Buyer Intent Data: The new tool for spotting in-market buyers

“This isn’t a priority for us right now.”

“Check back in 6 months?”

“Thanks but we’re happy with our current solution.”

Every rep has heard one of the above before. It’s what prospects say to let us know we're knocking on their door at the wrong time. 

But what if you could know when someone is ready to buy?

Enter buyer intent data; the closest thing we have to a crystal ball in the world of B2B sales. But not all B2B intent data is created equal. Some of it is useful, and some of it has been inflated more than one of those tube men at a car dealership.

On top of that, Sales and RevOps leaders struggle to unlock its full potential—71% of B2B organizations collect buyer signals, but more than half of those organizations are not operationalizing the data.

This guide will help you cut through the hype, find actionable sources and software for buyer intent data, and leverage them to improve your go-to-market.

What is buyer intent data?

Buyer intent data is information that indicates a prospect is likely to purchase software in your category.

It goes beyond traditional demographics or firmographics, offering a more dynamic view of your potential buyers based on online behaviors such as:

• Comparing competitors on review sites
• Engaging with marketing and sales content
• Searching for product-related topics on a search engine
• Visiting your pricing page
• Using a free trial more actively

These data points, also known as buying signals, power signal-based selling. Sales teams use buyer intent to prioritize high-potential leads, tailor messaging, and time outreach to prospects across their buying cycle.

Why is buyer intent data so big right now?

Buyer intent data is so popular right now because selling SaaS is getting harder.

Intent data has become the hammer to every nail. And there are a lot of nails in the B2B buying journey right now.

1. There are more decision-makers. The average B2B buying committee involves 11 to 20 stakeholders, with most software purchases requiring CFO approval. Sales teams need to multithread across stakeholders and create a bulletproof business case in order to push past the status quo.

2. Buyers are doing their own research and leaving breadcrumbs online. Only 17% of the purchasing journey is spent meeting with potential vendors. With the rest happening online, we need to understand what buyers are looking for and how to influence them.

3. B2B sales leaders are under pressure to create more efficiency. With increasingly complex buying journeys and growing competition, close rates are decreasing. Sales teams need to do “more with less” even as traditional outbound tactics lose their effectiveness and B2B buyer preferences continue to change.

Intent data helps sales teams prioritize their efforts through a data-driven approach. We can’t rely on deal forecasting based on gut feelings anymore. Every sales rep needs to work the right accounts and avoid wasting time on prospects that aren’t ready to buy.

Types of intent data

There are essentially three buckets of buyer intent data that are acquired from different sources. They all serve a different purpose and work best when combined.

1. First-party data

First-party data comes from places you own, like your website, CRM, and product. It’s the richest type of intent data because you can get down to the contact level and understand the actual person and their behavior. It’s not anonymized or watered down.

While we often think of our website as the primary source of first-party data, digital sales rooms can provide even deeper insight into buyer behavior towards the middle and bottom of the funnel.

2. Second-party data

Second-party intent data is another company’s first-party data. 

For example, review sites like G2 collect data points from prospects and customers similar to how you do. When they share this data with you, you are acquiring second-party data from them.

The advantage of second-party data is being able to find a target audience of accounts that are actively comparing solutions in the consideration phase. You reach prospects that might not have made it to your website, and the data is still specific and timely enough to take action.

3. Third-party data

Third-party data is aggregated from multiple external sources, like other websites and content platforms, and then sold through intent data providers.

Although this expands your universe of accounts significantly, it’s also the least actionable in sales because the data is inferred. Typically you only get to know if an account or contact “might be in the awareness or consideration stage” based on various inputs.

As Nick Ruggieri, Head of Sales at Koala, puts it:

“What’s the point of simply having more buying signals if it doesn't help you book more meetings and move your deals forward?”

More isn’t always better, especially when it comes to focusing on the right leads. You don’t want reps spinning their wheels.

That doesn’t mean third-party intent data can’t be useful. It just needs to be paired with other sources or used in conjunction with marketing campaigns for maximum impact.

Buyer intent data sources and tools

Buyer intent data sources collect and generate intent data, while tools help you analyze and take action on it. 

Third-party data providers

Third-party intent data providers aggregate data from multiple sources to provide a broad view of buying intent.

• Bombora is the leader in this space. They capture buyer intent signals from a cooperative of B2B publishers and offer “company surge data”. Basically, they can identify when businesses are consuming content on specific topics more than usual, indicating potential purchasing behavior.

• TechTarget Priority Engine focuses on purchase intent data for the technology sector. It tracks engagement across 140+ tech-focused websites to provide insights into active IT purchase plans.
• Clay is a tricky one to categorize because of its uniqueness. It enriches lead lists by “waterfalling” across over 75+ data providers, offers an AI research agent with a web scraper to automate SDR research, and then personalizes outreach.

Sales intelligence and engagement platforms

This is the most nebulous category because there’s so much consolidation happening. Overall, these companies connect intent data to other sales enablement features, whether that’s outreach, enrichment, or more.

• Common Room is a customer intelligence platform that brings all buying signals into one place to enable outbound automation.
• Koala is a lightweight customer data platform (CDP) that helps with account prioritization, identifying buying committees, and routing leads to reps based on intent signals. It can also ingest product analytics data and surface key insights to reps.
• ZoomInfo combines a comprehensive B2B database with intent signals. It provides intent data alongside detailed company and contact information to enrich leads. Lusha is a similar option.
• Apollo offers a suite of sales intelligence and engagement tools for prospecting automation and enrichment, including intent data derived from multiple sources.
• 6sense and Demandbase are AI-powered platforms that combine ABM and revenue intelligence, providing comprehensive "in-market" account identification.

Digital sales rooms

Most first-party data you collect comes from your website, but that’s not where buyers spend most of their time. Aside from review sites, social media, and search, they spend the most time inside of your sales process.

Dock reveals what buyers are doing when navigating your sales process through digital sales rooms and built-in mutual action plans. Once you share a Dock workspace, your pitch travels past the initial demo and goes deeper into the account so you can track:

• When and how often your buyers view your space
• Which contacts view your space
• What content your buyers engage with
• How many steps are completed in your mutual action plan
• Time spent viewing and/or downloading PDFs or slides

This type of first-party data shows real intent. You can tell if an opportunity is actually progressing and understand who the decision-makers are. You learn what each member of the buying committee is searching for and what they’re interested in learning more about inside of an active deal.

And all of this can feed into your CRM to educate your lead-scoring model.

Product usage and analytics

In a product-led sales (PLS) motion, your product becomes a key source of first-party intent data. These tools score leads based on their actions inside the product and notify reps at the right time.

• Pocus and Endgame identify product-qualified leads (PQLs) and allow you to pinpoint user actions that indicate buying intent. They also help identify which product areas the buyer is interested in so reps can refine their sales pitch during outreach.
• HeadsUp uses product usage data to predict buying signals. It analyzes existing data to identify what actions result in upsell, expansion, and churn.
• MadKudu offers an AI copilot that gives reps recommended actions based on buying signals across different platforms, like your CRM, product, and even LinkedIn activity.

Review sites

The main source for second-party intent data is review sites.

Companies like G2, Capterra, and TrustRadius sell data about who is snooping around in your category. For example, a sales leader at Calendly could purchase data showing accounts that are searching for scheduling software.

In the era of comparison, review sites are a great source of intent. If you learn that an account is evaluating solutions in your category on G2, you can reach out at the right time and educate them early on.

Relationship-based selling

This is a fairly new category that wouldn’t traditionally be classified as intent data, but still accomplishes the same result.

• Champify and UserGems track key contacts and accounts for job changes. This data can be used to prioritize high-intent accounts and improve outbound conversion rates.
• CommSor identifies potential customers in your company’s network of employees, partners, investors, and advisors. This helps you set up warm intros, connect prospects with customers, and even build a B2B referrals program.

How to use buyer intent data in your sales process

Now you have the tools and data, but how do you leverage them in your sales process?

Let’s look at a few plays you can run with the sales team.

Lead scoring and prioritization

Intent data gets stale really quickly. That’s why speed to lead is super important. 

Tido Carriero, CEO of Koala, says, “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.” 

Makes sense. If a buyer is on your site, it’s likely that they’re looking at other options too. Reaching out to them before competitors gives us the chance to shape their evaluation process and criteria.

At the company I work at, Beekeeper, we flag leads that watch our product demo tour video for immediate outreach by the SDR team given they meet the ideal customer profile (ICP). 

Why? We know these leads are more likely to convert, and the real-time behavior shows they’re genuinely interested in learning more.

First-party intent data is the most reliable indicator of potential purchasing behavior, so we don’t want it to get lost in the lead scoring model. By bumping up leads who demonstrate purchasing intent, we can fast-track them to a demo.

Outbound prospecting

The traditional sales playbook tells SDRs to spray canned emails based on second and third-party intent signals.

This doesn’t work because the outreach is too generic. Knowing that someone is mildly interested in what your company offers isn’t a good enough reason to have a conversation.

That’s why Jen Allen-Knuth, Founder of DemandJen, suggests a different approach.

“The intent signal just gives me a reason to research the account. It isn't THE reason to reach out.”

She walks through an example of receiving an intent signal about a funding announcement. Instead of sending a low-value message like “congrats on the funding”, she digs deeper into the announcement and develops a problem hypothesis.

In her outbound email, she focuses on this specific problem, shares relevant metrics, and highlights a similar case study.

Intent data offers a hint, not the answer. It gives reps a lead to chase and provides the who and when. It’s our job to figure out what to say based on the prospect’s pain points.

Competitive messaging

When prospects hop on a call, there’s one question they all have in mind: “Is this solution right for me?”

If you know what they’re searching for and which competitors they’re evaluating, it gives you the chance to customize the demo and highlight specific product features that are important to them. 

For example, if intent data shows that a prospect is engaging with competitor content, sales teams can start poking holes and creating FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) around the topic. 

From there, they can follow up with proof through case studies highlighting why other customers switched, offer references, or share use cases focused on key differentiators.

There’s the example of Totango, who used downstream intent data from TrustRadius to find in-market customers who were either using or considering a competitor for their customer success platform. They won deals by controlling the narrative around what’s important during the evaluation.

Having intel on the buyer’s needs gives us the chance to show we understand them.

Multithreading

If you have multiple decision makers in an ICP account looking at your website or reviews, you want to roll out the red carpet for them as you’re multithreading the deal.

But the Head of IT doesn’t care about the same things as the CFO. 

How do you communicate tailored value propositions to each stakeholder’s role and objections while still making sure they’re marching to the same tune?

Multithreading is a lot easier when your stakeholders don’t have to sift through emails and spreadsheets to find what they’re looking for.

With Dock’s digital sales rooms, you can create a single workspace where every stakeholder can find the information they need and work on a deal together.

It’s a win-win-win:

• Your reps collect intent data to gauge the level of interest and what’s important to the buyer
• Your decision makers get relevant content to guide their evaluation
• You know the right information makes it past the deal champion to every member of the buying team

Driving consensus is much easier when everyone is on the same page, literally. 

Expansion & account management

The most common way I’ve seen intent data used for expansion is by getting in front of more locations and departments.

For example, if one branch of Starbucks becomes a customer, there’s a good chance others might be interested. If you get an intent signal from a child account, you can follow up with an account-based marketing and sales strategy.

Marketing teams deploy ads with targeted messaging and host webinars around the results an existing customer has seen, and sales can follow up with case studies and more information.

Intent data could also indicate that a different department within the same customer account is searching for a similar solution to yours.

Reps can quickly “intercept” the conversation and begin multithreading to expand further into the account. This can also be used to mitigate renewal risk, identify cross-selling opportunities, or build the case for an upsell.

For example, if a customer is on a lower pricing plan but engages with advanced analytics features in the product, the sales team could be notified to set up a demo.

Capture more buying signals with Dock

Infusing buyer intent data into your sales strategy isn't just about gathering more information—it's about leveraging the data to drive meaningful customer interactions.

It’s easy to get caught up in the pursuit of data without a clear plan for how to use it.

With Dock, you can capture critical buying signals past the initial demo, ensuring reps have the information they need to deliver an ideal buying experience and win more deals.

Dock is free to try. Create your first 5 sales rooms for free.