, …)
• Real-world (presence at conferences, meetups, …)
• Growth (fundraising announcements, job listings, …)

Importantly, intent data is going to vary depending on your ICP(s), which is why clearly defining ICP is the first step towards eventually leveraging these buying signals.

Make sure that you’re speaking to as many customers and potential customers as possible, drilling into why and how they use your solution in order to find the key pain points/moments that are most likely to lead others to become paying customers as well.

(And as you might guess, that means using and automating intent data is a step for companies that have found product-market fit; pre-PMF companies should avoid wasting time automating tasks that could change drastically overnight, focusing instead on manual approaches to understanding and solving their problem.)

How is intent data collected?

Once you’ve identified the buying signals you want to target, it’s time to head onto the internet and start hunting.

Intent data can come from a variety of sources: social media, website visits, fundraising announcements, and much more.

Whether regarding our personal or professional lives, we’re always leaving little traces of ongoing events as we move through our connected digital world.

Do remember that sustainable business data practices are those that remain on the right side of regulations, whether related to GDPR, Apple policies, or any others.

Those who spend their days swimming in the data ocean know, though, that there’s more than enough intent data out there.

They also know that most of it is accessible by relatively basic means.

The problem isn’t accessing data, but instead finding the right data at the right time and then handling it properly to turn it into something actionable.

How and when should I use intent data?

Good intent data gives your sales team a huge advantage when it comes to both opening conversations and converting leads.

Because sure, a great salesperson can sell ice in Alaska, but that same salesperson would have an easier time of it in Abu Dhabi. 

Intent data has two key benefits: improving lead quality and increasing personalization.

In terms of improving lead quality, providing intent data to your sales team at the right moment has the power to significantly boost your conversion rates, and thus your ROI.

By adding intent data to your process, you’ll find that your lead scoring can become much more precise.

Personalization then helps your marketing and sales teams adjust their strategies and messaging to match the situation revealed through intent data.

They can develop pitches and advertising that speaks directly to the target’s current needs, leaving aside other aspects of your solution that may be valuable but less likely to impact the buying decision.

These two features both depend on timing, which is a key aspect of effectively using intent data.

You don’t want your sales team wasting time on prospects that will need your solution in six months, you want the prospects that are in the market for the solution today.

You’ll always be able to circle back to those other leads later; for now, you want to make sure that efforts are focused on the ripest targets.

Automating intent data

Like with many data sources, you can find manual ways to access and use intent data on the web: there’s quite a bit that can be done via LinkedIn sleuthing! 

But you’ll quickly reach a limit on how effective that manual work can be: since data needs are exponential in a growing company, you need tools that can quickly scale up to handle it.

That’s where data automation comes in. 

The goal is to set up a series of automated steps, to automate your sales ops, that take you from locating various buying intents (activity on a social media post, job position changes, creating a new job listing, etc.) to identification, contact and intent information being sent to your CRM (name / company name / job title / activity).

This implies connecting various tools: LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, your CRM, email/phone identification tools such as Kaspr, Hunter.io, or Dropcontact, and so on.

As a technique, intent data is able to be constantly refined and honed, giving your teams a tool that can be improved upon over time.

That’s also why we at Captain Data work so hard to ensure that our workflows can be adjusted on a no-code/low-code basis, so that you aren’t having to wait around for engineering time.

Because after all, since intent data is a real-time game, your data operations need to be able to keep up!

Many thanks to our friends at Kaspr, who joined us for a webinar on intent data earlier this year.

And if you’re looking for help on how to build data automations that find the intent data your marketing and sales teams need, don’t hesitate to set up a call with one of our specialists at Captain Data.