What is Prospecting™ Intent Data?

Most intent data is purchased by marketing demand generation teams. After all, the original use case was to identify the 3% of potential buyers that were active at any given time.

Prospecting intent data solves for the common demand generation use cases which include:

  • Identifying active accounts AND the active contacts
  • Prioritizing accounts for account-based marketing (ABM)
  • Paid social retargeting to custom audiences and by domain
  • Event marketing
  • Anticipating key trigger events (hiring, funding, etc.)
  • Enhancing conversational marketing

Prospecting intent data also serves other marketing functions including including product, competitive and content. Companies also use contact level™ intent data to enrich understanding of personas, identify product opportunities, develop new content insights, and gain competitive intelligence.

Identify accounts and contacts: Early intent data only identified "surging" accounts. That's changed. Contact level intent data simultaneously uncovers active accounts AND the active individuals. This contact insight, and the accompanying granular detail on stage in buying journey, problem to solve, competitor engagements, and job function and seniority support hyper-personalized messaging for retargeting and outbound sales cadences.

Prioritize accounts: Every company has a larger ABM one:many list than they can manage. Knowing which accounts are active AND which roles are active within those accounts helps to orchestrate the process of prioritization and marketing.

Retargeting: If you know the account, you can often retarget to the domain and filter for the common roles to which you sell. When you know who the person is you can build custom audiences for far more efficient and effective retargeting that delivers a contextually appropriate message rather than simply blanketing the account.

Event marketing: Are events eating up too much of your budget? Want to target likely attendees at key industry events? Or even competitors' events? Contact level intent data will identify them for you to nurture for appointments with your own sales team, engagement at your events, and efficient promotion of your sponsorships.

Key trigger events: Is your key window when the CTO or CMO change out? Or when a company is funded or hires for a specific role? Or if they open a new office? Google alerts and news groups are helpful, but your prospecting intent data should include these important trigger events too.

Conversational marketing: You work so hard to bring visitors to your site. Conversational marketing lowers the barrier for conversion, but contact level intent data can make it even more effective by incorporating deep insights into the chatbot experience you provide. Proper orchestration should add contacts or entire domains to segments according to multiple attributes so they receive a contextually appropriate chatbot engagement.

Orchestration and Enablement

Too much intent data gets pumped into CRM and marketing automation systems where it lies fallow. If your marketing, BDR, SDR and AE team members aren't all aware of how to find, interpret and react to the data, the investment might be wasted.

Effective prospecting intent data implementations plan for this, making it a component of strategies that incorporate intent data for sales.

Push the Dots Close Together

Whether through simple workflows that alert an AE to activity by key contacts in an active opportunity, or suggesting the right cadence to a BDR based on observed activity, it's important to provide proactive alerts and even automated coaching to support data activation.

Interpret the Data

Individual signals can reveal important insights. Aggregated signals from single contacts, and multiple contacts from the same company often reveal much richer insight. Optimizing prospecting intent data means crunching and massaging the full, integrated data stack (first and multiple third-party intent data and enrichment sources) to extract the important insights.

Content and Messaging

Great data is often wasted on crappy email cadences. You need great copywriting...and a lot of it. If your typical buying team has four to five buying functions and the buying journey spans four to five key phases, that means you need messaging and content for 16-25 different situations. Since you'll deliver that content through paid ads, email, phone scripts, site content, chat bots, social selling and direct mail, you might need >100 content pieces in addition to case studies, guides and data sheets.

Support the Sales Channel

If your company relies on sales channel for some of your revenue growth and account management, then it makes sense to provide the same insights to the channel sales team that you do for inside sales.

You'll probably want to simplify the process, though. That might mean relying on your own channel account managers to socialize the insights, or create workflows that alert the channel in ways that empower them without creating the need for extensive (and likely impractical) channel sales training around how to use third party prospecting intent data.

The bottom line, though, is push these powerful insights down to the level of prospect sales contact - wherevever it's happening!

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