Mastering B2B Sales: How to Use Intent Signals and Data for Outreach
How to Use Intent Signals to Boost B2B Sales
What if you could identify the exact moment a potential customer is ready to buy? Intent signals provide businesses with this capability, revolutionizing B2B marketing and sales strategies. By effectively leveraging intent signals, you can deliver highly targeted messaging at precisely the right time, maximizing engagement and conversions.
This guide explores how to identify, analyze, and use intent signals to supercharge your B2B sales and marketing efforts.
What Are Intent Signals?
Intent signals, also known as intent data, are behavioral indicators that reveal a prospect's interest in a product or service. These signals can originate from various sources and offer crucial insights into the buying journey, enabling businesses to optimize their sales outreach and marketing campaigns.
Recognizing and using intent signals effectively helps B2B companies prioritize high-value leads, shorten sales cycles, and improve overall marketing and sales performance.
Types of Intent Signals
Intent signals can be categorized into three main types:
First-Party Intent Data
First-party intent data is collected directly from your GTM ecosystem, including:
Website visits
Content downloads
Webinar registrations
Product usage patterns
Email engagement
Second-Party Intent Data
This data is acquired through trusted partners and external platforms, such as:
Customer advocacy platforms
Review sites like G2
Exclusive industry collaborations
Third-Party Intent Data
Third-party intent data provides broader insights into a prospect’s online activity, including:
Search trends
Public web browsing behavior
Social media engagement
Why Intent Signals Matter in B2B Sales
B2B sales cycles are complex, often involving multiple decision-makers, lengthy negotiations, and numerous touchpoints. Using intent data effectively allows businesses to identify when a lead is actively considering their solution, leading to:
More precise sales efforts
Higher lead conversion rates
Improved alignment between marketing and sales teams
According to McKinsey & Company, businesses that integrate AI-powered intent signals into their sales strategy experience a 10-15% boost in productivity and a 6-10% increase in revenue.
Key Advantages of Intent Signals
Understanding Intent: Intent signals help businesses determine which products or services a prospect is researching, facilitating more personalized engagement.
Prioritizing High-Intent Leads: By focusing on prospects showing strong buying intent, sales teams can enhance efficiency and improve conversion rates.
Shortening the Sales Cycle: Engaging with high-intent prospects accelerates decision-making, reducing time-to-close.
Types of Intent Signals
Engagement Intent Signals
These indicate direct interactions with content, such as:
Liking, sharing, or commenting on posts
Downloading whitepapers
Registering for webinars
Research Intent Signals
These reflect a prospect’s online search behavior, indicating where they are in the buying journey. For example, searching for "best B2B outreach tools" suggests they are evaluating options.
Hiring Intent Signals
Hiring trends can reveal a company’s future needs. For instance, a business hiring cybersecurity experts may be looking for new security solutions.
Technographic Intent Signals
These signals show which technologies a company is adopting or replacing, offering insights into their pain points and potential interest in related solutions.
Firmographic Intent Signals
Firmographic data, such as revenue, employee count, or industry trends, helps refine targeting and outreach efforts.
Explicit Intent Signal
Explicit Intent Signals are direct actions that clearly indicate a prospect’s interest, such as filling out a lead form, requesting a demo, signing up for a trial, or downloading an ebook. These signals show a high level of engagement and readiness to learn more about your product or service.
Implicit Intent Signals
Implicit Intent Signals are subtler and involve behaviors like browsing product or pricing pages, reading case studies, or researching solutions online. For example, spending time on your blog or reviewing implementation docs suggests a prospect is evaluating your offering. While these signals are less obvious, they provide valuable insights into a prospect’s interests and needs.
Intent signals are incredibly powerful when integrated into your go-to-market (GTM) strategy. Here are five actionable ways marketing and sales teams can use intent signals to enhance B2B sales performance:
How to Use Intent Signals in B2B Sales
Use Intent Data to Identify and Qualify Leads
Assign lead scores based on engagement levels and specific behaviors.
Prioritize high-intent actions like demo requests and repeated visits to pricing pages.
Personalize Sales Outreach
Leverage intent signals to tailor messaging that directly addresses a prospect’s needs.
Time Outreach Effectively
Engaging with prospects at the right moment increases response rates and improves conversion chances.
Enhance Marketing and Sales Efforts
Align sales and marketing teams around intent-driven campaigns to maximize efficiency.
Leverage Automation Tools
Use automation tools like CRM integrations and AI-powered solutions to track and act on real-time intent data.
Best Intent Signal Tools for B2B Companies
Manually tracking intent signals can be overwhelming. Fortunately, advanced tools streamline the process, allowing businesses to leverage intent data efficiently. Here are 11 top tools for capturing and using intent signals:
1. Common Room
Common Room is a leading customer intelligence platform that delivers intent signals to help you build a stronger sales pipeline and drive revenue growth. It gathers buying signals from various stages of the customer journey, offering actionable sales opportunities. Whether it’s website visits, funding rounds, or employment trends, Common Room ensures you receive the most relevant signals tailored to your prospecting needs.
Its Person 360 feature goes a step further by identifying the individuals behind these signals, allowing for more personalized outreach. Additionally, Roomie AI, the platform’s AI sales assistant, enables you to create custom signals and pinpoint your ideal buyers through a simple prompt-based system. Common Room also integrates seamlessly with third-party tools like Slack, Shopify, and Medium to enhance workflow efficiency.
Key Features
A unified database that aggregates hundreds of sales signals
AI-powered custom signal generation with Roomie AI
Pricing
Starts at $999/month
2. Instantly
Instantly helps you capture high-value website visitors, providing detailed insights such as full names, business email addresses, company names, and LinkedIn profiles. These details are automatically pushed to Slack, ensuring your sales team can take immediate action.
With advanced filters, you can segment web visitors and focus on prospects with the highest conversion potential.
Key Features
Identifies and deanonymizes web visitors
Integrates with Slack for seamless outreach
Advanced filtering for targeted prospecting
Pricing
Plans start at $47/month
3. Lemlist
Source: Lemlist
Lemlist offers a web visitor identification feature, enabling businesses to track and convert website traffic into leads. By installing a simple tracking script, Lemlist can identify European and U.S.-based companies that visit your site and enrich the data within its B2B database.
It also features smart filtering, which helps segment leads and optimize outreach efforts. Additional capabilities include email verification and multichannel outreach sequences for better conversion rates. Lemlist integrates with various CRMs and data enrichment platforms to streamline sales processes.
Key Features
Deanonymizes website visitors to reveal potential leads
Smart filtering for lead segmentation
CRM and data enrichment integrations
Pricing
Starts at $69/month with a 14-day free trial
4. Vector
Source: Vector
Vector specializes in contact-based marketing, identifying anonymous visitors on high-intent website pages. It provides detailed insights, including names, email addresses, job titles, and company information, ensuring your team never misses a sales opportunity.
Vector also offers buyer intent data, allowing you to track prospects actively searching for solutions similar to yours. The platform integrates with CRMs and outreach tools to improve efficiency.
Key Features
Website visitor identification for anonymous prospects
Buyer intent tracking to enhance sales strategies
Seamless integrations with CRMs and outreach platforms
Pricing
Growth plan starts at $1,000/month
5. Clay
Source: Clay
Clay, known for its data enrichment services, also provides real-time intent signals to help sales teams connect with the right prospects. It tracks key buying signals such as job changes, new hires, and promotions, keeping your sales pipeline updated.
All collected signals sync directly with your CRM, ensuring your data remains accurate and relevant.
Key Features
Automated tracking of job and hiring signals
CRM integration for seamless data synchronization
Pricing
Starts at $149/month
6. RB2B
RB2B is a website visitor identification tool that deanonymizes U.S.-based visitors, revealing key details such as job titles and LinkedIn profiles. It integrates with Slack to ensure your sales team is promptly notified of new leads.
RB2B complies with major data privacy regulations, including GDPR, CCPA, and CPRA.
Key Features
Identifies and tracks anonymous website visitors
Pushes prospect data to Slack
Exclusively targets U.S.-based visitors
Pricing
Free version available
Paid plan starts at $99/month
7. Warmly
Warmly is a signal-based revenue orchestration platform that uncovers 15% of visitor identities and 65% of company details from your website traffic. It segments your leads using firmographic, technographic, and behavioral data for more precise targeting.
Warmly integrates with Slack, Outreach, Apollo, Pipedrive, and SalesLoft, enhancing your sales workflow.
Key Features
Visitor deanonymization to capture prospect details
Advanced traffic filtering for better lead segmentation
Integrations with key sales platforms
Pricing
Starts at $499/month
8. Trigify
Trigify specializes in social signals, scanning social media for intent data to enhance outreach efforts. It tracks engagement trends, monitors industry conversations, and provides competitor insights to help you refine your sales strategy.
Key Features
Tracks engagement trends on social media
Provides personalized data for hyper-targeted campaigns
Monitors industry discussions for relevant insights
Pricing
Starts at $69/month
9. Ocean.io
Ocean.io uses AI-powered lookalike search to identify new prospects that closely match your existing customers. By analyzing URLs and detailed ICPs (Ideal Customer Profiles), Ocean generates high-quality prospect lists.
Key Features
Lookalike search for scaling customer acquisition
Advanced filters for refining prospect lists
Pricing
Free plan available with limited credits
Paid plans start at $79/month
10. LoneScale
LoneScale offers sales triggers that provide real-time insights into job postings and new hires at targeted companies. These signals help sales teams identify and engage with decision-makers at the right moment.
LoneScale syncs with HubSpot and Salesforce, ensuring a smooth workflow.
Key Features
Tracks job-related intent signals for sales opportunities
CRM integration for automated data updates
Pricing
Starts at $1,000/month
11. Humanlinker
Humanlinker delivers intent signals related to fundraising, job changes, LinkedIn activity, and business expansions. The platform integrates with HubSpot, FullEnrich, Gmail, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator, streamlining outreach efforts.
Key Features
Identifies key intent signals for sales growth
Multiple third-party integrations to enhance productivity
Pricing
Free plan available
Paid plans start at $75/month
Conclusion
Intent signals have transformed B2B marketing and sales by offering deeper insights into buying behaviors. By effectively leveraging intent data, businesses can improve lead qualification, enhance sales outreach, and drive higher conversions. Investing in the right tools and strategies ensures that sales and marketing teams work in harmony, maximizing growth and revenue potential.
Start leveraging intent signals today to stay ahead in the competitive B2B landscape!
