What is Intent Data? Moving Away from the Basics

Intent Data: Moving away from the basics

The online shoppers of 2022 are a different group. They no longer reach out to their salesperson for help at the beginning of their buyer journey. No, they get online and start hunting for the solution to their problem. A problem that you and your sales and marketing teams could solve with B2B Intent Data.

Did you realize that the average B2B buyer is at the end of their buyer journey long before they contact you – even if they are already a customer?! Digital channels have changed the availability of quality data and made it much easier for buyers to go online and gather information.

So what does this mean to you and your sales team? According to Gartner, you and your team will have less than 20% of the total time leads spend in the buying cycle to present your product and make your case. This gives you very little time to influence your lead’s buying decisions.

Enter Visual Visitor’s buyer intent data tool, Who’s Shopping. Our tool was designed to alert you and your sales and marketing teams when potential prospects display certain buying signals so your team can reach out first to engage that lead.

What is intent data?

B2B intent data can show which leads or prospects are actively researching on various third-party websites. This data provides insight into a lead’s purchase intent and can allow you to identify if and/or when a lead is moving through their buyer’s journey to purchase products or services that you can provide.

As we all know, when we face a certain issue, we research it online to find a solution. But unfortunately, a lead rarely begins by calling providers for the service or product they are considering. Instead, they go to social media or discussion boards to gather information.

Imagine if your sales and marketing team was using Visual Visitor’s buyer intent tool and knew those leads were actively researching and could engage with them at the beginning of their search. They would see spikes in activity as their buyer intent score increased and be able to prioritize their outreach to focus on the spiked accounts.

Let’s face it, the average B2B buying journey is challenging for both sales teams and customers. With all of the available information out there, buyers value the sellers that make it easier on them. With our tools, you will gain insight into the type of research your lead is doing and have information readily available to answer why they should use your product or service.

Visual Visitor’s Who’s Shopping, our buyer intent tool, allows our customer’s sales and marketing teams to find both the leads and the current customers that are online researching topics that are relevant to their business on third-party sites, including:

• Social Media
• News
• Message Boards
• Forums
• Articles or White Papers
• Blogs
• and more

When your business, especially your sales and marketing teams, have access to buyer data like this, they can reach potential buyers much earlier!

How does Visual Visitor collect Buyer Intent Data?

The buying journey is no longer a linear path. Instead, there are curves, twists, and turns that occur throughout various phases of the sales cycle. The good news is that all this activity, or content consumption, creates ‘Digital Footprints’ online that we use to provide you with buyer intent data. We gather these data ‘footprints’ through multiple third-party vendors that collect various forms of online research activities from many sources.

Buyer Intent Data vs. Website Visitor Tracking Data

You might be wondering how Visual Visitor’s buyer intent data differs from our website visitor tracking data – both are key elements of our Sales Intelligence Platform and provide different data to increase your B2B sales.

We track when prospective buyers visit your website and then present this data to you on your dashboard with our website visitor tracking software. This data includes a detailed company workup for each visitor, the visitor’s behavior (time on pages, how they travel from page to page, and more), identity, including access to contact information and other firmographics, etc.

Website visitor tracking is an excellent B2B sales tool and provides your team with numerous insights into the prospects who visit your website. But what about those prospects out there researching products and services like yours that have not visited your website? They are invisible to you unless you use a buyer intent tool like the one offered at Visual Visitor.

Buyer intent data is so much more than the first-party data that you are collecting from your website. It includes data that will show your sales and marketing teams leads or prospects that are actively engaged in research on third-party sites using the keywords that you have chosen based on your product or service.

Using B2B Intent Data

Visual Visitor’s B2B intent data can provide insight into a prospect’s purchase intent. This insight allows our customers to identify when a potential lead is actively researching third-party sites online and looking to purchase a product, or similar product, offered by a competitor.

Your sales and marketing teams are limited without this predictive data collection tool.

Reasons your team needs buyer intent data:

1. Identify Leads Actively Researching. Buyer intent signals help identify which leads are out there actively researching a product or service. The keywords/phrases used for your company’s buyer intent campaign will increase your ability to identify those leads without requiring that they come to your site and fill out a form. We understand how important those keywords are to pinpoint your leads; we offer up to 50 keywords to start.
2. Access to Lead Scoring data. The Lead Score data that we collect for your campaign will show your team which companies are actively researching and at what level. This will allow you to prioritize your outreach to engage the lead faster.
3. Focus your team’s outreach. Based on the intent data collected and the Lead Score given, your team can create lists that allow them to reach out to the most active companies earlier rather than focusing on companies that have a lower interest level.
4. Personalize your outreach. With the company data that we provide access to (names, email addresses, phone numbers, and more), your team will be able to quickly
   reach out with the buyer intent data gathered and increase their chances of making a sale.
5. Customer Retention. Our buyer intent data tool also shows you when your current customers are researching. This allows you to get ahead of customer cancellations or drop-offs.

What is Predictive Data and Why is it Important for B2B Sales?

Predictive data in the B2B sales realm uses data, algorithms, and AI or machine learning to identify potential future sales. This buyer data aims to use the digital footprints left behind as we travel through the online researching process to go beyond simply knowing what has happened and provide possible prospects that are likely to become future customers. Why is this important?

Getting started using buyer intent data is very important to your team for multiple reasons. B2B intent data has developed into one of the fastest-growing data categories, changing how sales and marketing teams schedule their time and prioritize their leads. Using this tool has allowed teams to get in front of the competition and reach out to prospects much earlier in their buying cycle.
Some important benefits buyer intent data can provide to your team include:

• Predictive data allows your team to initiate contact with leads earlier in their buying cycle.
• Grow your CRM with access to an increased amount of contacts to find the perfect buyer(s).
• Know early which leads are ready to spend money and implement a solution.
• Increase customer retention by knowing when your current customers are shopping before they buy from someone else.
• Fine-tune your marketing strategies using content consumption data and focus your efforts where you know the leads are researching.

Buyer Intent Data and B2B Data

Buyer intent data is not typically used as a standalone tool, and Visual Visitor understands that. Knowing that a company is researching does not provide nearly the same impact as knowing that a qualified company is researching. That is why we have paired our buyer intent data with other B2B data to provide our customers with as much information on the qualified leads as possible.

Firmographic Data

When you open your Visual Visitor Buyer Intent Dashboard, you will find the companies showing the most interest listed. However, we understand that just having a list of companies that have scored on the keywords that your team is tracking for intent data purposes is only the first step to finding qualified leads. That is why we also provide firmographic data in the lead datasheet. This data includes firmographic company data such as company size, revenue, and demographic data like names, social media information, job titles, location, phone numbers, and email addresses.

Technographic Data

This soon-to-be-released feature will provide your team with the technologies and software companies are currently using to assist your team in much the same way that demographics and firmographics do. Combining this with the buyer intent data tool will help add further insight into the company you are targeting.

Intent Data

Intent data gathered from the keywords used by your team will tell you who is actively researching and give you insight into the phase of the journey the lead is currently in. This allows your team to structure their initial engagement to fit the lead. Through our extensive research, we know that the more qualified keywords that your team can track, the better your list of qualified leads will be. That is why we provide our customers with up to 50 keywords.

Before you Buy

There are many different B2B buyer intent data providers out there right now, but we know that our product stands above the rest. Our intent data will lead your sales and marketing teams to companies and contacts within those companies with granular detail! We also provide your team with specific intent signals that give them the information they need to move forward with a lead.

With Visual Visitor’s buyer intent dashboard, your teams will know which intent data signals are being detected and the company data connected with those alerts. There is no need to dig further for contact information with our tool; we give you everything in one place! We are confident that your company will benefit from our software and offer a 14-day Free Trial.

So grab your Free Trial today, your sales and marketing teams will thank you.