B2B Intent Data: What It Is, How To Use It, and The Best Tools Available
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Intent data enables sales and marketing teams to better understand what customers are thinking by tracking their activities as they make their way through your sales funnel and research your products and services. Various third-party intent data tool offer unique features for identifying high-value prospects, enhancing account-based marketing, and driving revenue growth. B2B intent data tools track behavioral signals like website visits and downloads, allowing sales teams to focus on prospects who show active interest, improving conversion rates by targeting those most likely to buy. Get structured public data on professionals and organizations, refreshed continuously and built for scale. If the visitors provide the required data, it’s an indication of their interest in your products or services. These data points allow sales and marketing teams to focus on prospects looking for products like yours.
Now, it’s once again time to use the intent data you picked up in the initial stages. You know which accounts you’re targeting and who you’re targeting within each account. Account-level targeting creates a significant sense of urgency and awareness of your product throughout the breadth of the target account.
Their third-party intent data shows a Singapore-headquartered financial services firm showing a topic surge for "regulatory compliance software" — useful, but shared with every competitor on the same platform. Consider a revenue team selling compliance software into Southeast Asia. Third-party intent data structurally cannot capture research behaviour in local-language markets. A funding event plus a VP of Sales hire plus a technology adoption signal within 30 days is a buying window. A company that just filed a new subsidiary in Indonesia, posted ten compliance roles on a regional job board, and announced a partnership in local trade press — all within 30 days — is almost certainly entering a buying cycle. Third-party intent co-ops are built from English-language B2B publisher networks.
With deep experience in enterprise sales and revenue operations, he writes about sales intelligence, account-based selling, and the future of B2B go-to-market. For a step-by-step guide, see our post on account research at scale. For teams focused primarily on anonymous web intent data, Bombora and 6sense are the established leaders. Buying signals software tells your team which accounts from that database deserve attention right now and gives them the context to have a relevant conversation. Buying signals software complements your CRM, sales engagement platform, and contact databases.
There are buyer intent data tools available that can help you collect and make sense of this information. As we mentioned earlier, 1st party intent data encompasses the use of your websites, email, and social media. First party intent data is the simpler of the two types of intent data marketing. Once they’ve gathered all the information, a good intent data provider can put it all together in a way that gives the intent data meaning. Data privacy laws can come into play here, so it’s important to ensure your data is legal by working with a transparent and reputable supplier.
Demandbase is built for enterprise ABM — where multiple teams, channels, and signals need to align around account-level engagement. UserGems flips the script on intent by focusing on people — not clicks. And for the price, it’s hard to beat as a full-cycle SDR engine. Apollo is built for outbound teams that need to move fast. It’s one of the few data providers where privacy isn’t just a legal checkbox — it’s baked into the product. Bombora was the first to make third-party intent signals mainstream — and it’s still the go-to for demand gen, content marketing, and early-stage ABM.
How to Collect Buyer Intent Data: Top Five Buyer Intent Data Providers of 2025
However, the number of marketers targeting Boomers and Gen X (anyone born before 1981) has collapsed. Reaching younger generations has been a marketing focus for several years. That’s right — social media marketing isn’t just for brands targeting individual consumers. HubSpot’s Content Hub streamlines the entire content creation process, from ideation and writing to publishing and performance tracking.
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RevGenius Signal School, built in partnership with Common Room, offers a practical maturity model for teams adopting buying signals software. 71% of funded companies finalize vendors within 90 days. RB2B focuses on individual-level identification with Slack notifications. Warmly, Clearbit Reveal, and RB2B de-anonymize website visitors. ZoomInfo pairs its massive contact database with Bombora-powered intent signals. UserGems specializes in job-change signals and relationship tracking.
- An intent data provider focuses on collecting and analyzing behavioral signals, like web searches and content engagement, to identify businesses actively researching specific products or services.
- This means users can act on intent signals confidently, knowing their outreach lists are accurate and up-to-date.
- This helps sales teams focus on interested accounts and reach out with the right message at the right time.
Track all three to catch accounts before your competitors do. On the marketing side, b2b purchase intent data Smartsheet saw an 84% increase in MQLs after aligning demand generation around intent-driven account targeting. The business impact shows up across both sales and marketing.
Learn how to use intent signals to engage the right companies and grow your revenue with this guide → They’re actively sending out strong signals that they are ready to buy, and soon — and the power of intent data is finding them before your competitors do. B2B buyer intent data is an aggregated set of data showing which companies are active in the buying cycle. Try Leadfeeder free for 14 days to uncover prospects using customer data and behavior.
Built for advanced sales forecasting, targeting, and prioritization. For enterprise ABM teams, it’s the go-to when you want to know who’s heating up, and how soon to strike. 6sense isn’t just another intent tool — it’s the one predicting where buyers are in their journey, before your reps even reach out. If you're running high-volume outbound or fueling intent-informed ABM, it’s likely already in your stack — and for good reason.