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Intent data has been utilized in the B2B industry for quite some time, transforming the way we approach marketing and sales. However, while many recognize its potential, the real challenge is knowing how to use it effectively.
Intent data refers to the signals or behavioral information that indicate a person’s or company’s interest in a specific product, service, or topic. It is gathered from various online activities, such as website visits, content downloads, or social media interactions, allowing businesses to identify potential buyers who are actively researching solutions. This data helps companies prioritize leads, personalize outreach, and align marketing and sales strategies for better engagement and conversion.
Many companies have intent data tools in place but still see no results from their efforts, primarily because they fail to use the data properly—leading to wasted resources and missed opportunities.
Before you decide whether to acquire intent data tools, you need to understand how they work and what they are essentially for.
What makes intent data valuable?
Intent data comprises B2B intent signals that reveal how your prospects are seeking a specific solution. It tracks their digital behavior—what they search for and how much time they spend trying to find answers to their pain points.
This data allows you to assess their level of interest in a product or solution, helping you time your outreach and provide the information they need when it matters most.
By doing so, you can communicate more effectively and make informed decisions about when and whether to engage.
To put it simply, intent data answers the question: Do they need or want your offering right now? The more time prospects spend researching and consuming content related to your solution, the more likely they are to make a purchase decision.
With the right tools in place like N.Rich, you can identify the accounts that are in-market for your solution right now and track their buyer journey, to reach a 2.9x increase in sales pipeline efficiency.
Who uses intent data?
The State of Intent Data study by N.Rich reveals that intent data is widely adopted across key functions in B2B organizations, with 69% of companies using it for lead and account prioritization. Sales teams benefit most, utilizing intent data to enhance outreach efficiency (48%), while marketing teams use it to boost campaign performance (40%). Furthermore, 17% employ it for personalized marketing, ensuring targeted messaging. While the remaining 4% use intent data for customer retention and upselling, indicating room for growth in post-sale activities.
Intent data generally has two types:
1. First-party intent data
is collected directly from your own website and digital properties, capturing how prospects engage with your content, such as page views and form submissions.
2. Third-party intent data
is from external sources across the web, offering insights into user behavior outside your direct channels, like content consumption on other sites.
Both types are valuable for understanding buyer intent and can be applied in different use cases.
Main Use Cases for Intent Data:
1. Lead and Account Prioritization (69%)
The most common use case is lead and account prioritization. With intent data, you can focus your efforts on leads and accounts that are showing high buying signals, allowing you to target outreach more effectively and invest your resources in the most promising opportunities.
“We use intent data to fine-tune our lead scoring effort and qualify prospects based on their intention to make purchases. Through this, it's easier for us to identify leads that match our customer persona based on their behavior. Intent data also helps us prioritize high-quality leads to increase our sales efficiency and lessen customer acquisition cost.”
Sam Tabak, Co-Founder, Rabbi Meir Baal Haness Charities
2. Improving Outreach Efficiency (48%)
Predictive intent insights streamlines outreach efforts by helping you understand when a lead is ready for engagement. Integrating data enrichment tools can further enhance this process by supplying additional contact information and insights, facilitating more personalized and timely outreach. Real-time insights allow for personalized outreach based on where a prospect is in the buyer journey, improving the chances of engagement, ensuring that your message will resonate with them.
“We've found that intent data is particularly good for identifying people who are in the early stages of the sales funnel. These are people who haven't made it past the awareness or consideration stages yet but are starting to think about what they might be looking for or which brands they might want to check out. This kind of data is really helpful for us because it helps us to refine our messaging and make sure that we're targeting people at the right stage of the funnel. It also helps us to prioritize our outreach efforts so that we can focus on the people who are most likely to become customers. I use both first-party and third-party data, and the two complement each other well.”
Matthew Ramirez, CEO, Paraphrasing Tool
3. Improving Marketing Campaign Performance (40%)
Marketing teams can use intent data to optimize campaigns by having a clearer picture of the content your prospects are engaging with and the keywords they are searching for, you can optimize your campaigns for better performance.
“Our main use cases are:
- Account targeting through display ads
- Website personalization based on industry, intent scoring etc.
- Target account list building based on Fit & Intent scoring (sales)
- Prioritization of outreach based on Intent scoring (sales)”
Elsa Giraudineau, Director of Demand Generation, Telnyx
4. Personalization Based on Intent (17%)
Intent data makes it easier by identifying the specific interests and needs of your prospects and allows you to deliver more personalized experiences by tailoring content and outreach. This approach makes your communications more relevant and valuable for them.
“Our marketing team uses intent data to hyper-personalize our content creation process. The pipeline includes our email marketing targeting, message selection, and content creation to ensure we incorporate these valuable insights into our content creation strategy. We expect to move our intent data usage further into website personalization, such as producing hyper-personalized landing pages by specific problem-based customer segments.”
Grant Polachek, Marketing and Operations, Squadhelp.com
5. Gaining Insights into Audience Behavior (15%)
Intent data reveals how potential buyers are interacting with your content, what they are searching for, and where they are in their buyer journey. This gives you a deeper understanding of audience behavior, helping you refine your strategies.
“ We're using intent data to identify leads with higher propensity to convert based on recent behavior. We would combine these with lead prioritization based on higher expected revenue leads/accounts. It is important to be clear on these concepts with sales, because marketing might get push back if we only focus on "hot leads".“
Sara Bonilla Reyes, Global Head of Growth Marketing, Plentific
6. Marketing and Sales Alignment (10%)
Intent data bridges the gap between marketing and sales by providing both teams with the same insights into a prospect’s activity. This ensures that sales and marketing efforts are cohesive and working toward the same goals and that is to direct them into choosing you as their vendor.
“We're using our own platform to discover, qualify & convert anonymous website traffic, and combine those insights with data from CRM, LinkedIn, and external providers G2. The goal is to find an overlap between different sources of intent and identify accounts to be used in marketing campaigns (for TOFU accounts) and for sales outreach (for BOFU accounts).”
Praveen Das, Co-founder, Factors.ai
7. Churn Prevention (4%)
While intent data is often used for prospecting, it can also help you retain existing customers, showcasing intent data's impact on customer retention strategies. By monitoring their behavior, you can detect early signs of dissatisfaction or interest in competitor solutions, allowing you to give them higher priority to address what can potentially be lacking in your offerings.
“- Sales: alert account owners when their accounts are showing buying intent so they can outbound and message accordingly. We set up Slack alerts through an app called Rattle to be able to tag account owners on each alert, as it can be a firehose of information without specifying the account owner
- CS: Similar use case as Sales, but the account owner alerts are for retention, cross-sell, and up-sell opportunities rather than finding and closing new business.
- Marketing: advertise to ICP accounts showing intent. We set aside an additional budget to get in front of these accounts because they're the most likely to respond.”
Joe Kevens, Director of Demand Generation, PartnerStack
8. Feature Prioritization for Product Teams (2%)
Product development teams can use intent data to prioritize features or improvements based on what prospects and customers are actively seeking, ensuring the product aligns with market demand and staying relevant in the highly competitive market.
“Both the sales and marketing teams will be using this data primarily to identify potential customers and personalize outreach efforts to improve conversion rates. The two teams will also integrate this data into their workflows to help minimize customer churn from their respective ends and to provide targeted retention efforts. Both teams will also be looking to use the data in their predictive analytics models to forecast future trends in their respective purviews and make effective decisions that add to our competitive advantage for the long term. Our product development team will also be using the buyer intent data to help them identify trends in customer behavior and preferences, allowing them to make informed decisions when it comes to aligning product development with user intent and user experience.”
Lisa Richards, CEO and Creator, Candida Diet
Intent Data for Team Alignment, Especially Between Sales and Marketing
Intent data helps streamline and align sales and marketing efforts throughout the buyer’s journey.
For cold prospects, marketing runs demand generation campaigns to raise awareness, while sales engages in softer outreach. As prospects move to the in-market stage, marketing shifts to activation campaigns, and sales begins personalized outreach based on intent signals.
For hot prospects, marketing supports influence campaigns, providing executive content and case studies, while sales engages directly.
Finally, for pipeline accounts with open deals, marketing launches acceleration campaigns targeting buying committees, and sales focuses on involving additional stakeholders and decision makers to strengthen the chances of closing.
This strategic approach ensures that sales and marketing are aligned, avoiding overlap, and allowing for timely engagement based on real-time buyer behavior, making the process more efficient.
Case Study: N.Rich for N.Rich - Leveraging Intent Data for Account-Based Marketing
We at N.Rich launched an internal campaign to utilize our own platform to streamline our GTM efforts. We utilize both first-party and third-party intent data to identify hot demand prospects, prioritize high-intent leads, and boost conversions through targeted account-based efforts.
We used a weighted approach, with 80% of the data coming from first-party intent, such as ABM campaign engagement and website activity, and 20% from third-party intent, gathered from external website research. The focus was on creating a more accurate and timely understanding of high-potential accounts.
How did we implement N.Rich for N.Rich
1. Data Collection:
N.Rich’s intent data platform tracked key interactions on both owned properties (first-party intent) and external sites (third-party intent). This data was used to segment accounts into tiers based on engagement levels, with “hot demand” prospects receiving the highest prioritization.
2. Account Segmentation:
Accounts were categorized into three levels:
- Cold prospects: Minimal interaction with assets.
- Engaged demand: Moderate engagement but no clear buying signals.
- Hot demand: Strong engagement, indicating readiness to buy. This group was the primary focus for SDR and sales efforts.
3. Personalized Messaging:
For hot demand accounts, our marketing team collaborated with the SDRs to execute highly personalized outreach efforts. These included content tailored to each account’s engagement, such as case studies, product demos, and tailored messaging to align with their specific pain points.
Result:
The combination of SDR and marketing touches led to the highest success rates, with a 39.08% discovery-to-opportunity conversion rate and a 6.51% discovery-to-won rate. These figures were significantly higher compared to pure outbound or inbound efforts, highlighting the effectiveness of intent-driven, account-based marketing.
Our team focuses on hot demand accounts, improving both the quality and timing of engagement. By analyzing their digital behavior—specifically how they engage with content and interact with our assets—we ensure that the leads targeted are already highly engaged. This strategic approach significantly increases the likelihood of conversion, as we’re reaching prospects at the right moment, when their interest is at its peak.
Intent data is one of the most reliable ways to understand your target accounts and their buying journey. It gives you insight into not only who they are but also what they need, when they need it, and how to approach them.
By using intent data, you can avoid wasting resources on premature engagement and instead focus on leads when they are most likely to convert.
This approach allows you to tailor your communication and sales strategies without missing important details or burning opportunities by contacting leads at the wrong time.
With intent data, you engage leads precisely when their interest peaks, boosting your chances of conversion.
