Intent signal or data refers to information about your potential buyers’ behaviors that can help you predict what their next move or purchase might be. These datasets can be of great value to B2B sales teams as they identify buyers in-market or scout for prospects on any level of their buying journey.
If you’re not sure how exactly you can use intent data to help fire up your sales, here are a few ways to get you started:
1. Expand Your List Of Prospects
Identify your ideal customer profile (ICP) and create a list of business accounts that meet that ICP. How do you find out who meets this criterion? By generating a report from your customer relationship management (CRM) software and analyzing the metrics.
Once you have a suitable list of prospects, it’s time to sort them according to how strong their intent to buy is. And for this, your B2B data is going to be invaluable. Without it, you’d risk just shooting in the dark on all companies on your list as if they were at the same stage of your sales funnel.
With the B2B intent metrics given by your CRM, you can identify which of your customers have a strong intent to buy, and you can focus on those. You can also use the information to broaden your coverage and reach new contacts that are interested in your services or product. It can cut your marketing monetary and time expenditure significantly.
2. Identify And Use Micro Conversions To Segment Your Market
You can track your target accounts or accounts that meet your ICP so that you would know when they interact with specific content that gives them a strong intent to buy.
For instance, they might have read a white paper from your site or have been shopping around on third-party sites, showing that they are trying to learn more about a product you also offer before committing.
You can use this data to segment your market according to what stage of the funnel they are and then tailor your messaging, thereby increasing conversions.
3. Create Competitive Sales Plays
To further leverage your B2B intent data for sales, you should consider using it to understand your competitors.
Whether your goal is to acquire new clients or simply to expand, you can use competitive intelligence (CI) to help you identify customers that are interacting with your competitor’s content or actively searching for their products or services and create sales plays that are better targeted.
Paying attention to your competition, without breaching customer privacy by limiting the scope of your information, will help you identify what’s working best for your competitors and what will likely work for you as a competitive edge.
4. Flag Customers At Risk For Churn
It doesn’t matter how fast you’re gaining customers if you’re losing them just as quickly. You can use buyer intent data in reducing your attrition rate and the revenue losses associated with it.
You can track signs of disinterest, like when a customer who used to engage with your content a lot suddenly starts to do so less often. In this case, this low content consumption could be an indicator that your client is considering dropping you as the provider.
You could also notice that at the same time, they are interacting with your business’s content less; they are checking out a competitor.
This could show that your products or services lack key features or a specific experience they found elsewhere. Your sales team could notice these signs and find out before it’s too late. If adding a few features could help you keep those clients, chances are it will help you pick up new ones as well!
5. Find Any Upsell And Cross-Sell Opportunities
Once you’ve figured out how to acquire a customer and keep them with you, it’s time to make your buyer intent data do one more thing; help you upsell and cross-sell.
A careful study of your data will show you customers showing signs of interest in other products or services you offer. Is there any increased traffic or engagement from their account towards specific pages or content in general? If yes, then this could be a good time to upsell or cross-sell.
Conclusion
Not all data is made equal. You can reap many benefits by finding an intent data provider who can help you with insights that can help you drive sales and fire up your entire sales process.
Without this, you may find yourself chasing prospects that aren’t mature enough to be sold to, wasting precious resources and time.
