Your next customer can be anywhere right now. Maybe your sales team is already engaging them by showing a demo of your product, or maybe they are on your website, but it may not be clear to them how they can progress to the next step in the buyer’s journey.
Today, 89% of people looking for B2B solutions search for them online first. That’s why having a clear, informative, and actionable website is a must.
But no matter how intuitive and user-friendly your web presence is, most people tend to only reach out to sales or customer service when they are almost ready to buy. Leaving your potential customers to self-select in this way means a lot of lost opportunities that could leave for your competitors due to easy-to-resolve misconceptions.
The obvious solution is to proactively engage with interested visitors earlier in the process, while they are still researching and have lots of questions.
You can do this by leveraging buyer intent data.
Let’s take a look at what buyer intent is and how buyer intent data can be used to quickly improve your sales results.
What Is Buyer Intent?
Buyer intent is simply a measure of how interested a potential customer is in your solution. Buyer intent data then is an aggregate of all signals that help determine buyer intent, from time spent on your website to requesting demos, etc.
High-quality buyer intent data is valuable because it separates signal (or what counts as intent) from all the noise (normal behavior). Your sales and marketing teams can use those signals to optimize their communication and reach out to the best prospective customers.
Figuring out which signals are the best markers of buyer intent can also inform your marketing and digital advertising strategies. After all, your competitors are looking for those signals too — everyone wants to offer the most personalized experience while your potential customers are in the consideration stage of their buyer’s journey.
As a result, buyer intent data allows you to spend less time and fewer resources finding the right customers, so you can do more with the team you already have.
Not all buyer intent data is the same. There’s first-, second-, and third-party data, and each type has its advantages and disadvantages. Most of the time, you should pay special attention to how you collect and use internal (first-party) and external (third-party) data.
What Is Internal Buyer Intent Data?
Internal buyer intent data can be derived from your own website, software, and tools. It also includes any information that your BDRs can find through research or by talking to potential customers.
Some examples of internal buyer intent data:
- Clicks on the pricing page
- Demo requests
- Contact information left on your forms
- Newsletter subscriptions
It’s important to note that buyer intent data is not just any data you can pull from your analytics software. It’s important to separate lots of top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) activities that don’t show buyer intent (e.g. visiting your website for the first time) from bottom-of-the-funnel ones (e.g. booking a demo).
While it’s possible to evaluate some buyer intent aspects manually, relying on specialized software is a much more effective strategy.
What Is External Buyer Intent Data?
Your website can give you a lot of accurate data about visitors and their behavior. However, to make your customer acquisition strategy even more effective, you need to widen your reach beyond your own properties as well, which means gathering external buyer intent data.
There are buyer intent tools on the market right now that will not only track prospective buyers on your website but also around the web. Such tools will detect which companies your visitors are coming from (through IP address lookups), whether they’ve visited websites of your competitors, which keywords they use the most, and much more.
Even though you don’t have control over external buyer intent data, you can still use it to inform your sales strategy and grow your conversions as a result. Here’s how.
How Can You Use Buyer Intent Data to Grow Conversions?
In our fast-paced world, getting in touch with your potential customers just at the right time is key. Reach out too early, and they will ask tons of basic questions. Reach out too late, and they might have already settled on a competitor. Plus, the opportunity cost of talking to a visitor that won’t convert is not talking to the one that will.
Buyer intent tools can automate most of this process, instantly gathering and analyzing thousands of buyer intent signals, and suggesting the best way forward.
It’s important to note that most buyer intent tools are only able to evaluate in-market (or offline) intent, such as Google keywords, website analytics, etc. This is helpful, but is far from what real-time (or online) buyer intent can do.
Real-time buyer intent leverages historical data and any other analytics to determine an accurate buyer-intent score for every website visitor. It is a far more comprehensive approach.
An example of a real-time buyer intent solution is Lift AI.
Lift AI’s real-time behavioral buyer intent scoring is second to none and more effective than “informational” buyer intent data.
What Lift AI does is it identifies the buyer intent of all visitors to your website in real time (even completely anonymous ones) and connects the most promising ones directly to your BDRs through any chat platform you already use. If visitors score lower, they are delegated to a nurturing bit or a self-help guide instead.
How is Lift AI so effective? The secret is in its unique machine-learning model trained on billions of data points and more than 14 million live sales interactions. And it continues to get better every day.
Companies using Lift AI see major improvements (up to 10 times) in their chat conversions within just 90 days. For example, Formstack grew its pipeline by 88%, while PointClickCare’s pipeline improved 400%.
Try Lift AI free for 30 days. No credit card or IT involvement required. Just copy a small JavaScript snippet to your website, and you’re ready to start.
Using Lift AI helps you get rid of inefficiencies in your sales process, attract the most interested customers, and grow your chat conversions, pipeline and revenue.
