From Buyer Intent to Higher Intent

It’s time to step up from “buyer intent” 🤔 to “higher intent” 📡 .

Sales and marketing leaders have seen a massive shift in the effectiveness of outbound in the past 2 years. Bombarding prospects with barely relevant pitches and personalizations doesn’t cut it anymore. Especially when the tidal wave of other vendors’ emails is hitting the same audience at the same time.

That led to the recognition that sales needed to focus on prospects that were in-market or close to it by targeting those that had “buyer intent”. That is, you want to engage with people who intend to address the problem you solve.

And marketing needed to work on brand visibility, community development, and other programs that could nurture that buyer intent. Marketing can support the conditions that help people to see the value of addressing the problem you solve.

Buyer intent’s superpower is that it lets your teams focus on people who want to hear your message. People that are actively thinking about the problem domain you live in, and who want to know how to confront it. Engaging with these prospects isn’t an interruption, it’s assistance.

So, how do you identify when someone is in-market? You look for buyer intent signals. These will vary widely depending on your industry and your own company. But generally, they’ll include indications like a buyer is on your website, viewing your profile on G2, TrustRadius, or Capterra. Maybe they are asking peers in a community forum or attending industry events. Or, perhaps they’re engaging with relevant content on a third-party site.

You’ll need to evaluate and test for yourself which measures of intent are the most valuable. And many tools can help you to automate the process, like DemandBase, 6Sense, etc.

However, there’s a challenge with focusing solely on buyer intent data.

1. It can be too high-level to provide real guidance. Someone from a target account engaging with an ad doesn’t necessarily indicate genuine interest.
2. It is often generalized about an account, but not a person. Sure, you can sometimes associate intent with a person that has been captured in your marketing automation already, but that’s not as often as you’d like.
3. It is not focused on the middle and bottom of the funnel. Today’s deals often slip or go to no contest. What you need is better data about intent within the sales process.

And critically, you’re missing a defensible advantage that you have already available to your team. An advantage that none of your competitors can duplicate. It’s a leg-up that isn’t just focused on more leads, it’s an advantage that can help you move raw leads and handraisers through to close.

That advantage is “higher intent” data. All right, so I’ve teased this enough. Tomorrow, I’ll break it down.