Today, the typical B2B buyer completes their buyer journey before they engage with one of your sales reps. But what if your team could get ahead of this reality?
Intent-based targeting helps you improve marketing effectiveness by targeting prospects based on their purchase intent. To incorporate intent-based targeting into your outreach process, you need intent data, which enables your sales team to identify candidates who are actively searching online for your product or service.
Far from being just another marketing buzzword, intent targeting offers substantial benefits, including outdoing the competition, optimizing spend and conversions, and increasing email responses. Your sales team can quickly prioritize leads, waste less time, and close more deals with virtually the same amount of effort.
What is Sales Intent Data?
B2B buyer intent data is an innovative sales intelligence tool that identifies a prospect’s subtle buying signals so you can position your company and your solution at the front of the supplier line. It’s a behavioral dataset that determines what a business or individual is interested in and predicts whether they intend to invest in your product or service.
Two primary benefits of using intent data are:
- Finding active companies. You spend less time pursuing inactive companies, so you’re able to convert a higher number of opportunities.
- Gaining audience insights. The data you gather helps you learn in greater detail how your solution is going to help a prospect.
Intent data can be first-party or third-party. First-party intent data is collected from your company’s website, such as collected visitor IP addresses or response form information. Third-party intent data is collected from outside websites and can also include filled-in forms and collected IP addresses. The difference is it’s collected by third-party intent data providers such as Bombora, LeadSift, and Cognism.
You can break down the two types of intent data even further:
- Known first-party intent data, such as your CRM.
- Anonymous first-party intent data from Google Analytics.
- Known third-party intent data from an intent data provider.
- Anonymous third-party intent data, also from an intent data provider.
Including intent data in your sales outreach process opens up considerable marketing and sales possibilities by helping you refine your content strategy, fuel your sales pipeline, and even send effective targeted emails.
How Sales Intent Data Benefits B2B Sales
Cutting to the chase, intent data gives you an edge over the competition and greater awareness of your market.
Benefits to B2B sales efforts include:
- Getting in early to maximize potential outcomes. Every skilled B2B sales rep knows it’s to their advantage to be the first person a prospect talks to or hears from. Intent data even helps you find potential buyers who don’t even know your company exists.
- The best way of scoring leads is, of course, by their intent. Intent data lets you rank prospects in order of buyer intent, so your sales team knows who to contact first.
- Eliminate pain points as the focus of your cold call and enjoy a more valuable call where you spend time building rapport.
- Want to reduce churn? Intent data lets you see the solutions your existing customers or clients are considering from other providers. You can use the information to identify gaps in your product or service and make improvements to keep your customers from moving on.
Intent Overlays to Influence Conversions
Prospects leave their customer journey at different points, so you need different messages and incentives to re-engage them. Exit intent overlays provide a second chance to engage with your customers, giving you another opportunity to persuade them to make a purchase.
B2B digital intent overlays track digital behavior, find buyers in the market for your solution, and provide data that helps you identify decision-makers who are ready to buy now.
Tools like Bombora, LeadSift, and Cognism make outreach easier by allowing you to use intent data to fuel sales campaigns that move prospects (based on their intent signals) to different stages of the campaign. They also:
- Let your teams create dynamic audiences, so you never miss out on prospects with a high propensity to buy.
- Create and enrich qualified leads and get to top decision-makers.
- Can be used to personalize your website based on known topics of interest.
- Generate onsite messaging you can adjust for individual prospects.
- Help you trigger next best actions for your sales team. For instance, a sales rep may believe a prospect has “ghosted” them but then discovers the lead is still interacting with your company’s website content.
No matter which platform or software you choose, intent data helps you find businesses that are ready to buy before your competitors do. And it must work, because major players like Adobe, IBM, and LinkedIn have already made the leap.
Ready to learn more about intent data and how it can assist you in identifying prospect signals and supplement your existing sales strategies, book a consultation with 3D2B to learn more.
Call us at +1 813-320-0500 (US) or +39 06 978446 60 (EMEA) or contact us online for help meeting your sales goals.