Intent Data-as-a-Service

How to Use Intent Data

You've made an important decision. You want to add intent data to your arsenal of sales and marketing tools to help your sales team close more deals and to assist your marketing team deliver more sales-ready leads. But you also want to get the most benefit from your decision, and you're not sure how to get there. Here, we explain how to leverage intent data.

You can start by sending your intent data lead lists to your sales development reps and have them review and call the most qualified. Or you can have marketers upload your intent data to your marketing automation platform and start nurturing your leads with relevant emails and advertising. Either way (or maybe by combining both), you're well on your way to improving close rates and revenue growth.

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT INTENT DATA

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what else could you be doing?

Consider the power of intent data in a broader set of sales
and marketing use cases:
01 Creating and launching highly targeted demand generation campaigns for leads in the consideration and decision stages of the buyer's journey.
02 Assessing the full spectrum of intent signals and focusing in on the most likely buying triggers
03 Figuring out what "sales-ready" really means, through data and analysis
04 Pivoting to an ABM (account-based marketing) strategy based on data, not aspiration alone
05 Creating ideal customer profiles for your products and services, based on data, not conjecture
06 Finding the movers and shakers on your target buying teams
07 Targeting those individual buying team members with timely, relevant messaging and conten
08 Monitoring competitor activity and changes in market engagement
09 More accurately predicting pipeline through buyer data as well as sales team performance
10 Identifying changes in customer sentiment and notifying the sales and service teams to prevent churn

Intent data is powerful business information. It supports use cases across the entire customer lifecycle from marketing, through sales, to customer success and business reporting. The issue many companies face is how to operationalize intent data, outside the traditional sphere of sales and marketing data collection and management. Some companies struggle with trying something new. Who will be responsible for oversight and implementation?

What resources do they need to get up and running quickly, and how will those new processes fit into their current data management practices and regulations? Potential roadblocks, such as compliance or privacy, must also be addressed. Who will do that, and how? Perhaps your current sales and marketing teams are just too busy to take on a new initiative, so it's easier to wait. These and other issues prevent some companies from moving forward with intent data, but there is a viable solution.

Intent Data-As-A-Service from IntentData.io

When evaluating an intent data provider, look for one that can help you extract the full value of intent data with services to manage, integrate and apply your data to reach your goals.

Our Services Can Include:

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Coaching, advice and playbooks

Coaching, advice and playbooks for how to use intent data for its most common use cases, like sales development, sales enablement or marketing automation
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customer
data platforms

Providing a customer data platform (CDP) that includes capabilities for data loading, data management, and two-way integration with sales and marketing platforms
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Managing lead qualification processes

Managing lead qualification processes to identify ideal customers and buying team members and their buying intent signals. Immediately notify sales development reps or account executives for follow-up activities when intent signals are updated or contact information changes.
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Developing
reports

Developing time-sensitive reports that focus on causes and influences of sales and marketing performance, not just raw data or trends — gaining deeper insights into marketing campaigns and sales team performance.
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analytics &
reporting

Sophisticated analytics and reporting to identify prioritized target data and buildout of segmented populations for marketing and sales operations.
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Schedule a Meeting with an Intent Data Expert

Intent Data Service solutions

Intent Data Service solutions are designed to help you find the right approach for your situation. Most companies prefer to walk before they sprint, and proving ROI before making a larger investment makes a lot of sense. You want to improve results, not implement another technology onboarding project. Once you have established a firm foundation, then it makes more sense to expand capabilities and attain new levels of growth. IntentData.io has a variety of programs with these sensible goals in mind.

When you select an intent data provider, they should work with you directly to find the right contact-level intent data that uncovers your ideal customers and their pre-purchase activities online. This is an iterative process; we help analyze your data to identify the highest quality leads and deliver them to your sales team. We also develop search criteria, gather relevant data, assess its value and fit, and help you deploy it to your teams in a format they can use immediately.

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Lead Qualification

Intent data is useful on its own, but the work to turn it into lead conversions, scheduled meetings, webinars, and event registrations requires more effort. In many cases, hitting aggressive KPIs (key performance indicators) for demand generation requires high levels of outbound sales and marketing activity.

For lead qualification and outbound sales and marketing, we can do the heavy lifting. The IntentData.io team can manage outbound sales using email only campaigns, or full omnichannel outbound sales targeting your highest-quality intent data prospects and deliver these leads and event registrations on a CPL (cost per lead) basis.

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Paid Advertising Management

Search marketing, display advertising, social media advertising and retargeting are powerful tools for generating qualified demand when done right. A strong intent data provider can manage ad campaigns built on custom audiences sourced from contact-level intent data to give your campaigns an extra edge and higher conversions.
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Content Syndication

IntentData.io’s Contact-Level™ Intent Data delivers better performance across lead generation channels, including syndicated content. A good provider should manage content syndication programs with attractive costs per lead (CPL) by focusing syndication on the publishers that they know fit your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) and are active in the market.
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Delivering Real Sales Opportunities

If your sales development team is already swamped with inbound or outbound leads, you might be looking for an additional way to convert and close high-quality pipeline opportunities.

A good intent provider will take the work off your plate, delivering leads that fit agreed qualification standards from BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing) and qualified SQLs, through scheduled appointments and first touch meetings.

We also maintain close communication with you via your CRM and hand off qualified, sales-ready leads to your account executives.

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Target Companies and Account-Based Marketing

The first challenge facing companies getting started with account-based marketing (ABM) is putting together an ideal customer profile and a list of target companies to focus on with account-based sales and marketing. Based on your criteria for ideal target companies, your provider should use intent data to find active companies searching for your products and solutions.
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Data Management and Analysis

Fully orchestrating purchase intent data can involve a variety of data operations. Our CDP (customer data platform) assists with integrating multiple data sources, limiting costs of marketing automation contact bloat, managing large volumes of signal and putting the right information in front of your sales team at the right time. Our analysis services help you identify prospect groups or trends to allow you to better segment leads for efficient and personalized marketing and sales follow-up at scale.

 

Examples of how data management and analysis service can support your program include:

Automating the data loading process

As fresh intent data comes in, automate the process of loading, cleaning, de-duping and segmenting the data for further analysis, sales enablement or outbound sales. Your sales and marketing operations teams will enjoy the time savings and efficiency gains.

Integrating multiple data sources with contact-level intent

Best practices with data involve looking for intersections in sources. Examples include surge data, event registration lists, channel partner prospect lists and separate (never quite fully integrated) CRM & marketing automation systems. These diverse data sets should be merged at the contact level for better visualization and analysis.
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Putting the right contacts in the right place, automatically, based on real-time observation

If a certain target company and key member of the buying team visits your website, show them a custom offer or present them with a personalized chatbot. Want only certain contact types automatically added to your marketing automation system or CRM? Want the contact owners or sales reps notified when certain events occur or thresholds are met? CDP platforms and data management processes make this happen consistently and predictably.

Aggregating and visualizing all of the data, not just a subset or slice

Find real-time insights among diverse data sets for better prospect analysis and targeting. Don't rely on simple X-Y plots or pie charts to identify complex trends and behaviors, when you can easily explore the data and find the best possible data visualization to answer your questions.
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Performing business intelligence and market overview

Create alerts and notifications based on intent data changes, such as increased competitor activity or prospect visits to your competitors. Watch for surges in interest in certain topics or keywords tied closely to your success, and respond more quickly. If you can imagine the use case, a CDP platform can help you easily realize it.
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DIY Coaching and Advice

If your team needs some help ramping up faster or working through some complications, IntentData.io can help with:
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  • Extensive strategic consultation and coaching
  • Specific projects designed to meet your goals
  • Access to a library of resources
  • Gaining on-demand access to a dedicated team

Getting the most from our Contact-LevelTM Intent Data takes time and knowledge. Even for single-use cases like demand generation, there is a learning curve required to interpret, segment and follow up on the data. Contact-level intent data is more complex than account-level data because it's richer in context and detail at the individual level. That's a good thing for making better decisions, but it also creates execution challenges. Some examples include:

  • Finding out which people are actually on the buying team
  • Finding out what roles are played by the different people on the buying team
  • Determining which people are the decision-makers for various functions (financial, technical, safety, compliance, etc.)
  • Determining which people are influencers and/or potential champions
  • Determining which people represent obstacles to a potential purchase
The right intent data provider can help you overcome those challenges by pulling in relevant data to answer these questions and updating both account and buyer profiles accordingly.

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