Updated September 4, 2023: We’ve clarified the definitions for different types of customer data as well as the benefits of buyer-intent prospecting.
The use of buyer intent data is growing rapidly. But even with all the benefits it provides, no more than 25% of B2B companies are leveraging it on a regular basis.
If your sales team doesn’t have buyer intent data, they are spending dozens (or hundreds) of hours every week going after poor quality leads that go nowhere.
With buyer intent data, however, your time can be leveraged in the right direction — turning qualified leads into customers instead of qualifying random website visitors.
Buyer intent data represents interrelated data points that give you a clear insight into what your leads are thinking and doing. For example, if you see someone reading about integrating a live chat platform into their website, you can assume that they will be looking at choosing one in the future. If you’re selling live chat platforms, this type of user is infinitely more valuable for you than the one you don’t know anything about.
Tip: Use all the benefits of buyer intent with Lift AI. This tool can sift through every single visitor on your website and automatically connect your BDRs to those with the highest buyer intent scores.
How Is Buyer Intent Activity Collected?
Data prospecting for buyer intent involves gathering as much useful profile information about every website visitor as possible. This can be done by combining different types of data from a variety of data sources.
Here are a few typical buyer intent indicators:
- Time spent on your website and specific pages
- Subscribing to newsletters or social media
- Clicking on links
- Returning to your website multiple times
- Emailing questions or requesting a demo
Aggregated together, these and other types of data points have the potential to become actionable buyer intent profiles of your website visitors.
The next step is to turn thousands of data points of unfiltered information into something sales and marketing teams can use. The best buyer intent tools can analyze raw data and translate it into clear insights and suggestions.
Any buyer intent tool you choose to use needs to be able to syndicate various types of content, identify the most promising leads, compile databases of potential customers based on engagement, and perform buyer intent scoring, which is a more effective version of lead scoring.
Where to Get First- and Third-Party Intent Data
While you need a large number of data points to create coherent images of your audience, you might not know where all this data should come from.
As described in our article on sourcing and using buyer intent data, there are three types of data sources: first-party data, second-party data, and third-party data.
First-party data is everything you can gather internally, using your web properties, CRM lists, ad analytics, and more. An example of first-party data is someone visiting your website, clicking on your CTA, or replying to your survey. This is the most limited in scope but at the same time the most accurate type of data.
Second-party data involves you commissioning research or buying someone else’s first-party data directly. It’s the most rare type of data, but it can be a good source of buyer intent information if there’s a vendor that’s closely aligned with your industry.
Third-party data is the most popular type of data and includes website cookies, IP addresses, public and private databases, search engine crawlers, ads, and more. Companies purchase third-party data or subscribe to its sources. You can sometimes find third-party data in the analytical features of other solutions.
If you’re not sure which buyer intent tools for data prospecting you should use, scan through our top picks.
Now, with all the data collected, how do you turn it into something that can assist your target audience in their buyer journey?
How Buyer Intent Data Prospecting Leads to More Sales
Understanding your ICP’s (ideal customer profile) buyer journey is key to leveraging buyer intent data in the most effective way.
Every visitor on your website differs in terms of their buyer journey and timing. This means that the messaging you use for each one should be different to resonate. Imagine giving a prospect who’s done all the research a basic demo introduction to your product. Misalignments like these might kill a lot of sales.
You can use buyer intent data to:
- Identify opportunities at the right stage in their buyer journey. You can know the precise time at which a prospect is considering your product.
- Improve lead scoring. As finding high-quality leads is the priority for all sales teams, buyer intent data provides insights that help make the right call.
- Add more context to ABM. Buyer intent tools provide information on each lead and the companies they are coming from, which can assist your account-based marketing efforts.
- Create more targeted marketing content. Buyer intent data helps to identify gaps in your content strategy as it relates to the buyer journey.
- Attract more leads with ads. Having more information about who, when, and why visits your website, you can better target your ads to match the profile of your best leads.
There is no limit to how you can use buyer intent data in business, from better analytics to sales reporting to brand positioning. Once high-quality data starts coming in, you’ll find more and more uses for it over time.
How to Use Buyer Intent Insights in Sales
There’s a lot of data out there, from the type you’re able to source on your own (first-party data) to what you’re able to buy (second- and third-party data). But how do you integrate everything together? You use Lift AI.
Lift AI is the only solution that integrates first- and third-party data to accurately measure the buyer intent for every single visitor on your website.
Using a vast machine-learning model, Lift AI incorporates billions of data points and more than 14 million live sales engagements to process interactions on your website in real time and assign accurate buyer intent scores.
Unlike other buyer intent solutions, Lift AI works for every single website visitor, even anonymous ones (as up to 98% of your traffic can be). As a result, Lift AI identifies nearly all visitors with high buyer intent (around 9% of the total traffic).
Lift AI integrates with your marketing stack, from live chat tools like Drift to CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot. With chat, Lift AI can connect high-scoring visitors directly with your BDRs, while sending medium- and low-scoring ones to a nurturing bot or a self-help guide.
The results of using Lift AI speak for themselves. Drift customers converting increased their pipeline by 9 times. PointClickCare saw a 400% increase, attributing $1M of extra revenue to their Lift AI integration. Formstack grew its chat pipeline by 420%.
Try Lift AI for free — for 30 days. No credit cards or complex setups required to start. Copy-paste a Lift AI JavaScript snippet on your website and you’re ready to go.
Lift AI gives you all the benefits of integrating first- and third-party data without spending extra time configuring complex data models by hand, and it works for companies of any size today.
