Answered on January 14, 2026
Intent-based marketing tools are platforms or applications that help you identify and engage potential buyers based on what they’re actually doing.
So, instead of relying on static demographics or job titles, these tools analyze behavioral signals that reveal when an account or individual is researching solutions, comparing vendors, and evaluating alternatives.
The goal here is to know who your target accounts are, understand when they’re in-market and what they’re specifically looking for.
And for B2B marketers, these tools provide a direct window into real-time interest, letting you engage prospects the moment they enter an active buying cycle.
Related → What Is B2B Intent Data? How to Get It, Use It, and More
Intent-based marketing tools rely on behavioral data to understand buyer readiness. This data comes from two key sources:
These behaviors show direct engagement with your brand.
By combining both data sets, intent-based tools build an enriched profile of buyer behavior, showing who is researching, what they care about, and how close they are to making a decision.
Once data is collected, these tools use algorithms and AI models to identify specific intent triggers—i.e., patterns that suggest elevated buying interest.
Common examples include:
Each of these behaviors contributes to an “intent score,” which helps marketers and sellers prioritize high-potential accounts and ‘de-emphasize’ those still in early research stages.
Related → How to identify accounts for ABM: A step-by-step guide for B2B marketing teams
Once an account or individual is flagged as “in-market,” the tool integrates that insight across your martech stack. These include ABM platforms, CRMs, ad networks, and sales engagement systems—to trigger timely, personalized engagement.
Here’s how it typically plays out:
Intent-based marketing is powered by an interconnected system of tools. With each responsible for capturing, interpreting, activating, or measuring buyer intent across the customer journey.
But to better understand how they work, we’ve split these tools into four categories:
These are the ‘command centers’ of intent-based marketing. They serve as the central hub that unifies your data, orchestrates engagement across channels, and gives every revenue team a single source of truth about who’s in-market, and why.
What they do:
These platforms combine first-party data (from your CRM, website, and marketing automation system) with third-party intent data collected across the web.
Using AI and machine learning, they analyze this data to identify which accounts are showing strong buying signals. Next, it scores them by likelihood to convert. And then, activate personalized campaigns across advertising, email, and sales outreach.
Key examples:
Related → What is ABM intent data & how to use it effectively in your ABM strategy
These systems are responsible for gathering and refining high-quality intent signals across the digital ecosystem.
What they do:
These providers track content consumption across thousands of B2B websites, publisher networks, research portals, and forums.
By analyzing patterns in topic-level engagement, they identify which companies are showing spikes in interest around specific themes or products.
For example, when a company’s employees start consuming an unusual volume of content around a specific topic—say, “data warehouse migration” or “cybersecurity compliance”—the platform flags it as a signal of active research.
This is called surge intent, and it’s one of the most predictive signals available.
Most organizations feed this data into a larger platform like Demandbase or 6Sense, or directly into their CRM, to enrich targeting and segmentation.
Key examples:
DB Nuggets → If your team already runs campaigns through an ABM platform, integrate one of these providers as a data enrichment layer.
You’ll improve accuracy, expand your addressable market, and uncover new buying signals that might not appear in your first-party data alone.
Related → 40 Best account-based marketing (ABM) solutions
These are specialized systems that take buyer intent data as an input and use it to trigger real-time engagement across specific channels.
What they do:
These tools activate intent insights the moment a relevant signal appears. They specialize in optimizing one engagement channel (chat, personalization, email, or ads) and make that channel more intelligent by adapting content or experiences to match known intent.
For example, let’s say a high-intent account lands on your site. Now instead of seeing a generic homepage, they see a personalized landing page with a case study from their industry and a CTA to book a demo. Or they’re instantly routed to a live sales rep via chat. The experience adapts based on what you know about them.
Key examples:
Knowing who’s interested is one thing. Proving how that interest turned into revenue is another.
That’s where attribution and analytics tools complete the intent-based marketing loop. They connect your marketing campaigns directly to business outcomes.
What they do:
These solutions analyze the complex, multi-touch buyer journey that defines modern B2B decisions. They map every marketing and sales interaction (from the first ad view to the final closed deal) to show which touchpoints actually influenced the pipeline.
Key examples:
Artificial intelligence is the foundation that powers modern intent-based marketing.
Without it, you’d just have a lot of unstructured behavioral data (clicks, views, article reads, and searches) that no human team could possibly interpret fast enough.
But with AI, those actions become patterns that reveal who is most likely to buy, what they care about, and when they’re ready to engage.
Here’s how AI drives every stage of the intent-based marketing process:
Intent signals exist across millions of accounts, thousands of topics, and countless digital touchpoints. Every day, B2B buyers consume content, search for solutions, compare vendors, and engage with ads. Capturing and analyzing that activity manually is impossible.
AI algorithms do the heavy lifting, processing billions of behavioral data points in real-time. They track content consumption across publisher networks, monitoring search patterns, analyzing website visits, and correlating engagement across channels.
They do this continuously, updating intent scores as new signals arrive, so your view of account readiness is always current.
The scale also matters because intent is contextual. A single page view means nothing. But 15 content interactions from five different employees at the same company over two weeks on the same topic is a buying signal.
AI identifies those patterns across your entire total addressable market simultaneously, something human teams might struggle to do.
Related → How to use intent data for B2B sales and marketing
Not all behavior signals intent. Someone casually reading a blog post is different from someone downloading three competitive comparison guides in a week.
But traditional rules-based systems struggle with nuance. They treat all engagement as equal or rely on basic thresholds that miss context.
Meanwhile, machine learning models analyze the type, frequency, recency, and context of behaviors to score intent strength. They learn from historical data what patterns correlate with actual purchases, then apply those learnings to predict which current behaviors indicate buying readiness.
For example, AI can recognize that:
AI also adjusts for topic relevance and account fit. It understands that research on “implementation best practices” from an account that matches your ICP is more valuable than the same research from a company outside your target market.
By the time intent is obvious—e.g., an account is on your pricing page, requesting demos from three vendors—it’s already late.
The early research phase is when buyers form opinions, build shortlists, and develop preferences. If you’re not visible then, then it becomes difficult.
But with predictive AI models, you can analyze historical buyer journeys to identify leading indicators.
These models can detect patterns like:
AI uses these patterns to forecast which accounts are moving toward a buying decision, even if they haven’t exhibited the most obvious intent signals yet.
Related → How to create a B2B go-to-market strategy
Once AI identifies high-intent accounts, it automatically triggers contextually relevant experiences across touchpoints (ads, website content, chatbots, and even outbound sequences).
For example, an account researching “account-based advertising platforms” might see:
All these activations are automated and updated dynamically based on live intent changes.
AI-powered attribution models analyze the full buyer journey and assign credit to each touchpoint based on its statistical contribution to the outcome.
Unlike simplistic first-touch or last-touch models, AI considers:
This gives you a detailed view of what’s working (and what’s not). You can see that;
With all of this, it’s easy to quantify the contribution of each.
The foundation of any intent-based marketing platform lies in the data it captures. And that includes both first- and third-party data.
Your preferred solution should gather and use intent data from these validated sources to create a complete ‘behavioral footprint’ of your target audience (or accounts).
This means going beyond page views and downloads to track search patterns, content topics, and competitive research across the web.
Why it matters:
Without comprehensive data, your insights are incomplete, and your targeting will miss the mark. High-quality intent data tools ensure you’re identifying relevant activity—i.e., what topics matter, when interest spikes, and how it connects to your solution.
You must choose platforms that use AI and machine learning to identify behavioral patterns that indicate genuine purchase intent.
These systems learn what a “buying journey” looks like in your industry, then assign intent scores to each account or lead based on the strength, frequency, and recency of their activity.
Why it matters:
AI allows you to separate curiosity from commitment. It recognizes when a spike in research is meaningful (e.g., 10 employees reading about a single topic) versus random.
This ensures that your marketing and sales teams focus their time and budget on the accounts that statistically have the highest likelihood of converting.
Related → Understanding AI lead scoring: Definition, benefits, and how to get started
Your chosen platform should connect seamlessly with your CRM (e.g., Salesforce, HubSpot) and marketing automation tools (e.g., Marketo, Pardot, HubSpot) to synchronize data, automate workflows, and maintain a unified account view.
Why it matters:
Without integration, intent insights stay locked in a dashboard. With it, you can automatically trigger campaigns, such as sending personalized emails to high-intent, quality leads or alerting sales when an account moves into an active buying stage.
You need a platform that helps you surface the data and also tells you what to do with it. That means turning raw intent signals into actionable insights that fuel engagement across multiple channels. A few examples include personalized web experiences, targeted ad campaigns, or timely sales outreach.
Why it matters:
Intent data has a short shelf life. If your system can’t push insights to the right channels instantly, your competitors will act on the same accounts before you do.
The ability to activate insights in real time keeps your messaging relevant, increases engagement, and shortens your response window (ideally target <24 hours).
Related → Understanding ABM orchestration for B2B marketing
Intent-based marketing platforms should go beyond surface metrics (impressions, clicks, page visits) to track pipeline and revenue influence. This includes identifying how each intent-driven touchpoint contributes to opportunity creation and deal velocity.
Why it matters:
Attribution and performance dashboards help you prove ROI, justify spend, and refine future strategies. Your preferred solution should be able to integrate with your CRM to show which intent signals actually resulted in pipeline, and which didn’t.
Related → Measuring ROI of intent-nased marketing

Demandbase is the leading account-based marketing (ABM) and intent-data platform that empowers B2B organizations to identify, engage, and convert high-value accounts.
It offers the ability to connect first-party behavioral data from your website and CRM with third-party intent signals captured across the B2B web.

Then it layers on proprietary Account Intelligence that identifies which companies are in-market, what they’re researching, and where they sit in the buying journey.

This unified data model powers everything from programmatic advertising to sales outreach to pipeline analytics, ensuring every team operates from the same account-level truth.
Demandbase also enables coordinated action across marketing, sales, and customer success based on real-time account behavior.
For example, when an account shows surge intent, Demandbase can automatically adjust ad targeting, personalize website experiences, trigger sales alerts, and update CRM records without manual intervention.
Demandbase ranks #1 G2’s Winter 2026 Enterprise Grid® for Account-Based Advertising

This is Demandbase’s proprietary intelligence layer that combines firmographic data, technographic signals, and behavioral intent to create comprehensive account profiles.
It identifies which companies are visiting your website (even anonymous traffic), matches them to your target account lists, and enriches each account with detailed attributes—e.g., employee count, revenue, technology stack, business initiatives, competitive landscape.
This intelligence helps targeting precision across all downstream activities, ensuring you’re reaching the right accounts with relevant context.


Aggregates third-party intent signals from Bombora’s Company Surge data and Demandbase’s proprietary intent network, capturing research activity across thousands of B2B publications, review sites, and communities.

The platform identifies topic-level intent (what accounts are researching), intent strength (how actively they’re researching), and intent trends (whether research activity is increasing or plateauing).
Intent scores update continuously and integrate directly into account records, giving sales and marketing teams real-time visibility into buying committee engagement.

This is a B2B-native programmatic advertising platform that enables precise account-based targeting across display, social, CTV, and video.
Built on the Piper B2B DSP, it allows you to target specific companies on your account lists, and adjust creative based on account characteristics and intent signals.


The platform also includes frequency capping at the account level (not just the cookie level), cross-channel attribution, and real-time campaign optimization.
You’re buying impressions against named accounts, which eliminates wasted spend on audiences outside your ideal customer profile (ICP).

Dynamically adapts your website experience based on the visiting account’s industry, company size, technology stack, intent signals, and stage in the buyer journey.
You can change headlines, CTAs, product messaging, case studies, and even navigation based on who’s visiting.


Personalization rules can be set manually or driven by AI recommendations, and A/B testing is built in to optimize performance over time.

Surfaces account-level insights directly in Salesforce, including intent signals, recent website activity, engaged contacts, and recommended next actions.
Sales reps see which accounts are showing buying signals, what content they’ve consumed, and which topics are driving their research.
Demandbase also enables ‘one-to-one’ and ‘one-to-few’ outreach campaigns with personalized messaging based on account intelligence. This ensures sales engagement is informed by the same intent data driving marketing efforts.

Provides closed-loop reporting that connects marketing and sales activities to pipeline and revenue outcomes at the account level.
You can track how intent signals correlate with opportunity creation, measure account engagement over time, and attribute revenue to specific touchpoints across the buyer journey.
Demandbase supports multiple attribution models (first-touch, multi-touch, custom) and allows you to segment performance by account tier, industry, or campaign.

Maps the complete account journey from first anonymous website visit through closed-won deal. It shows every touchpoint including ads viewed, content consumed, sales interactions, intent spikes, and engagement patterns.
This timeline view helps revenue teams understand what’s working (which activities correlate with progression) and what’s not (where accounts stall or churn).

Uses machine learning to suggest next-best actions for both marketers and sales reps based on account behavior and historical conversion patterns.
The recommendations improve over time as the AI learns from your specific outcomes.


Gives marketers direct control over campaign setup, audience management, and budget allocation without requiring agency or platform support.
You can launch new campaigns, adjust targeting parameters, swap creative, and reallocate spend in real-time based on performance.
“With Demandbase, we effectively transformed advertising spend into qualified opportunities. Through precision targeting and actionable insights, we’ve strengthened cross-functional alignment, accelerated pipeline growth, and delivered measurable impact in the areas that matter most.”
—Jared Levy, Growth Marketing Manager at League.
“Using the two platforms together, we’re able to target specific companies with precision and increase the relevance of our ads. And we’ve increased our conversion rates by focusing on high-value accounts.”
—Thao Tran, Global Integrated Marketing Manager at Workday.
“Traditional targeting out of LinkedIn is fantastic, and with Demandbase, I can take that information from LinkedIn and focus it even further.”
—Mara Chapin, Digital Marketing Manager at Visier.
“Marketing’s contribution focused on reaching accounts who currently aren’t doing business with us. Through insights derived from Demandbase activity, we learned what solutions these accounts were interested in, which helped initiate new sales conversations. It proved to be a very successful collaboration between marketing and sales.”
—Jenny Reed, Sr. Manager, Global Marketing at Diebold Nixdorf.
Your Next Best Customer Is Already Researching. Here’s How to Reach Them.

6Sense positions itself as a ‘Revenue AI’ platform designed to predict which accounts are in-market before they show obvious buying signals.
It uses AI and machine learning to analyze behavioral signals (e.g., anonymous website visits, search patterns), and correlates those signals with historical buying patterns.
This predictive engine assigns each account to a stage in what 6Sense calls the “buying journey,” from awareness through consideration to decision. This allows revenue teams to tailor their approach based on where an account actually sits.
6Sense typically operates with enterprise-level pricing that scales with data volume, number of users, and level of orchestration required.

ZoomInfo operates as a go-to-market (GTM) intelligence with a large proprietary database of B2B contacts and companies.
It provides detailed profiles on over 100 million business contacts and 14 million companies, enriched with direct dials, verified email addresses, job titles, reporting structures, technology stacks, and firmographic details.
ZoomInfo pricing varies depending on the data volume, modules, and automation layers selected.
Plans typically begin at a mid-tier range suitable for scaling B2B teams, with enterprise tiers offering access to the full RevOS suite (including Intent, Orchestrator, Engage, and Chorus).

Bombora established itself as the category leader in third-party B2B intent data by pioneering the concept of ‘Company Surge’. This proprietary algorithm analyzes content consumption patterns across this network to determine when companies show an unusual spike in interest around a given topic.
For this to work, Bombora uses a co-op data sharing model where 5,000+ B2B publishers, media companies, and content sites contribute anonymized consumption data to a collective pool.
For example, when a company’s employees consume content on these sites (e.g., reading whitepapers, watching webinars) Bombora aggregates those signals at the company level to identify topics that organization is actively researching.
Bombora offers custom pricing based on data usage volume, number of tracked topics, and integration type (API access, CRM sync, or ABM platform linkage).
The Demandbase and Bombora partnership allows you to sync Bombora Intent Topics directly into Demandbase. You can use Bombora intent to power marketing and sales growth at every stage of the account journey.

Cognism is a global sales intelligence platform that specializes in providing compliant, phone-verified contact data combined with intent signals to help B2B sales teams build pipeline in international markets.
While many intent and contact data providers focus primarily on North America, Cognism leans more to a global-first approach. It offers deep coverage across EMEA, APAC, and NAM with particular strength in European markets where GDPR compliance is non-negotiable.
Cognism operates on a custom quote-based model, with pricing dependent on the number of seats, data volume, and integration requirements.
Plans are available for both SMBs and large enterprises, with advanced features (like Diamond Data and Reveal) typically included in higher tiers.

Lead Forensics is an AI-powered B2B intent identification and website intelligence platform that helps organizations uncover which companies are visiting their website.
The platform transforms anonymous traffic into identifiable business opportunities by matching IP addresses to an extensive global database of companies and decision-makers. It then enriches that visit with firmographic and contact data, behavioral metrics (pages viewed, visit duration), and inferred intent based on activity patterns.
This gives your team a clear picture of which accounts are researching your solution, even if they haven’t engaged with you directly.
Lead Forensics provides a customized pricing model based on website traffic volume, data access level, and number of platform users.

Factors.ai is an account-based attribution and analytics platform. It’s designed for B2B marketers who need to connect anonymous website behavior, multi-touch campaign interactions, and intent signals to actual pipeline and revenue outcomes.
What makes Factors.ai distinctive is how it unifies three core parts of the GTM system: account-level analytics, intent signal tracking, and multi-touch attribution.
This gives GTM teams an end-to-end picture of the buyer’s journey and how every touchpoint contributes to revenue.
Factors.ai follows a modular pricing structure based on the size of your account base, number of tracked visitors, and integration scope.

DemandScience is a global B2B demand generation and intent data platform that helps revenue teams identify, engage, and convert in-market buyers.
The platform functions as both a data engine and an activation layer. It continuously monitors online research behavior across thousands of digital properties (e.g., webinar registrations, whitepaper downloads, and content engagements) to identify surges in topic-level interest at the account level.
Once it detects intent, the system scores those accounts based on behavioral intensity, recency, and historical conversion data. From there, marketers can automatically build and deploy campaigns directly through the platform.
DemandScience offers a customized enterprise pricing model, depending on data usage volume, campaign scale, and integration requirements. Packages typically include intent data access, contact delivery, and activation services (e.g., content syndication or display).

Lead Onion is an AI-powered intent data and sales intelligence platform built to help B2B organizations uncover, prioritize, and convert high-intent prospects across every stage of the buyer journey.
It goes beyond surface-level intent tracking by combining first-party, third-party, and social intent data into one unified dashboard. It also features a database of 50 billion intent signals, 209+ million verified contacts, and 1.4+ billion matched IPs.
All of this empowers both marketing and sales teams with real-time intelligence, enabling them to target active buyers, launch personalized campaigns, and engage decision-makers at the right time.
Starts at $100 per month.

Dealfront emerged from the merger of Leadfeeder and Echobot to create a unified go-to-market intelligence platform.
The platform combines website visitor identification, B2B contact data, sales intelligence, and intent signals to help revenue teams identify, prioritize, and engage with prospects showing active buying interest.
Dealfront operates on two pillars:
Integrating these capabilities creates a seamless workflow. In this case, your website attracts anonymous visitors, Leadfeeder identifies which companies they represent, Echobot surfaces the right contacts at those companies, and the combined platform scores intent and routes qualified leads to sales.
Dealfront pricing depends on your setup and needs. They offer different bundles tailored to different business sizes (Start up, Enterprise).

HockeyStack is a B2B revenue analytics and go-to-market intelligence platform designed to show how marketing and sales activities translate into pipeline and revenue.
Its core job is to unify data from your website, product, CRM, and marketing tools, then turn that data into reliable attribution, buyer journey visibility, and account-level insights that revenue teams can act on.
In practice, HockeyStack replaces fragmented reporting across tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot, Salesforce, ad platforms, and product analytics.
It tracks how anonymous visitors become known accounts, how those accounts engage across channels, and how specific touchpoints influence opportunities and deals.
HockeyStack offers a custom-pricing model depending on the plan (marketing intelligence and/or account intelligence), and connected data sources.

UserGems is a relationship intelligence and revenue platform that helps B2B companies identify the warmest paths to pipeline. It tracks job changes, champion movements, and buying intent across their total addressable market.
What makes UserGems stand out is that it adds a human relationship layer, analyzing who your buyers are, where they’ve gone, and when they’re most likely to buy again.
This approach helps B2B marketing and sales teams capture “hidden demand” by engaging contacts who already know, trust, or have used their product in the past.
UserGems pricing is custom and varies significantly by company size, preferred features (including AI), tracked contacts, and other integrations.

Lusha is a B2B sales intelligence and prospecting platform that helps revenue teams find, verify, and enrich contact and company data. This includes providing accurate email addresses, phone numbers, and firmographic data tied to real decision-makers.
It works by pulling together verified contact information from multiple data sources and delivers it through a browser extension, web app, and CRM integrations.
Reps then use it to identify buying personas, enrich leads and accounts, and remove friction from outbound workflows.
Lusha follows a tiered subscription model:

G2 is a B2B software marketplace and buyer intelligence platform that helps companies influence, capture, and convert in-market demand using verified peer reviews and buyer behavior data.
It shows which accounts are actively researching software, what they’re comparing, and how vendors can engage those buyers at the right moment.
G2 aggregates millions of authenticated user reviews across thousands of software categories. Buyers use G2 to research tools, compare alternatives, and validate shortlists.
On the vendor side, G2 turns this buyer activity into intent signals, account insights, and performance data that sales and marketing teams use to prioritize outreach and shape messaging.
G2 (review and research platform) is free. However, if you’re a company wanting to market your software on G2 or use their seller tools, there are paid plans. Solutions like Buyer Intent or advanced insights typically are custom-priced.

Dreamdata is a B2B revenue attribution and GTM analytics platform built to show how marketing and sales activities influence pipeline and revenue.
It connects every touchpoint (from first anonymous visit to closed-won deal) and assigns clear revenue impact to channels, campaigns, and interactions.
Here’s how it works: Dreamdata ingests data from your CRM, marketing automation platform, website analytics, ad platforms, and sales tools.
It then stitches this data together at the account and opportunity level, creating a single, end-to-end view of the B2B buyer journey. This allows teams to understand which efforts drive qualified pipeline, which touchpoints accelerate deals, and where revenue leakage occurs.
Dreamdata offers two pricing model:
See Who’s In-Market, Know What They Want, Close More Deals
The market is full of platforms that surface intent data. What separates Demandbase is what happens after you identify intent.
Demandbase answers “yes” to all these questions because it was built to turn intent into revenue.
You also get:
And Christian Lowery, ABX Programs Team Lead, Global Field & Channel Marketing at CyberArk further confirms this:
The Intent Data You Need, The Action You Can Take.
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