Intent Data
Intent Data
What is intent data?
- A buying signal that says 'they're researching right now'
- Know in advance who is ready to buy
- Timing drives conversion
What intent data changes is not the number of leads but the order of contact. The traditional pipeline starts with whoever filled out an inquiry form, which means you only meet customers who have already compared three or four vendors and call us last. With signals attached, accounts that haven’t filled out a form yet rise to the top of the list, and the question in the weekly sales meeting shifts from 'How many inbound leads this week?' to 'Which accounts are digging into our topic right now?'
Signals come in three types by source. First-party intent, such as time spent on a pricing page or repeat downloads of a resource, is accurate but only captures people who already know you. Third-party intent is gathered at the company IP level across media and review networks, so its reach is wide but its precision is lower. In between is second-party intent, where a review platform hands you the accounts that viewed your product comparison page. In practice, the benchmark to use is not absolute volume but a surge versus the account’s normal level. Add an account to your candidate list only when its consumption of a given topic runs well above its average of the past 8 to 12 weeks and holds for two weeks or more, and treat a signal’s shelf life as one month at most, acting within that window. Unlike lead scoring, which scores touchpoints with us, intent data looks at behavior that happens outside our own channels, and that difference is decisive.
The most common misunderstanding is reading this signal as a 'list of people who will buy.' It is an account-level signal, so you can’t tell who inside the company did the searching, and searches by competitor research teams, consultants, and employees planning a job change all get mixed in. That is why opening a call with 'I hear you're looking into AI training, right?' is a mistake. The other person feels watched and the conversation ends on the spot. Use the signal only to decide whom to approach and on what topic, and open with ordinary industry talk. One more thing: if you sign a tool contract but the list never reaches the sales team’s CRM, it ends up as a dashboard that just costs a monthly subscription.
John KimInstructor John Kim, author of B2B Marketing Design and CEO of Nanum Consulting
Seungtae ParkAI transformation practitioner who teaches AI business development and marketing automation by building the tools himselfIt emerged with the growth of digital behavior tracking and the B2B data industry, and its use has grown alongside the spread of account-based marketing (ABM) and data-driven sales.
Let’s look at a hypothetical case. Company A has 45 employees and KRW 6 billion (≈ US$4,489,000) in annual revenue, and it sells AI training programs to businesses. It gets 30 inbound inquiries a month, and half of them had already received proposals from three competitors. Its three salespeople each made 200 cold calls a month, with a meeting rate of just 2%. The CEO put up a three-month pilot budget, saying, 'We have to meet them before they inquire to hold our price.'
- Kim, the marketing team lead, signed a three-month pilot with a third-party intent tool and set 12 keywords, including 'in-house AI training' and 'generative AI literacy.' In the first week, 340 accounts showed signals.
- We filtered 340 accounts down to manufacturing and finance companies with 300+ employees, then kept only those whose content consumption was more than double the 8-week average. That left 27. Mr. Lee in sales said, 'At this size, we can cover them all in two days.'
- When Kim opened the topics that 27 accounts had actually viewed, half were repeatedly reading about 'measuring training effectiveness,' so every cold email subject line was replaced with 'A Casebook: Reporting AI Training ROI in Hard Numbers'.
- On the first calls with the 11 companies that replied, Kim never mentioned intent data. Instead, the opener was, 'Training managers in manufacturing lately keep asking how to measure effectiveness.'
- The sales team set a rule to complete first contact within 10 business days of a signal appearing. Accounts that went cold after two weeks were moved to the nurture email list.
- Three months later, the cold meeting rate had risen from 2% to 9%, monthly cold calls had dropped from 200 to 60, and the intent list alone produced 4 new deals worth KRW 230 million (≈ US$172,100) in contract value.