If you’re a B2B Demand Gen marketer, you’ve no doubt heard of intent data. We’ve talked quite a bit about it of late. In fact, you might even be tired of hearing about it.
Intent data was supposed to be the tool we could use to replace the third-party cookies Google has decided to kill off, without hampering or even slowing down our customer identification and tracking capabilities.
But so far, the reality hasn’t lived up to the promise.
Instead, most intent data provides what’s called account-level intent data. That is, it gives you broad, less-than-actionable info on entire accounts that just might be engaged with your ads and interested in your product. Of course, for B2B, hearing that an entire company might be interested in your product is kind of like hearing that something that looked like a flying saucer was spotted above Texas three nights ago.
“OK…great, but what do I do with that information?”
Fortunately, account-level intent data isn’t the best we can do. There’s another level to intent data that will transform your business. In fact, it’s already here.
Our latest guide has the details.
New guide: “The Proof is Out There: Discover True Buyer-Level Intent Data”
For our latest guide, The Proof is Out There: Discover True Buyer-level Intent Data, we asked some of the best and brightest in marketing how buyer-level intent data will change marketing for the better, and how marketers can prepare to make the most of it.
“The Proof is Out There” contains their answers and our breakdown in full, and it’s available to download right now. But we can’t resist sharing a few of the most exciting highlights. Here are just a few of the big questions our B2B Demand Gen experts helped us answer:
What is Buyer-level intent data, anyway?
The simplest definition of buyer-level intent data is: “an amalgam of information indicating a specific individual prospect is in their buying cycle and preparing to make a purchase decision.” Compared to account-level intent data, which gives you the company or enterprise interested, buyer-level intent data Is focused on actual, specific people.
As CEO of Arment Dietrich and author of Spin Sucks Gini Dietrich put it, one of the major reasons why buyer-level intent data represents such an opportunity is that Demand Gen teams are already seeking it out. They just don’t have any way to get at it directly. In fact, as she explained, it’s one of the major challenges facing teams today: “One of the biggest roadblocks my team and I experience is whether or not the data is good, which doesn’t make executives super happy. If we can’t prove buyer-level intent (versus account-level) with the data available to us, aligning with sales and reporting to the C-suite becomes nearly impossible.”
What makes buyer-level intent data so exciting?
Buyer-level intent data has the potential to solve some long-standing B2B marketing challenges. That’s how TopRank Marketing CEO Lee Odden sees it: “A more granular understanding driven by buyer-level data solves the blurry B2B marketing mystery by helping marketers tailor their outreach and target the individuals with the highest likelihood of converting,” he told us, “and all while delivering a more efficient marketing process, as well as cost and time savings.”
CEO and Founder of Vengreso and creator of FlyMSG (a text expander) Mario Martinez Jr. agreed, calling buyer-level intent data revolutionary for both marketing and sales teams: “If marketers and salespeople have the ability to spot individual buyer intent early and accurately, it revolutionizes the buying and selling process,” he said. “With this knowledge, sellers and marketers can tailor their approach to each buyer, increasing the chances of a successful sale. It also allows them to identify potential roadblocks and address them before they become an issue.”
How will buyer-level intent data accelerate the sales pipeline?
For years, we’ve written about the chasm between what sales wanted and what marketing could deliver. Through buyer-level intent data, these two departments can now speak the same language. The outcome can be out of this world.
“When sales and marketing teams get their hands on reliable buyer-level intent data, they can really join forces to speed up the buying process,” CEO of OnMi Patch Scott D. Clary pointed out. “By creating campaigns that truly speak to the buyer’s needs, marketers can spark interest and smoothly guide them through the sales funnel. Salespeople, equipped with these insights, can concentrate on the most promising leads, boosting their overall performance.”
Founder and President of Heinz Marketing Matt Heinz explained even more simply how buyer-level intent would speed up his sales process: “The age-old questions for anyone in sales are: 1. Who do I call next? and 2. What should we talk about?”, he says. “Buyer-level intent data answers both of those questions.”
How should I prepare to use buyer-level intent data?
All the experts we talked to agreed on this point: buyer-level intent data is the future of Demand Gen marketing and sales — and teams should be preparing to make the most of it right now. “The new insights provided by buyer-level intent data will help marketers gauge your lead quality and prospects’ intentions to optimize your goal-setting much more effectively,” said speaker, author, and podcaster Pam Didner.
And co-founder and CEO of Content Monsta A. Lee Judge aptly sums up what our experts told us: “As I speak to organizations about sales and marketing alignment, a key factor involves showing sales teams what marketing teams already know about potential customers. A true revenue team emerges when sales and marketing find their alignment. This occurs when marketing seeks sales’ help to develop content for the right buyers and sales relies on marketing for signal data about specific individuals with current buying intent.”
The availability of buyer-level intent data will make this “true revenue team” possible in a way it never has been before. The time to start building that team, therefore, is now.
For more insight on the exciting potential of buyer-level intent data from these experts, download “The Proof is Out There,” available now.