Why Is Intent Data So Crucial to The Overall B2B Sales Process?

Being able to accurately identify the intent of your target audience can be a game-changer for your sales strategy. Any tool (or tactic!) that provides you with this information can save you time and increase your revenue.

First off, how do organizations collect this data? Intent data is gleaned from activities online to indicate a user’s level of interest in a topic or product. If the topic relates to what you offer, and if the user falls right into your ideal customer category or profile fit, it could indicate they have an intention to make a purchase.

Read More: 8 Video Marketing Tools That Can Help You Boost Your Sales Pitch!

Here are 10 strategies for you to leverage intent data and to make a significant impact on your sales and marketing efforts:

• Prioritizes Sales

Add intent data to your sales equation to get a deeper insight into the buyer’s behavior, mindset, and psychology. Intent data can help you prioritize conversion-prone leads first.

Your sales department already knows who their prospects are. Arm them with intent data so they can strategize their outreach initiatives effectively based on their audience’s level of interest.

• Improves the Sales Prospecting Process

Improve your sales prospecting by offering your sales team a list of contacts and companies actively researching your product/service category. To do this on a larger scale, you can leverage big data analytics solutions.

The leading B2B intent data tools use artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and machine learning to analyze billions of signals and identify organizations and people researching topics relevant to you.

• Enhances Audience Segmentation

Intent data lets you identify the companies and buyers currently researching the market for a product or service that you offer. Intent data can help you segment your target audience into active and non-active prospects.

Some intent data solutions help you use filtering using an unlimited combination of location, demographics, contact, installed technology, and more.

Read More: 5 Proven Tips That Can Make Your Sales Prospecting Efforts More Effective

• Supports ABM Goals and Initiatives

Account-based marketing efforts should be fueled by intent data! An account-level focus can be enhanced with the information about a target prospect’s current interest and readiness to buy.

Intent data solutions can also help automate the process of investigating account behavior across organizations at scale.

• Identifies Upselling Opportunities

For any B2B organization, cross-selling and upselling are at the heart of revenue generation. This is where intent data can work for you. Besides finding out new prospects to go after, why not look for existing customers who are also looking for adjacent or higher-value products/services.

Intent data  can create but more importantly help you identify upselling and cross-selling opportunities to help sales teams bring in higher revenue from existing clients.

 

• Helps Create Relevant, Personalized Content

You would naturally want to steer your content marketing efforts toward those who are more interested in your offering. 48 percent of marketers believe that content personalization makes their message more effective.

Sales teams can use this content to offer value to their prospects as they move through the pipeline. Content teams can create lead magnets that salespersons can offer to highly-interested prospects in a bid to get higher conversion rates.

• Boosts Customer Retention

It’s five times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain an existing one. High-quality intent data can help you identify irregularities in buying cycles of your customers and spikes in their interest for your competitors’ product.

Once you know your prospect is about to look for alternatives, you can talk them out of it! Moreover, you can use intent data to identify reasons why they’re thinking of a switch and offer solutions to bring them back.

• Aids Targeted Advertising

Intent data throws up very precise data points that you can use to leverage targeted advertising, such as automated advertising, long-tail keywords, and automated advertising (as per a specific device or a word a user put in their research).

This can help sales and marketing teams work in collaboration to target highly interested companies with laser-focused advertising campaigns.

• Helps with Better Sales Enablement

Focus on higher likelihood buyers and know what to say when you get them on a call. Intent data at a sales team’s disposal can enable them to have better conversations knowing what the prospect is looking for in an ideal product or service.

Having intent data directly link to your CRM system can streamline the process of making the data quickly actionable from your existing workflow.

• Enhances your Data Science Models

Sales and marketing teams are now more data-centric than ever. These teams use big data to select the best accounts to focus on for better ROI.

Buying intent can be a key enabler in marketing and sales, overlooking it could mean ignoring the current interests of your target prospects!

Looking for more revenue generation and technology sales tips? Catch this podcast episode!

By the time a B2B buyer connects with a vendor, they are already through with 70 percent of their purchasing journey, of which 67 percent is digital. Sales intent data is your chance to leverage that knowledge.

Research says that it’s possible to determine which companies are in-market at an early buying stage with an accuracy as high as 91 percent.

Which of these applications are right up your sleeve?