As more competition floods the market, entrepreneurs, sales professionals, marketers, and B2B business owners like you are looking for ways to find relevant prospects to sell your products & services to.

With ads you have algorithms that are known to engage in click fraud, and with the latest iOS updates, it’s getting harder and harder to track and attribute sales, so you can improve performance.

In the B2B cold outreach game, the “spray’n’pray” approach most people take is getting less effective by the minute – especially for high-intent industries like B2B SaaS, agencies, and more.

Better results and better ROI come from more relevant, in-market audiences who are actively looking to buy solutions to their business problems.

We call this Intent Data.

What exactly is Intent Data?

Simply put, Intent Data is prospect data that is showing signs of intention to shop for and purchase a specific product or service.

It’s the most powerful prospecting data you can get because it’s not just targeting by demographics, psychographics, or technographics – it’s actually targeting prospects who have entered the buyer’s journey as shown by their online behavior.

There are 2 main types of intent data, so let’s dive in:

2 Different Types of Intent Data

Since we’re tracking online behavior signals, there’s different degrees of this that shows a prospect is proven to be in-market or just showing signs of being in-market.

Buying Signals

This is the simplest and most basic form of intent data.

Buying signals means that there are signs that the prospect’s company is:

• Showing overall company growth
• Hiring for relevant positions
• Showing department growth
• Showing senior management changes

When a company is growing and changing, rest assured there is money flowing, new people entering higher positions (and having to prove themselves), and focused hiring for ROI-positive roles in the company.

This data is relatively easy to find, but it’s manual & tedious to collect, unless you use an intent data list building provider like ListKit.

In-Market Data

This is the next level in intent data.

In-Market Data is using in-depth online tracking to map the buyer’s journey of prospects within relevant companies.

This is generally done through deep data networks where several DSP, ESP, and other providers pool together their data to identify who is in-market to buy a specific product or service.

With this kind of data, you’re targeting exactly who is actively shopping online for a solution to their problem, which puts you in the perfect strategic place to outreach and offer a relevant solution.

The downside is that it’s very difficult to find quality in-market data and it is very expensive compared to other B2B data you’ll find in the market.

If you’re willing to make the investment, iiintent is our preferred in-market data provider.

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The Advantages to Intent Data

With quality intent data, you have a competitive advantage to:

• Get in touch with ideal customers before your competition does
• Drastically shorten sales cycles
• Attract less leads with a higher close rate
• Get higher ROI by launching focused campaigns
• Testing marketing & sales strategies faster
• Increasing cold prospecting, Account Based Marketing (ABM), and advertising results overnight

Bottom Line

Intent data is set to be the hottest thing in sales & marketing since cookies (which are quickly disappearing!).

Thankfully, it lives up to the hype as there’s nothing better than reaching out to qualified, in-market prospects that align with your ideal customer profile (ICP).

If you’re looking to attract more ideal customers, intent data could be your new secret weapon.