60-Second Summary
Buyer intent data is becoming a decisive advantage for sales teams, but fewer than half of reps currently have access to these insights. Reframe outbound around intent by creating stage-specific content, capturing first-party signals, and using tools and AI to prioritize outreach and shorten sales cycles.
Key takeaways: Intent data reveals buyer stage and priorities, cuts through market noise, and turns anonymous website and email behavior into actionable signals—critical given 75% of companies prioritize closing more deals while only 46% of reps see intent insights.
Standout strategies & tactics: Create premium content for awareness, consideration, and decision stages; repurpose across channels; capture leads via gated content and tools like Leadfeeder; track email engagement with Mailshake; and deploy chatbots (e.g., Drift) plus AI to qualify and route leads.
Real-world lessons & frameworks: Follow the Content → Capture → Interpret → Act framework: publish stage-specific content, capture first-party signals, enrich and score with ML/AI, then prioritize timely, relevant outreach to high-intent accounts.
Operational impact: Intent data helps sales spend more time selling (sellers currently spend <1/3 of time on selling) and engage buyers earlier and more effectively—important since 57% of the B2B buyer journey is completed before first contact.
*This summary was created with AI assistance, using our original content.
Access to buyer intent data is rapidly becoming a differentiating factor for top sales teams around the world. Roughly 75% of companies say that closing more deals is their top priority. Meanwhile, only 46% of sales reps say they have access to data insights regarding the buyer’s intent. If you want to be on the right side of those statistics, you need to reframe your strategy around intent data for outbound sales.
Utilizing buyer intent data will tell you about products and services that prospects are presently seeking out online. Online behavior such as what content they consume or engage with can give you clues as to whether they are in the awareness, consideration, or decision stage. That data reduces the collective noise in the market and allows you to proactively tailor your outreach campaign to their current stage, making it more relevant and likely to start a conversation or influence a conversion.
Guide to Intent Data for Marketers
Intent data is the future of ABM! Learn how to use intent signals to engage the right companies and grow your revenue with this guide →
DownloadTo truly supercharge your sales process with buyer intent data, you’ll want to start at the beginning:
Note: Gathering buyer intent data has never been easier. Sign up for free Leadfeeder's 14-day trial and give it a try.
It All Starts With Content
The first step to gathering the buyer’s intent is having the right content to build an audience. The only way they’re finding your product is with content like ads, blog posts, or emails to guide them there. That content needs to be relevant to your industry and the prospect’s position in the buyer’s journey – meaning you need to have premium content for every stage:
Awareness Stage - Where buyers are identifying opportunities they want to pursue or challenges they want to solve.
Consideration Stage - Where buyers have defined their goals or challenges and have committed to finding solutions.
Decision Stage - Where buyers have chosen their solution and are now searching for specific companies that can fulfill their needs.
Once that content is created, you can then repurpose it across all your channels and outreach methods to see who engages. Remember, the content should be focused on your buyer’s goals or pain points – not your product or brand. Your content can have a call-to-action directing them or a light touch on your brand as a possible solution, but if it’s not helpful or comes across as overly salesly, you’ll push them away.
Website Visitors: How to Find Buyer Intent Data?
If you’re interested in switching software or finding a new vendor, you’re probably going to ask around or – more likely – go straight to Google for a little recon work. Having your website primed for visitors shopping around is critical because 95% of customers choose to buy from providers that offer relevant content at every stage of the buying process.
Capturing buyer intent can be as simple as using lead magnets such as ebooks, whitepapers, webinars, gated content, or free trials. Once you’ve got their email address in exchange for content that identifies their buyer journey, you can use that buyer intent data in sales qualification and take action.
Another strategy is to leverage a tool like Leadfeeder, which gives you insights into your own first-party intent data i.e. which companies are visiting your website. Via a simple dashboard you can not only see which companies have visited, but also the frequency of their visits, the number of users, which pages they viewed, and how they found you.
Guide to Intent Data for Marketers
Intent data is the future of ABM! Learn how to use intent signals to engage the right companies and grow your revenue with this guide →
DownloadOutreach Campaigns: How Do Sales Teams Interpret Intent Data Reports?
The average cold email campaign gets less than a 1% response rate. It’s quite a sobering statistic, yet it’s not the end of the story – at least it doesn’t have to be. If you’re leveraging the right software, you can still gain valuable insights from how prospects behave upon receiving your email.
For instance, software like Mailshake can track key campaign metrics including email open rates and click monitoring so you can see what subject lines are working and what content is relevant to their current stage in the buyer’s journey. When they do reply, you can trigger automated followup emails that have premade templates designed to further identify their buyer’s intent and assign them a lead score.
These types of tools are excellent for cold outreach but also for newsletters that go out to existing customers, past customers, and previously interested buyers. You can see in real-time when a buyer changes their behavior and begins opening emails to engage with your content.
Leverage Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
To stay ahead of the digital natives, brands in all industries need to be where the consumers are – anytime, anywhere. It’s safe to say that AI, machine learning, and other advanced tech is changing the way marketing works, and naturally, companies integrate intent data sales workflows to supercharge their sales process. Over the last several years, in particular, the process of anticipating prospective buyers' intent has grown more scientific. AI has the power to make the buying experience more personalized, and the selling experience more straightforward.
One easy solution many companies are pursuing is offering chatbots on their website. Chat solutions like Drift are easy to install, relatively affordable, and start directing traffic and gathering buyer intent right away. You can opt to have your staff chat to give a personal touch or automate the process with a Drift Chatbot, which will welcome all users, ask probing questions to identify what the buyer wants and route the potential lead to your sales team when they’re ready to purchase.
Now that you have the low-down on using buyer intent to kick your sales process into high gear, let’s talk about the last two pieces of the puzzle. First, more often than not, your customers are way ahead of you. 57% of the B2B buyer’s journey is completed before talking to a sales rep. To feel equally prepared, you need to not only understand their position in the buyer’s journey but also have relevant content at your fingertips to help you build a use case and handle sales objections.
Second, with more data at your disposal, your sales team should be spending more time actively selling and less time doing non-selling activities. According to CSO Insights, sellers spend less than one-third of their time actively selling. With the right buyer intent data, you should be able to filter out more noise and focus more of your efforts on moving people through your funnel.
Note: Gathering buyer intent data has never been easier. Sign up for free Leadfeeder's 14-day trial and give it a try.
