What is Intent Data?

Intent data is information about what companies or people are researching, taken from your own website and product or from third-party publisher networks, that suggests an account may be looking for a product like yours right now.

At a glance

• First-party intent is activity you can see yourself: pricing page visits, demo requests, documentation reads, trial usage.
• Third-party intent comes from outside networks. Bombora, for example, collects research activity across a co-op of thousands of B2B sites and tracks more than 25,300 topics.
• It’s usually delivered at the account level, as a score or a “surge” on a topic.
• In Forrester’s Q1 2023 Global B2B Intent Data Survey, over 85% of companies using intent data reported business benefits.

How intent data works

Third-party providers look for a change in behavior, not a single visit. Bombora describes its scoring as comparing an account’s last three weeks of research on a topic with its own 12-week baseline. When reading on that topic rises well above normal, the account shows as surging.

First-party intent is simpler and usually stronger, because it’s about you. A known contact who reads your pricing page twice in a week is a clearer signal than an anonymous company reading about your category somewhere else.

An intent data example

Example (illustrative): a team selling fleet software has 2,000 accounts that fit its ICP. This week, 40 of them surge on “fleet maintenance software” and six visited the pricing page. The SDRs start with the six, then work the 40 with messaging about maintenance, and the rest stay in the normal sequence.

Common intent data mistakes

• Buying a feed with no plan to use it. If a surge doesn’t trigger a task, a route or a campaign, nobody acts on it. Decide the action before you buy.
• Treating a surge as a buyer. Intent says an account is reading. It doesn’t say who, or that they have budget. Use it to rank accounts, then qualify as usual.
• Topics that are too broad. “CRM” matches students, job seekers and competitors. Pick topics close to the problem you solve.
• Ignoring your own signals. Pricing page visits and replies from known contacts are often the best intent you have, and they’re free.
• Only using it for new business. Customers researching competitors can be a churn warning, which Bombora also markets as a use case.

How intent data shows up in a revenue system

Intent is most useful as a way to decide which accounts on a list get worked first and what the first message is about. It sits next to firmographics and technographics in the account data we build for partners, and feeds the list a sales team works each week. See how this fits our datasets work.

Terms that sit next to intent data

Intent ranks accounts that already passed firmographic filtering, and it’s the core input to signal-based selling. Teams often add it to lead scoring and use it to pick accounts for ABM. Pairing it with technographics shows both what an account researches and what it already runs.