Finding the right type of companies within your TAM that need your product is a huge step towards closeable business, but you still need to figure out which of those companies are actually ready to buy your product – this is where intent comes into play. We can determine intent by a company’s search activities. Most of you are buying weekly intent feeds delivering the names of companies who are searching for the terms that you prioritized. With an intent model, you can automatically achieve AI-generated scores to identify low, medium or high intent. By utilizing Fit scores in conjunction with Intent scores, you can determine the right companies as well as the ready companies.
An Intent model monitors user interest (first- and third-party, known and unknown), and applies scoring based on the level of intent activity specific to customers’ products/category. Knowing that a company’s employees have been actively searching in your field of expertise with either new high intent or sustained intent enables you to focus your efforts on the best companies that are truly ready to buy.
Intent is a great way to time your engagement with companies that are expressing in-market buying signals in your products and solutions. However, it’s easy to over-index on intent and just end up with more noise than results, because not every company that expresses interest is the right company for your business. Over-relying on intent often leads to sales reps chasing potentially bad accounts and deals, or spending excessive money on ads that are targeting companies that just aren’t the right fit. However, intent is particularly effective when applied to the accounts that you already know have high Fit scores (the ones that look like customers who have bought specific products, have led to your biggest deals, or have generated the most LTV (lifetime value), etc).
A company might show high intent, but they’re not a good match for your product overall – pursuing such a lead can be a waste of time and resources. But if you’ve already used Fit models to determine that a company needs your product (and is able to buy it), you can further filter by intent to find the companies who are ready and willing to buy your product. Intent models compound the success of your Fit models, further increasing the odds of achieving closeable business as you focus sales and marketing efforts in order of likelihood to buy – enabling you to achieve ROI faster and more efficiently for overall revenue optimization.
With Leadspace, once you’ve discovered your TAM, buyer profiles are automatically created at the person, account, and buying center levels. Sales and marketing teams can then amplify buyer profiles across their TAM with Leadspace predictive Fit scores, and amplify them even more with Leadspace Intent. Each buyer profile within your TAM is assigned an intent score (High, Medium, Low, or No Intent), where a score of “High Intent” represents that people from that account have demonstrated intent by searching for terms relevant to your product that you’ve determined ahead of time.
The best intent signals are targeted at specific market segments. Market segments that can be identified by the patterns of terms that they are using to conduct online searches. It’s useful to align your intent model with SEO/SEM keywords. Branded terms (like your company name or a competitor’s name), product categories, event signals (headquarters move or business milestone), competitive categories (competing or adjacent categories sold against or with your product) are all words that can be chosen to identify a product or region-specific intent signal. The highest intent signal can be the name of your own company or product.
Use Cases and Key Capabilities of Intent Models:
- Enable inbound leads to be directly routed to sales or specific nurturing streams based on intent scores.
- Utilize AI-driven intent scoring to enable customer success to proactively improve customer retention and prevent churn.
- Improve BDR outbound and digital marketing conversion rates by utilizing AI/ML-driven intent scoring models to more intelligently curate ABM audiences and improve ad bidding strategies.
- Enhance your active profiles with Fit and Intent models to automate insights for complete buyer profiles.
- Identify the top strategic accounts for investment by focusing on those who are most likely to buy your product.
- Monitor your target accounts for in-market buying signals, uncovering and targeting potential opportunities before competitors, and improving sales and marketing intelligence for more timely and effective outreach.
- Power your Go-to-Market with CDP data & activation using multi-source aggregation and topic/trigger weighting.
- Identify the right and ready ABM accounts for each territory or campaign.
- Match your weekly intent vendor signals to the ICP criteria for each of your Salesforce accounts and integrate account AI models and intent signals directly into Salesforce.
- Prioritize outreach to accounts based on predictive Fit, weekly intent surges, and product-specific intent scores.
By enhancing your active profiles with Intent (and Fit) models, you can automate insights and enable your marketing team to achieve complete buyer profiles and leverage decisioning models to quickly seek out and achieve closeable business. This takes the guesswork out of identifying the top strategic accounts for investment by focusing on those who are most likely to buy your product. Put the right account contact details, in-market intent buying signals and propensity-to-buy scores directly in front of your reps to prioritize leads and opportunities in their pipeline.
In short, with a powerful CDP solution, you can turbocharge your growth strategy with AI models to identify the highest-returning market segments and optimize territory assignments to maximize sales effectiveness. But what’s the next step? Now that you know which companies need your product Predictive (Fit model), and which of those companies have been actively searching for your kind of product (Intent model), now you need to figure out who are the right people to pursue within those companies. Stay tuned for the next blog in our Revenue Radar series where we will explore how to find the right type of person to pursue using Persona models. In the meantime, get the full Revenue Radar Guide to see how Leadspace finds your best customers.
