Using Internal Data for “Higher Intent”

Stuck deals are everyone’s problem these days. Slow-moving, stalled opportunities that sellers can’t unlock. Internal politics, lack of perceived value, and prioritization are all major issues.

An approach that go-to-market teams can turn to is to take the next step beyond “buyer intent” to “higher intent” data.

Higher intent data is the intelligence that comes from interactions between sellers and their prospects and buyers.

– It’s the discussions of pricing with the economic buyer via email. 
– It’s the business value presentation to the CFO that happened on Zoom. 
– It’s the meeting about next-steps that the VP of Finance accepted but didn’t attend.

And it starts with your internal data. The data most companies have within their reach, but not their grasp. Email, calendar, and transcript data from seller activities are scattered across dozens of tools and teams. Without a way to centralize and normalize the data, it’s just data with no business value.

This is your data and yours alone. That’s what makes higher intent data such a unique differentiator for your business. Buyer intent data, meanwhile, can come from many sources, including sources that your competitors have access to. Higher intent data is exclusively yours to take advantage of if you decide to.

But you can’t simply throw ChatGPT or similar AI onto your Salesforce CRM and expect to get magical insights. You need the data to be tuned to match your unique sales process and terminology. It needs to match how you do business.

Next time up, I’ll take a look at that idea of extracting value from your higher intent data.