Intent data

What intent data measures

Every B2B purchase starts well before a sales conversation. A buyer reads, compares, asks colleagues, and forms an opinion long before they ever fill out a form. Intent data is the umbrella term for any signal that tries to detect that activity at the account level - usually before the buyer would identify themselves voluntarily. The promise is simple: catch in-market accounts earlier than competitors and act on the signal while it's fresh.

The complication is that 'intent data' is not one thing. The signal varies wildly by source - reading a research article is different from comparing vendors on G2, which is different from a company posting 20 SDR roles. Each signal lives at a different point in the buying cycle and has a different lead time to purchase. Treating intent data as a single category is the most common reason intent investments don't pay back.

The six categories of intent

Content intent measures what accounts are reading across third-party publisher networks - Bombora is the category leader. It fires in the awareness stage, gives broad coverage, and is noisy: a topic spike doesn't always mean the account is in-market today. Most predictive ABM platforms (6sense, Demandbase) consume content intent as one input to their composite scores.

Review intent measures who is comparing vendors on software-review sites - G2 and TrustRadius are the dominant providers. It's the most BOFU signal of the lot because the behavior is a few clicks from a purchase decision, but coverage is narrow: it only catches accounts that actually browse review sites.

Predictive / ABM intent blends multiple signals into composite account scores - 6sense, Demandbase, ZoomInfo Intent, Cognism. It's the right shape for orchestrated ABM motions but tends to be a black box: you see the score, not which signal fired it.

Publisher intent comes from a single publisher's owned audience network - TechTarget Priority Engine, Foundry. Vertical-specific (especially strong in IT and infrastructure) and structurally narrower than co-op intent, but signal-quality-per-account is often higher.

First-party intent is engagement on your own properties - Dreamdata, Factors.ai. It only catches accounts already in your funnel, but the signal-to-revenue path is the cleanest because the buyer is already known to you.

Hiring-signal intent uses a company's job postings and headcount changes as a leading indicator - JobsPipe, TheirStack. It's the earliest signal because hiring is a capital-allocation decision that has already cleared internal review, but the lead time to purchase is 1-2 quarters, which means it pairs poorly with same-week BOFU triggers.

How to pick a type

Match the type of intent to the stage you most need to win at. If your problem is top-of-funnel account scoring across a broad market, pick a predictive platform with content intent underneath. If your problem is identifying live shortlists, pick review intent. If your problem is catching demand earlier than competitors, pick hiring-signal intent. Most established teams end up running a portfolio - typically content + review or content + hiring - rather than relying on any single source.

Pricing varies by orders of magnitude. Self-serve providers like JobsPipe and Dreamdata have free tiers and paid plans starting under $100/month. Mid-market platforms run from low-four to low-five-figure monthly. Enterprise platforms like Bombora, 6sense, Demandbase, and TechTarget commonly run from mid-five to low-six-figure annual commitments and don't publish public pricing.