How Intent Data Helps Sellers Convert A-List Accounts

It’s enough to ruin any sales professional’s quarter: that prospect your team has spent months engaging — scheduling demos, addressing concerns, comparing features — suddenly decides they’re not ready to buy after all.

You can’t stop every account from getting cold feet or misreading their company’s appetite for new solutions. But today’s best-performing go-to-market (GTM) teams are increasingly using intent data to focus their efforts on the accounts that are the most likely to close a deal.

With intent data, your sales team can identify the highest-value prospects in the market and prioritize their outreach to match the account’s position in the buying journey. 

In a market that rewards efficiency, scalability, and automation, intent data can be the ingredient that helps GTM teams of all sizes unlock their potential and win faster than ever. Here’s how it works.

Understanding Intent Data

Intent data captures the digital footprints left behind when prospects research products and services, generating signals that help inform sales, marketing, and business strategy decisions. This information can be analyzed to identify account intent, or how likely prospects at a particular company are to engage with a particular vendor.

Intent data can be collected from a variety of sources across the web, including review sites, news articles, and product research. When these signals are sorted into distinct topics, with high amounts of activity interpreted as “spikes” in intent, sellers can make much more informed decisions about their target audience’s needs and interests. 

For example, if several people within an account are browsing content tied to the term “best B2B sales software vendors,” you can infer the company has relatively high intent to make a purchase in that sector.

Ways to Incorporate Intent Data in Your Sales Strategy

Research by McKinsey found that more than 70% of businesses are willing to switch…