Buyer Intent Explained: Why It Matters & How To Use It

What is Buyer Intent?

Buyer intent is a concept that represents a prospect’s likelihood and readiness to purchase a specific product or service — all based on their behavior, actions, and engagement patterns throughout the buying journey.

While often used interchangeably with “purchase intent,” this concept goes far beyond simply identifying who might buy – it’s about understanding the precise moments when prospects demonstrate readiness to engage in meaningful B2B sales conversations.

Think of buyer intent as this behavioral framework that clearly shows you not just if — but when and how prospects are likely to convert. It’s a shift from volume-based to intent-based targeting that helps optimize resource allocation and shorten sales cycles.

What is Buyer Intent Data?

Buyer intent data is the measurable information that reveals a prospect’s actions and behaviors, helping businesses infer their likelihood to buy.

The data reveals three critical insights:

• What companies are researching (topics, solutions, or competitors)
• How intensely they’re researching (frequency and depth of engagement)
• Who within the organization is involved in the research (roles and departments)

For example, when a company is seriously considering a new CRM system, their intent data might show up as:

• Multiple IT team members reading software comparison articles
• The CFO downloading pricing guides
• The CTO reviewing technical documentation
• Several stakeholders attending relevant webinars

When analyzed collectively, these signals help organizations identify and prioritize accounts that are most likely to convert, enabling more targeted and timely sales outreach.

Note → While buyer intent represents the internal motivation and readiness to purchase, buyer intent data consists of observable signals like website interactions, content downloads, third-party research activity, technographic changes, and even company news or hiring patterns.

Related → What is B2B Intent Data?

Buyer Intent Types

Buyer intent can be categorized based on different stages of the buyer’s journey, rather than being conflated with types of buyer intent data.

This approach helps clarify how a prospect’s level of readiness and engagement evolves, allowing businesses to align their strategies accordingly.

Active Buyer Intent

These prospects are in the decision-making phase and actively seeking a solution to a specific problem. They are researching, comparing options, and engaging with content that directly relates to their purchase decision.

Examples of Signals:

• Visiting pricing pages
• Requesting demos or consultations
• Downloading detailed product comparisons

Opportunity → These prospects are closest to making a purchase, making them ideal targets for direct sales outreach or personalized marketing campaigns.

Passive Buyer Intent

These prospects currently use a competitor’s solution but show openness to alternatives. They’re not actively searching for a new solution, but they may be experiencing pain points or limitations with their current setup.

Examples of Signals:

• Browsing competitor case studies
• Subscribing to newsletters without deeper engagement
• Attending webinars related to industry trends

Opportunity → This type of intent requires nurturing with persuasive messaging, focusing on your product’s unique value or addressing gaps in their current solution.

Awareness-Based Intent

At the earliest stage of the buying journey, awareness-based intent signals an organization’s initial recognition of a business challenge or opportunity. These prospects are still defining their problem and understanding potential solution categories rather than evaluating specific vendors.

Examples of Signals:

• Searching for “how-to” guides or industry best practices
• Reading blogs or downloading introductory whitepapers
• Following your brand on social media without further engagement

Opportunity → These prospects represent a long-term investment. Providing educational and thought-leadership content can position your brand as a trusted authority when they move into active intent.

Related → Intent Data: The Secret to Knowing Who’s Most Likely to Buy

Benefits of Using Intent Data in Marketing and Sales

Benefits for Marketing

• Enhanced Targeting. Intent data enables teams to identify and focus on accounts showing active interest in relevant solutions. Rather than casting a wide net, marketers can concentrate resources on prospects demonstrating genuine purchase signals, yielding higher conversion rates.
• Improved Personalization. With intent data, marketing teams can create deeply personalized campaigns based on prospects’ actual research patterns and interests. By understanding which specific topics, features, or pain points prospects are investigating, marketers can craft messages that speak directly to these concerns.
• Optimized Lead Nurturing. Intent data helps trigger automated workflows that deliver relevant content at the right time. For example, when a prospect’s research intensity increases around specific topics, marketing automation can immediately shift to deliver more detailed, solution-specific content that matches their current focus.
• Data-Driven Decision Making. By analyzing which content types, topics, and channels generate the strongest intent signals, marketers can continuously optimize their strategy based on actual buyer behavior rather than assumptions.

Benefits for Sales

• Prioritized Lead Qualification. Rather than working through leads alphabetically or by company size, sales representatives can focus on accounts showing genuine buying behavior. When multiple stakeholders from an account are intensively researching specific solutions, sales teams can prioritize these high-intent opportunities, leading to better ROI.
• Personalized Sales Outreach. By understanding exactly which solutions, features, or use cases prospects are looking for, sales teams can customize their approach to address specific interests and concerns.
• Improved Sales Forecasting. When sales teams analyze patterns in prospects’ search behavior and engagement intensity, they can more accurately forecast which opportunities are likely to close and when.
• Shorter Sales Cycles. Instead of spending weeks or months nurturing early-stage leads, sales representatives can engage directly with prospects who have already demonstrated serious purchase intent.

Related → Demystifying Intent: Understanding Its Definition & Significance in Sales

How to Identify Buyer Intent

First-Party Intent Data

First-party intent data is information you collect directly from prospects’ interactions with your channels — e.g., website, email campaigns, CRM, and social media.

Here’s how you can identify it across key channels:

• Website Analytics. Use tools like Google Analytics to track page views, session durations, and actions such as downloads or form submissions. Look for patterns like multiple visits to product, pricing, or comparison pages—these indicate strong buying intent.
• Email Engagement. Monitor email open rates, click-throughs, and downloads from your email campaigns. High engagement with product-specific or educational content indicates deeper research and interest.
• CRM Data. Leverage your CRM to track interactions like demo requests, pricing inquiries, or ongoing sales conversations. Elevated lead scores or direct mentions of pain points suggest heightened buying intent.
• Social Media Interactions. Use social listening tools to monitor mentions, likes, shares, and comments. Pay attention to prospects engaging with posts about your solutions or discussing pain points your product addresses.

Pro Tip → Combine Demandbase’s first-party intent data with third-party data to get a more comprehensive picture of your target audience’s interests and behaviors.

Second-Party Intent Data

Second-party intent data is information collected by another organization and shared directly with you.

Here’s how you can identify it across key channels:

• Partner Website Activity. Collaborate with industry partners or affiliates who share data on visitor activity from their websites. Look for signals like content engagement, resource downloads, or time spent on specific solution-related pages.
• Event Participation. Gain access to attendee data from webinars, trade shows, or virtual events hosted by partners. Participation in sessions relevant to your offerings can indicate interest.
• Shared Account-Level Insights. Data-sharing agreements with platforms or publishers can provide insights into account activity, such as which companies are researching topics related to your solutions.

DB Nuggets → With Demandbase One Analytics, you can view all your intent data in one centralized dashboard, providing a comprehensive overview of account engagement and buying signals.

Third-Party Intent Data

Third-party intent data is aggregated information collected by external providers from sources such as publisher websites, review sites, industry forums, and other content networks.

Here’s how you can identify it across key channels:

• Intent Data Providers. Third-party platforms (e.g., Demandbase) aggregate intent signals from multiple data sources. Use these platforms to access reports and dashboards highlighting account-level activity. Look for specific behaviors, such as repeated visits to relevant articles or downloads of content on industry challenges.
• Search Engine Data. Use third-party providers (e.g., Ahrefs, Semrush) to track search query trends and keyword engagement to highlight intent.
• Social Listening. Opt for social listening tools like Hootsuite or Sprinklr to track mentions of your brand, competitors, or industry-specific keywords. Pay attention to recurring discussions or queries about challenges your product can solve.

DB Nuggets → Demandbase integrates with other intent data providers like Bombora and G2, giving you a broader view of account intent across the web.

Other Ways to Identify Buyer Intent Data

In addition to leveraging first-, second-, and third-party data, there are advanced tools and traditional methods that can enhance your ability to identify buyer intent. These include the following:

AI and Machine Learning

AI and machine learning transform raw intent signals into actionable insights by processing vast amounts of behavioral data in real time.

How to identify: Use AI-powered platforms to detect correlations in buyer behavior, such as repeated searches, content engagement, and purchasing signals. Machine learning algorithms can predict future buying behavior by analyzing historical data and real-time activity.

Example → AI might notice when multiple decision-makers from one company start researching similar topics across different platforms within a short timeframe – a pattern that could easily be missed through manual analysis.

Qualitative Research

Direct conversations with customers and prospects remain a powerful way to understand buyer intent. Surveys, interviews, and feedback sessions can uncover the specific needs, challenges, and decision-making factors that influence purchasing behavior.

How to identify: Conduct structured interviews or distribute surveys to gather insights about prospects’ pain points, their research processes, and their preferences when selecting a solution.

Example → Learning that customers typically research implementation requirements just before making a purchase decision helps you properly weigh that behavior in your intent scoring.

How to Use Buyer Intent Data in Marketing

Content Personalization

Buyer intent data enables marketers to move beyond basic demographic targeting to create highly personalized content experiences that align with the prospect’s actual interests and buying stage.

Here’s how to implement this effectively:

• Align content delivery with specific research patterns
• Customize resource recommendations based on past engagement
• Adjust messaging tone and technical depth to match buyer sophistication
• Present case studies from relevant industries based on prospect profile

For example, if an enterprise software prospect shows intense interest in security features, automatically prioritize security-focused whitepapers, compliance certification details, etc.

DB Nuggets → The ‘hack’ is to continuously refine personalization based on response patterns, ensuring that content remains relevant as buyer needs and interests evolve.

Lead Nurturing

Smart lead nurturing starts with recognizing signals that indicate where prospects are in their buying journey.

To implement this, you need to create nurture workflows that adapt to prospect behavior in real time.

When multiple stakeholders from the same company engage with pricing content, accelerate the nurture sequence with ROI-focused materials. If a potential customer downloads technical documentation, automatically follow up with related case studies or implementation guides.

The key is responding to actual buying signals rather than following a rigid timeline. For example:

• When research intensity increases, increase content delivery frequency
• If technical teams engage, shift to more detailed product information
• When executive stakeholders join the conversation, introduce strategic value propositions
• If engagement drops, adjust and test different content types

You never want to bombard them with predetermined content sequences— rather, let their behavior guide your nurturing strategy.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

Rather than targeting accounts based solely on firmographic data, focus your ABM efforts on organizations actively showing interest in solutions like yours.

When multiple stakeholders from an account research specific solutions or competitors, that’s your cue to launch tailored ABM campaigns.

For example, if a target account’s IT team is heavily researching cloud security solutions while their finance team reviews ROI calculators, coordinate your approach:

• Deliver technical security briefings to IT stakeholders
• Share cost analysis tools with financial decision-makers
• Customize case studies featuring similar companies in their industry
• Align advertising messages with their specific research interests

The goal is to surround key accounts with relevant messaging across all channels while maintaining consistent themes that reflect their actual interests.

Advertising Campaigns

Fine-tune your ad targeting based on actual research behavior. When prospects investigate specific features or solutions, serve them ads that speak directly to those interests.

Optimize your ad budgets by:

• Increasing investment in accounts showing high intent
• Adjusting bid strategies based on engagement levels
• Creating look-alike audiences from high-intent accounts
• Testing different messages against specific intent signals

For example, if a prospect company starts heavily researching enterprise collaboration tools, dynamically adjust your campaigns to showcase your platform’s team features across their common browsing destinations.

Pro Tip → Demandbase layers intent data with people-based targeting, so you’re always bidding on the right individuals within your target accounts—maximizing the impact of your ad spend.

Retargeting Campaigns

Your retargeting strategy should go beyond simple website visit tracking. It should be smarter, more strategic, and focused only on those demonstrating specific buying behaviors.

For example, you can identify prospects who visited high-value pages (e.g., pricing, product comparison) or engaged with content (e.g., whitepaper downloads, demo requests) but didn’t take the next step.

Here’s how to shape your retargeting approach based on engagement patterns:

• Tailor ad messaging to reflect the specific interests of the prospect.
• An ad offering a free demo might be effective for prospects who previously viewed your demo page but didn’t sign up.
• Use dynamic ads to showcase relevant products, services, or case studies based on the intent data gathered from their interactions.

This intelligent retargeting approach ensures you’re not just reminding prospects about your brand – you’re advancing the conversation by addressing their specific interests and concerns.

By delivering value in each retargeted interaction, you maintain engagement while guiding prospects toward a purchase decision.

How to Use Buyer Intent Data in Sales

Prioritize Leads Based on Intent

Stop wasting time on lukewarm prospects. Instead, create a simple but effective scoring system that ranks leads based on their actual buying behavior.

Look for high-intent signals like:

• Multiple stakeholders engaging with bottom-funnel content
• Repeated visits to pricing and comparison pages
• Direct requests for technical specifications
• Increased research activity around your solution category

You should also divide qualified leads into tiers based on their scores (e.g., hot, warm, cold) to determine the level of follow-up required.

DB Nuggets → High activity doesn’t always equal high intent. A junior employee downloading whitepapers carries less weight than a CTO reviewing implementation guides. Your scoring system should reflect these differences and help you identify truly sales-ready opportunities.

Customize Outreach and Messaging

Stop sending generic sales pitches that get moved to spam. It gets you nothing — worse, it could hurt your reputation.

What you should be doing is shaping your outreach based on the available buying signals you have. This way, your initial contact would reflect what you know about their interests.

For example:

“I noticed your team has been exploring enterprise security solutions. Many organizations like yours are particularly interested in our zero-trust architecture. Would you like to see how we’ve helped similar companies address their compliance requirements?”

Take it a step further by aligning your follow-ups and concurrent interactions based on their engagement patterns. This proves you understand their needs and aren’t just following a script.

Time Your Outreach Strategically

Know when to reach out by watching for buying signals that indicate genuine interest. It’s not just about what you say – it’s about when you say it.

Before making contact, justify your approach with a reason:

• Is there a sudden increase in search activity from the prospect’s company?
• Are key decision-makers engaging with your content and showing active interest?
• Has there been any direct feature or pricing inquiries?

If all these (and more) check out, then that’s your window of opportunity.

However, timing isn’t just about first contact. Use intent signals to guide your entire engagement strategy. If research activity spikes after initial conversations, follow up with relevant insights or resources. If engagement drops, adjust your messaging to avoid becoming a nuisance.

Enable Sales with Intent Data

Equip your sales team with actionable intent insights that make every conversation more meaningful. Give them real-time visibility into prospect behavior so they can focus on opportunities that matter most.

Create digestible intelligence briefs that show:

• Which solutions prospects are actively researching
• Key stakeholders involved in the buying process
• Competitor considerations and comparisons
• Recent engagement history and content interests

Put this information where sales teams can easily access it – directly in your CRM or sales enablement platform.

When a rep opens an account record, they should immediately see relevant intent signals and engagement patterns.

For example:

Company X – Last 7 Days
CFO reviewed pricing pages 3 times
IT team downloaded security documentation
Multiple visits to integration specs
Competitive comparison activity increased

Train your team to use this intelligence effectively. Help them understand what different signals mean and how to adjust their approach accordingly. This turns intent data from just another metric into a practical sales tool.

Identify Upsell and Cross-Sell Opportunities

Monitor existing customer behavior to spot expansion opportunities before they even arise. When current clients research additional features or related solutions, it’s often a signal they’re ready to grow.

Watch for these telling signals:

• Increased usage of current features
• Research into complementary solutions
• Engagement with advanced feature content

For example, if a customer’s marketing team starts looking into your advanced analytics features while their current package includes only basic reporting, that’s your cue. Their business needs are expanding, and they’re already looking for solutions within your ecosystem.

Best Buyer Intent Tools in 2025

Demandbase

Demandbase combines buyer intent data with advanced account intelligence, leveraging firmographics, technographics, and engagement data to create a unified view of account activity. This enables businesses to craft highly personalized outreach strategies that resonate with prospects and drive results.

It features Intent Data, which identifies in-market accounts showing early buying signals by analyzing trillions of web interactions (over 2 trillion signals monthly).

The platform’s Account Intelligence layer also takes it a step further by combining first- and third-party data to create highly accurate account profiles. Currently, Demandbase boasts information on 104M companies, 156M B2B contacts, and 650k+ intent keywords.

Key Features

• AI-Powered Insights: Advanced artificial intelligence capabilities allow Demandbase to analyze extensive data sets and predict account behaviors. It identifies key buying signals and provides actionable recommendations, such as when to reach out and what messaging will be most effective.
• Integration Ecosystem: Demandbase integrates with your existing tech stack, including major CRM and marketing automation platforms (e.g., Marketo and Eloqua). This deep integration enables automated workflows and ensures intent data informs every aspect of your go-to-market strategy.
• Sales Intelligence: Offers real-time alerts, account scoring, and actionable insights, allowing sales teams to prioritize high-value accounts, tailor their conversations, and close deals faster. The platform even includes customizable sales playbooks to guide teams through effective engagement strategies.
• Account-Based Advertising: With its account-based advertising feature, Demandbase helps businesses deliver personalized ads to specific accounts across multiple channels. This strengthens ABM campaigns by reinforcing messaging and staying top-of-mind with key decision-makers.

Leadfeeder

Leadfeeder transforms anonymous website visitors into actionable sales opportunities. It uses reverse IP tracking and integration with popular CRMs to identify the companies browsing your website, providing valuable insights into their behavior and interests.

The platform also highlights the specific pages they engage with and the duration of their visit. This helps sales teams prioritize leads based on demonstrated intent. Another key offering is Custom Feed Filters, which enables users to segment leads based on criteria like industry, location, or behavior.

Key Features

• LinkedIn Lead Search: Integrates with LinkedIn, making it easy for users to quickly find profiles of key decision-makers at visiting companies.
• Lead Scoring: Uses a scoring system to rank website visitors based on their activity and engagement.
• Email Notification Alerts: Sends real-time email alerts whenever a high-value lead visits your website.

Bombora

Bombora leverages its proprietary Data Co-op feature to analyze over 5,000 websites, capturing behavioral data that reveals which companies are actively researching specific topics.

It also offers Company Surge, which identifies spikes in search activity by companies on topics relevant to your offerings. This insight empowers teams to prioritize outreach to accounts showing the highest likelihood of making a purchase.

Additionally, Bombora allows users to sync intent signals directly with their existing CRMs, marketing automation platforms, or advertising tools, ensuring intent-driven actions are seamlessly integrated into their workflows.

Key Features

• Topic Taxonomy: Offers a comprehensive library of over 10,000 intent topics, allowing businesses to align insights with their unique product or service offerings.
• Audience Verification: Verifies the accuracy of intent signals by cross-referencing multiple data points, providing reliable insights for targeted campaigns.
• Collaboration Signals: Identifies collaboration or intent signals across multiple decision-makers within a company, helping prioritize accounts with strong purchase intent.

ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo provides sales and marketing teams with the tools to identify and engage high-value prospects based on detailed company and contact-level insights.

The platform features Workflows, which automates lead routing and follow-ups based on specific intent triggers, ensuring no opportunity is missed. When combined with Scoops, which provides updates on key events within target companies, sales teams gain a comprehensive view of where to focus their efforts.

Key Features

• WebSights: Tracks anonymous website visitors, revealing which companies are browsing your site and providing actionable insights for sales follow-ups.
• Engage Tool: Integrates multi-channel outreach capabilities, including email automation and dialer functionality, to streamline prospecting efforts and improve efficiency.
• Org Charts: Displays detailed organizational charts for target companies, helping sales teams understand decision-making structures and identify key stakeholders.

Related → Is ZoomInfo Worth It? We Did the Research

Terminus

Terminus offers a suite of tools that help B2B organizations identify, engage, and accelerate high-value accounts.

For example, its Engagement Spike Reports allows you to detect significant increases in web activity from target accounts, signaling heightened interest and optimal timing for engagement.

Additionally, Terminus offers Relationship Data, which maps and quantifies the strength of connections between your organization and target accounts, providing valuable context for outreach strategies.

Key Features

• Ad Experiences: Delivers personalized advertising across multiple channels, including display, video, LinkedIn, and connected TV, to engage target accounts.
• Measurement Studio: Provides comprehensive analytics and attribution insights to track the impact of ABM campaigns, including engagement metrics and revenue attribution.
• Email Experiences: Embeds targeted ABM advertising directly into email campaigns, increasing reach and engagement with key accounts.

6Sense

6Sense is a revenue AI platform that helps B2B companies identify and engage potential buyers by uncovering both known and anonymous buying signals.

Using AI and machine learning, 6Sense analyzes billions of data points to identify accounts showing purchase intent, predict where they are in the buying cycle, and determine when they’re likely to make a purchase decision.

Their proprietary “Dark Funnel” technology uncovers anonymous research activity, giving organizations visibility into buyer behavior that typically goes undetected.

Key Features

• Revenue AI: Uses AI-powered insights to uncover hidden buying signals, predict buying intent, and prioritize accounts most likely to convert.
• Orchestration Workflows: Automates personalized, multi-channel engagement across advertising, email, and sales outreach, ensuring cohesive account journeys at scale.
• Pipeline Intelligence: Offers detailed analytics to track pipeline progression, measure campaign effectiveness, and attribute revenue to ABM initiatives.

HubSpot

HubSpot integrates buyer intent signals directly into their broader CRM and marketing automation ecosystem, making it particularly valuable for organizations already using HubSpot’s suite of tools.

HubSpot’s intent capabilities focus on three key areas:

• Identifying in-market accounts through behavioral analysis
• Automating engagement based on intent signals
• Providing sales teams with actionable insights through their CRM

The platform also aggregates intent data from multiple sources, including first-party website interactions, email engagement, sales activities, and third-party intent sources. This data is then processed through HubSpot’s AI engine to create a unified view of account behavior and buying signals.

Key Features

• Marketing Hub: Includes tools for email marketing, lead capture forms, landing pages, and SEO, allowing businesses to create, automate, and optimize marketing campaigns.
• Customizable Reporting and Analytics: Offers advanced reporting features and customizable dashboards that provide insights into marketing performance, sales activities, and customer interactions.
• Conversations Inbox: Unifies communications from email, live chat, Facebook Messenger, and other channels into a single shared inbox.

Beyond Basic Intent: Target the Right Accounts at the Right Time — with Demandbase

Picture this: Your sales team is burning hours chasing accounts that keep saying “we’re not ready yet” or “maybe next quarter.” Your marketing team just launched another campaign, but half the responses are from companies that don’t even fit your ideal customer profile.

Meanwhile, perfect-fit accounts are actively researching solutions like yours – but you have no way of knowing who they are or when to reach out.

This is exactly why we built Demandbase. Instead of just throwing generic intent data at you, we analyze billions of intent signals, combining them with your specific ICP criteria.

When a company that matches your perfect-fit profile starts showing buying signals – like researching your competitors, reading about solutions to problems you solve, or engaging with related content – you’ll know immediately.

Here’s what this means in practice:

• Your sales reps get real-time alerts when target accounts start their buying journey, complete with insights about what they’re researching and why.
• Your marketing team can automatically trigger personalized campaigns the moment an ICP account shows relevant intent.
• Your customer success team learns early when existing customers are researching complementary solutions or, more importantly, your competitors.
• Your ABM campaigns finally target the right accounts at the right time with messages that match their current interests.

No more wasted efforts on accounts that aren’t ready. Just perfectly timed engagement with companies that match your ICP and are actively looking for solutions.