A Simple Guide to Understanding B2B Buyer Intent Signals

The internet has evolved over the years, and so did our marketing strategies. And the primary reason is changing consumer behavior.

The way B2B prospects discover new products has changed drastically in the last decade. As a result, B2B marketers had to reinvent a lot of strategies. Most of which directly resulted from improved technology.

The addition of marketing data has made it easier for B2B businesses to analyze buyer intent.

If your sales team knows which B2B prospects are ready to buy the product, it’s a game-changer. Instead of chasing prospects that might not be interested, you connect with only those who showcase a purchase intent, saving you time and resources.

There are multiple types of B2B buyer intent signals you can track. This guide will show you which different buyer signals you can use to improve your B2B sales.

Let’s jump in.

What are Buyer Intent Signals?

Buyer intent signals are indicators that a prospect is getting ready to make a purchase. Based on where they are in the sales funnel, there are different intent signals.

Types of Buyer Intent Signals

Based on your product, marketing strategies, business model, there might be different intent signals that become important to you.

1) Demographic Signals

Demographic signals are the most basic of intent signals. They are usually derived while designing your customer’s ideal persona.

They also include firmographic and technographic intent signals.

Demographic signals may include company title, geographic location, age, gender, and many more.

Firmographic signals include company size, number of employees, industry, revenue, etc.

Technographic intent signals include competitors’ market penetration, technical differences between different products.

2) Event-based Buyer Intent Signals

Event-based intent signals are tracked by tracking particular events that are important to your business. When a key event happens, it can be a trigger for your salesperson to follow up prospects within that company. If you offer a product/service that can help them with further activities, it’s a good time to reach out and engage. Some examples of event-based signals are:

New funding round
New hiring pushes
New proposals

3) Action-based Intent Signals

Action-based intent signals relate to the actions your prospect is taking that signals interest in buying your product. The actions are often linked to the bottom of the funnel, so you must keep an eye on these intent signals. Some examples of action-based intent signals are:

Filling out forms on your website
Visiting product pages
Prospects asking questions on live chat
Prospects searching for high-intent keywords

If you can track these signals, your salesperson can reach out to prospects exactly when they are ready to buy. It’s a good way to improve sales conversions and make sure your sales reps are spending time with prospects who are ready to buy.

How to Use Intent Signals

1) Build a list of targeted accounts

As you tap into the prospect’s intent data, you’ll discover data points that are useful to take your strategy formed. From there, you can decide which accounts to prioritize first. The technographic and firmographic signals, in addition to other purchase intent signals, help you build a list of targeted accounts with high purchase intent.

2) Proactively Reach to Prospects

By paying close attention to the buyer intent signals, you make sure that you are proactively reaching prospects. You can create a lead score indicator, based on which you can reach nurtured prospects once they cross a particular score. With this, your sales reps could react proactively rather than reactively.

3) Create Specific Content

You can use buyer intent signals to create specific content addressing the prospect’s needs. This way, you can move prospects down the sales funnel. Rather than just relying on keyword research, you can use intent data to create landing pages, email newsletters, ad copies, and blog posts.

Based on which content they consume, you get a clear view of where your prospect is leading, the sales velocity, and the product/services they are interested in.

4) Customized Sales Presentations

When you know customers’ intentions and pain points, you can create sales presentations to address the issues. Personalization heavily influences the buying decision. Going one step ahead will ensure that you address the issues your competitors have missed.

5) Reduce Churn rate

All B2B marketers know that it’s easier to upsell current customers than to acquire a new one. With intent signals, you know how your prospect is reacting to the current product, and you can upsell them new products and services. You can even identify gaps in your product and offer alternative solutions.

6) Improve your ABM Campaigns

Account-based campaigns target specific prospects from specific industries rather than an audience as a whole. With buyer intent signals, you can further narrow down your targeted list by only dealing with prospects who show high purchase intent.

ABM is a very successful B2B marketing strategy. Adding intent signals will make the campaigns better.

Conclusion

Intent signals may feel complicated at first, but over time they bring a good ROI. For example, you may notice that targeting prospects based on demographic and firmographic signals doesn’t result in much engagement. But prospects collected through content consumption results in good sales, so you can focus your efforts there.

B2B sales cycles are usually lengthy. Using intent signals will ensure you reduce the time and help brands focus efforts only where they are effective.