Most sales teams work their accounts in an order nobody chose on purpose. Biggest logos first, usually, or whatever the CRM puts at the top.
Neither has anything to do with who’s buying. (Alphabetical is still surprisingly popular.)
One account might have read your pricing page twice this week while another hasn’t thought about you since spring, and your CRM can’t tell them apart. Buyer intent data can. It’s the record of companies, and the people at them, doing the things buyers do, with a date on each, and some of it is already sitting on your own website.
What is buyer intent data?
Any record of a company, or someone at it, doing something that suggests they’re getting ready to buy.
It makes most sense next to the data you already have. Your CRM is full of fit data, which is who a company is: its industry, its size, what it runs on.
That barely changes from one year to the next. Intent data is what the company is doing, and it’s out of date within a month.
| Fit data | Intent data | |
|---|---|---|
| ❓ The question it answers | Could this company buy from us? | Is it looking right now? |
| 📌 Examples | Industry, size, country, the tools it uses | Read the pricing page twice, compared vendors, came back after a lost deal |
| 🕰️ How fast it changes | Hardly ever | Every week |
| 🏠 Where it lives | Your CRM | Mostly outside it, until you put it there |
You need both, because each one fails on its own. Fit without intent gives you a list of perfect companies that aren’t shopping. Intent without fit gives you whoever was busiest on your website this week, and that includes students, job seekers and your competitors. (Competitors are very busy.)
You can test this on your own CRM. Pick ten accounts and ask which of them did anything on your website this month. If nobody can say, you have plenty of fit data and no intent data.
None of this is a promise that anyone will buy. It tells you which companies are doing the things buyers do. Those are worth looking at first, because most of your accounts, most weeks, are doing nothing at all.
What does an intent signal look like?
A company or a person, something they did and a date. Lose any of the three and it stops being useful. (A signal, by the way, is just one entry in that record.)
| The signal | Where you’d see it | How strong |
|---|---|---|
| 💰 A company reads your pricing page twice in one week | Your website | Strong |
| 👥 Two people from the same company open your security page | Your website | Strong |
| 🔁 A deal you lost in March is back on your site in October | Your website and your CRM | Strong |
| 🔼 Someone at a customer reads your pricing or upgrade page | Your website and your product | Strong. They may be outgrowing their plan |
| 📉 A customer reads your terms and conditions | Your website and your CRM | Strong, and a churn warning. Notice periods are in there |
| ⭐ A company compares you with a competitor on a review site | The review site | Strong, and late in their research |
| 📈 A company is reading far more than usual about your category | A data provider | Medium, and early. It’s about the category, not about you |
| 📧 Someone opens your newsletter | Your email tool | Weak. Some mail apps open every message on their own |
People forget the date. A pricing visit from last Tuesday is a signal and the same visit from last spring is history. Intent data that doesn’t tell you when something happened isn’t worth much.
The subject matters just as much. The first five rows are about you, because the company was on your site or in your product. The seventh is about your category, which means the same company could be deep in your competitor’s blog and never have heard of you.
Where does it come from?
Four places, and two of them you already own.
Intent data you collect yourself is called first-party. Second-party is another company’s own data, shared with you, like G2 telling you who looked at your profile. Third-party is data somebody else collects across lots of websites and sells to you, and they’ll happily sell the same list to your competitors.
| Where it comes from | Type | What it sees | What it can’t see |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🏠 Your own website | First-party | Which companies read which of your pages, and when | Companies that haven’t found you yet |
| 📦 Your product and your CRM | First-party | Trials, logins and lost deals coming back | Companies you’ve never met |
| ⭐ Review sites, such as G2 | Second-party | Who looked at your profile, your category and your comparisons | Buyers who don’t research on that site |
| 🤝 Data providers that pool reading across many business websites, such as Bombora | Third-party | The topics a company is reading about more than usual | Whether any of that reading was about you |
Your own website is the one most teams overlook, mostly because analytics hides it. Google Analytics counts visits, not companies. Visitor identification (software that names the company behind a visit) turns “40 people read the pricing page” into a list of companies you can do something about.
Review sites are where buyers go late, when they’re comparing vendors side by side. (We’re on G2 ourselves, rated 4.8 out of 5 from more than 200 reviews.)
Topic data arrives differently. It’s usually a regular list of company names, each with a topic and a score that says the company is reading more about that topic than normal. You don’t get the pages or the people, only a name, a topic and a number.
Then there are account-based marketing platforms, such as 6sense and Demandbase, which combine several of these sources with their own scoring. They’re built for large marketing teams running campaigns at a fixed list of target accounts.
How do sales teams use it?
Mostly to decide who gets attention first.
A rep with 300 accounts can’t work them all this week, so something has to decide the order. Without intent data, that’s habit. With it, the order comes from what the companies actually did, and the rep spends Monday on the ones that are moving.
It ends up doing four jobs:
| The job | What changes | For example |
|---|---|---|
| 📋 Ordering the call list | Fit decides who’s on the list. Intent decides who’s first | The account on your pricing page this week goes above the one that’s been quiet since spring |
| ⏰ Timing a follow-up | You write when they’re looking, not when a reminder fires | A lost deal that comes back gets an email that day, not at the six-month check-in |
| ✍️ Choosing what to say | What they read tells you which problem to write about | A company on your integration pages gets an email about integrations |
| 🎯 Choosing who sees your ads | Companies researching the category see ads before they’re ready for a call | Bought topic data is good at this |
The first job is where most of the value is, and it only works when intent sits on top of fit. A company can be all over your website and still be a competitor, a student or far too small to buy.
(Our own scoring once flagged a company as high intent after it opened our pricing page 15 times in an afternoon. It was a competitor.)
One thing it shouldn’t change is your opening line. When all you know is the company, you don’t know which person was reading, so write about the problem and leave “I saw you on our pricing page” out of it.
How do you turn it into a list a rep can work?
With two filters and somewhere to put the result.
The first filter is fit, meaning the industries and sizes you sell to. The second is intent, and this is where you get to decide what counts. Then the result has to land where reps already look, because a brilliant list in a tool nobody opens is still a list nobody opens.
Here’s ours. A company makes our “high intent” list when:
- It fits our ICP, with an A+, A or B.
- It’s been active lately, like reading our pricing page in the last few weeks.
- It isn’t in our CRM or using our app yet.
That last one keeps it a list of new business. Everyone else already has an owner.
Most companies that fit never make it onto the list. That’s what keeps it useful, because it stays short enough for our reps to actually get through.
Once you have your list, put it where reps already work. The signal goes on the account in your CRM, and each new arrival goes to the account’s owner.
Where does it mislead you?
In four ways, and every one of them looks like a hot lead at first.
| What goes wrong | Why it happens | What to do about it |
|---|---|---|
| 🕵️ The busiest company isn’t a buyer | Competitors, students, job seekers and your own customers all read the same pages buyers do | Check who the company is before anyone calls |
| 📚 The signal is about the category | Topic data can’t tell whether they were reading about you or about your competitor | Use it to pick who sees ads, not who gets a call |
| 🕰️ It’s old | A list built last week from the week before is already two weeks behind | Treat anything older than a month as history |
| 🤝 Everyone has the same list | Bought data is sold to your competitors too | Use it early, or lean on what only you can see |
The second row is the expensive one. A report saying 400 companies are “surging” on your category sounds like 400 leads. What it means is that 400 companies read something, somewhere, about a topic you share with every competitor you have. That’s a list for your ads, not for your reps.
It’s still worth having. It tells a rep where to look first, and the rep decides what happens next.
Do you need to buy intent data?
Not to begin with. Start with what your own website already knows.
Your own data is about you, it’s current and nobody else can buy it. Its one limit is reach, because it only covers companies that have already found you.
Bought data fixes the reach and loses the detail. It earns its money when two things are true. Your market is far bigger than your traffic, and someone on your team is ready to act on a list every single week.
Here’s a quick test before you sign anything. Imagine 500 companies “researching your category” arrive in your inbox tomorrow. Who does what with them on Monday? If nobody can answer that, don’t buy the list yet.
Our take on the order to add them in:
- Your website. The companies already reading about you.
- Your CRM and your product. Lost deals coming back, and trial users getting busy or going quiet.
- Review sites. Worth it if buyers in your category compare tools there.
- Topic data. Last, and mainly for ads.
(We sell the first one, so we would say that. It’s also the order that costs least.)
So, what is buyer intent data?
It’s a record of companies, and the people at them, doing the things buyers do, with a date on each one. Reading your pricing page counts. So does comparing you on a review site, or coming back six months after you lost the deal.
Sales teams use it to put their accounts in order. Fit decides which companies are worth a call at all, and intent decides which of those get one this week. Without it, reps work the list from top to bottom while the interested companies wait their turn at the bottom.
So start with the intent data you already own. Find out which companies are on your website, keep the ones that fit and send the active ones to whoever owns the account. Buy more when you’ve run out of signals to act on, and not before.
When you do get there, ask any provider three things:
- Is this about my company, or about my category?
- How old is it by the time I see it?
- Who else can buy the same list?
Curious which of your accounts are showing intent this week? Try Snitcher, set up your ICP (the kind of company you sell to) and filter on High intent. It’ll be a shorter list than you expect, and a much easier one to act on.
