Transforming Buyer Intent Signals Into Revenue With HubSpot | INBOUND 2025

Good afternoon, everyone. It is so great to see you all. Thank you so much for being here since I know there are a lot of amazing sessions taking place right now. So I'm thrilled that you have decided to join this one. This is transforming buyer intent signals into revenue with HubSpot. And I am Emily Davidson. And what I'm hoping is that for the next 30 minutes, that, that not only can I show you some of the new ways that HubSpot has baked buyer intent right into their system, but also give you some framework that you can follow if you're considering following that buyer intent methodology in your business moving forward. So for the next 30 minutes, I have a bit of a packed agenda, so we're going to do our best to get through all of these. So I'm going to set an upfront contract level set. We'll. So we'll go ahead and talk about buyer intent today, why it matters, why it's important for your business, and to be thinking about in this day and age, how HubSpot has embedded it right into their ecosystem. And then we're going to go through the framework, a bit of what it takes to build a buyer intent engine in your business. So we're talking precision targeting, following the right segments, putting them together. Then we're talking about how we create those signals, how we write the rules for your engine to make sure that you're getting those high intent accounts captured in your CRM. And then we'll talk about how do we take all of these insights that you're gathering, all of those breadcrumbs and making them actionable, turning that into revenue for your business and filling your funnel. And then I'll tell you a little bit about how we at Sandler have implemented this today to transform our business. Sound good? All right, so as I said, I'm Emily Davidson. I am the Director of Enterprise Marketing at Sandler. We do all sorts of sales training, sales performance work with your sellers to grow your business. So from assessments to creating those personalized learning paths for your groups, your teams, your individuals, all the way to reinforcing those best practices, we partner with you from start to finish. So with that, I do want to encourage you to connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm not sure we'll have time for Q and A at the end of this, since we're trying to pack as much in as possible. So please don't hesitate to send me any questions via LinkedIn. I'm happy to talk over Zoom anytime, so definitely feel free to approach and make sure. That you give a follow and we can connect. So let's talk then about buyer intent. I know Yamini started to lay the foundation for this yesterday in her opening talk track where she talked about how so many of the buyers that we see today are doing more anonymous work when it comes to exploring different solutions. So why does buyer intent matter? Well, according to the latest data we have available, we know that 70% of that buyer journey is happening anonymously before they fill out a form, before they raise their hand, before they connect with you. So therefore, when I look at that, I'm thinking, wow, that leaves me, that leaves all of us a 30% window to connect with them and really make that difference in closing the deal. And then we also see that companies today, not tapping into that buyer intent data, they're becoming more reactive. Those funnels are drying up faster. There's nothing to put in at the top, and therefore there's less coming down into the pipeline. So how do we start to be proactive in looking for those high intent buyers, even when they're trying to anonymously look for our solutions? And then we also know that with buyer intent, we're able to engage earlier, we're able to nurture them, we're able to educate them, thus we're able to start really learning more about them, delivering much more personalized content experiences, and fostering those relationships much sooner. So if we can see that these are some of the three foundational truths we have to embrace as marketers today, it is imperative that we start seeing the power of buyer intent signals and how we should be harnessing them in our business, how we can start looking at those breadcrumbs and making a difference with them. So instead of really looking at those individual movements that you see in your prospects, starting to look at the collective behavior within a company and seeing the value that holds, and then realizing that with the power of buyer intent baked into your HubSpot CRM, you now have a command center. It becomes your center where you can see an overview of your target accounts, your segments, how they're tracking down the funnel and the impact you are having with those accounts. And then you also, us as marketers, have the power to be much more personalized in our outreach, in our campaigns, our nurturing, our messaging, as do our sellers, because we know that once they've worked through us in marketing and they're qualified, we want to make sure that the conversations our sellers have are still harnessing those intent signals to deliver the most impact. So I don't know how Many of you have seen this. Is anyone here? By a show of hands, have any of you seen HubSpot's new buyer intent engine? Okay, good. Good. Okay, so this isn't totally brand new, but I do want to draw your attention to a couple things. We're going to break this down because there's a lot to unpack here. But what you'll see, at the top, you have your Configuration tab. That's where you get to write those intent rules. It's where you'll get to build those target markets, your segments, and write about those keywords and search topics that are relevant to your business. And then you have the Signals tab. As you can see, this is beta. But what's incredible about the Signals tab is it's really capturing those major events happening in companies that a lot of other ABM platforms are not picking up on today. And then research, that's where you're going to be able to pick out those topics that your buyers search for when your solution is part of the conversation. So you get to define those topics, you get to define those terms and build that right into your CRM. And then you see, right now we're in the visitors view. This is where you get to see the big picture of all of those companies, all of the intent signals, all of the actions that they're taking. And it's incredible to see too, that of course, HubSpot makes use of all of their different tags. And that's a great way at a high level to just categorize and prioritize your accounts. So if we think about where does this all start, As I promised, Buyer intent is a methodology. It's a framework that we want to be following. But it all starts with that precision, targeting, thinking about who are your target markets, who are your segments that you want to be reaching out to. So I want to give you guys a bit of a framework to follow, regardless whether it is in HubSpot or if you decide to pursue this outside of HubSpot. It's important to have a framework to know that you are hitting upon all of these key points when looking at your buyer intent, ecosystem, and big picture. So, as you can see at the top, we start with step one, identifying those target markets and segments that are based on your ICP and your organizational goals. Then next we have alignment, really sitting down and aligning with your teams, both marketing and sales. What are those big intent activities, engagements and signals that you want, want to be capturing and that signal that someone is showing high buyer intent. And then we have engage. So this step is really about enriching your CRM and enriching your funnel. Filling that top of funnel with those accounts that are showing high intent and engaging them in a hyper personalized way to make sure that they are converting and progressing down the funnel and then lastly expand. So using those signals and research tactics to really dig in and build those relationships and make sure that you're having meaningful conversations. So how does this all translate to HubSpot? Well, it can do all of these things. So inside their buyer intent engine you do get that full picture. You get a mini funnel, if you will, where you can see your total addressable market. You see which accounts within that market are showing intent, and you can see a breakdown of which companies already exist in your CRM and perhaps the ones that do not. Then it's up to you to decide whether or not you want to add them to your CRM and start targeting them in your marketing efforts. So let's start with step one. What does this actually look like? I like to get in the weeds and actually show you what it takes to build this. So when we think about building those target markets, if you go into buyer intent today, there's this configuration tab and it's very easy to use. You can build up to 20 markets and you can segment them based on a variety of filters. There's several dropdown options from regions to locations to company size to tech stack. You can organize your segments in any way you like based on your organization and who you are going after. So as you can see, we've done quite a mix in our CRM. We have regions from Europe, North America. We have industries that we've seen success in, computer software, construction and building materials. And you can have up to 20 of them. So as we go in and look at this, you can actually go into HubSpot today and you'll see markets is a new option. This is where you'll actually build them and you can explore as many options that work for your business and I encourage you to test them because sometimes we think we know who we should be going after. Yet we find certain segments perform better than others. So it's always important to keep your options open and think strategically about who you're targeting. So this is what it will look like. As you can see, HubSpot does a great job from a user friendly version of it. It really makes it simple to use the dropdown menus, all the filters, and you can get as specific as you like. I will say that there were probably over 100 options in some of the filters. So it by no means limits you on who you can go after and it does help you be very specific and customizable in who you target. So I know we only have 30 minutes, but if you did want to get a demo of how to do this, feel free to scan the QR code, bookmark it and watch it. There'll be another demo video too in this, but I did want to make sure that you guys had something you could refer back to as you go through the process of building yourself. So now that we have our target markets, our segments that we're going after now, we need to think about that second step, aligning on what does meaningful buyer intent look like for our organization? What are those high intent activities and engagements that are going to equal someone that we know is coming after our solution? So when you have these conversations, it's important to think about this in a couple different ways. There are a lot of ways that people can show that they are looking for your solution or service. Now we know website traffic is showing a little bit of a decline at the moment due to some of the ChatGPT tools and all of the AI that's out there. But it has not gone away by any means. So we still want to make sure we are utilizing our website. So using that HubSpot tracking code on your website, you can start to put in the key pages that represent high intent for your business. So maybe it's, you know, for us, our why Sandler page, maybe it's our pricing page, maybe it is some of our key development program pages. You can even control what value each of these have. So how many visits someone must make, how many unique visitors equals high intent and the frequency that they are visiting. So this will look different for every business, but it's a great conversation to have. And think about how many ways really represent someone who is on the path of going after your solution or service. The next thing that is actually really unique to HubSpot is you can actually defined buyer intent by paths. So we know as users, if somebody is looking for our solution or service, I'll typically spend a little bit more time on their site. I'll click around, I'll explore different resources, I might jump from one page to another. It's very common that a lot of our websites today are very accessible in the sense that we have buttons baked onto pages. They go from one instance to the next. You can actually track that path within HubSpot, you can define and list how many pages they go after and it's a great way just to kind of represent someone's journey and see what your buyers are doing and add weight and add value to that. The next piece too that we'll dig into is research intent topics. So we know that every business there are going to be search terms, if you will, or topics that are relevant to our solution or service. So for us, as you can see, we have sales training, sales coaching, professional development, all of those are going to be a great conversation to have with your internal teams about what equals a topic that is relevant to your business. So you can plug those in and see how many companies both in your CRM and and those not in your CRM that are showing intent based on those search terms. So it's another great breadcrumb just to see where someone is in their buying journey and get a sense if your solution is a fit. And again, one of the nice things about HubSpot is it does try to remove some of the guesswork. So it's always important for us to remove certain company domains, exclude certain things from getting tracked. So you can always exclude different domains, exclude different companies that maybe already have deals in the works, just to make sure you're keeping your data clean and it's not getting muddied. So we've gone through quite a bit here. We've talked about how to build those target markets and your segments, what that conversation looks like, and we've even talked about what those buyer intent signals look like when you build them and, and those research topics. But how do you take all of those insights, all of those breadcrumbs, and be actionable with it? So a lot of times we get all of this data, but it's hard to know where do I go from here? How do I make this something that I can execute upon and make sure it gets into the right hands in a proactive way? Well, the nice thing, as we look at the next step, enrich and engage. As I said, there's going to be accounts that the buyer intent engine will pick up on that are in your CRM and some that are new to your CRM. So today you do have the option to actually see which accounts are showing intent that already exist and which ones are not. So as you can see here, we have 33 accounts that are showing intent. Fifteen exist in our instance. Well, what about the other 18? I wanna work with the other 18. I wanna get them in my system. I wanna know what's happening with them. That's potential pipeline for me. So for us, you can actually tap into adding these companies. HubSpot does have different tiers of credits. It's a credit system where you can buy a bundle of credits and you can use those to add companies to your instance of HubSpot. And I think right now for us we have about 500 that we use and it resets on a monthly basis. So you can kind HubSpot CSM and just see what they can do and what's gonna work in terms of volume for your business. But it's a great way to keep refilling that top of funnel. It's a great way to light up what we sometimes would call that dark funnel that we weren't seeing and get those into our pipeline. So it's really easy actually to do this. As you can see here, if there are certain accounts that don't exist in our CRM today, they make it really easy. They have a plus button here. This is actually a dropdown and the very first option is add to your CRM. A little pop up window will tell you, hey, you want to cash in on one of your credits, you click OK and then that account is added. You can assign the owner, you can leave notes on it, you can assign tasks, you can even enroll them in workflows directly from here once they've been added to your CRM. And you can add them to static lists. So you can keep track of these accounts separately to measure the impact of those that are coming in from this buyer intent engine. So again, I know we have short time, so I did create another demo so you could see this in practice. So feel free to scan the QR code, take a look. Nothing is gated, so you're free to just peruse it at your leisure. But it's a great way just to keep an eye on those high intent companies that maybe weren't on your radar initially to make sure that they're getting into your campaigns and getting passed down at the right time. So as you can see, this little demo will show you all of those options I just talked through. I will say that this will only add company records, so it is important to have another system or tool such as ZoomInfo or if you have Sales Intelligence or if you have Sales Navigator, you really can add those key titles. So think you know the five to 10 people that are in that buying committee. That's who we typically will enrich and add to these companies to make sure that we have the right people getting the right message. You can then take those buyer intent signals from the research topics they're looking at to the major events and signals that you're seeing. And you can hyper personalize your outreach to them, you can nurture them, you can put them into a campaign based on on their pain points that you're seeing. So these are all great ways to inform your marketing strategy and inform the path that we as marketers put them on that feels relevant and personalized. So one of the cool things I wanted to show you was how does this actually look in practice? So this is a little preview of the research tab. So you can see we had pre populated all of those relevant research topics for our business. And I can see at a high level here all of the accounts that are showing some level of intent as well as researching these topics. Now I know for us this is great because then I can put them into a campaign that's gonna send them emails on our leadership programs. I can put them into a campaign that's going to talk about sales coaching. And it's a much better fit to put them into campaigns like this and give them something that's going to meet their needs and add value at the right time. It feels a lot more personalized as opposed to kind of the guesswork sometimes of over generalizing our messaging or campaigns. The next cool piece is signals. Now how is this different from research? Well, these signals are totally unique to HubSpot and they are tracking major events at companies. So I'm talking geographic expansion. So if you have a company that's growing, I think our salespeople would like to know, I think they would like to seize that opportunity and reach out and have a conversation. It can also track whether they have published recent thought leadership that maybe our sellers want to check out. That's a great way to open a conversation that feels timely and relevant. It can also track any sort of technology investment. So if there are any technology vendors or services out here, I think it's great to know if a company has recently put funding behind a tech initiative. So it's able to get really granular and track these major events. It can track layoffs, it can track hiring. So it's great to have that context whenever your sellers are gearing up for these conversations. So this is just another layer that you can peel back to through this intent data. So I did wanna show you. This is perhaps my favorite part. But one of the questions I always have at the end of any presentation is well, now I have all these insights, what do I do with it? Here's exactly what you can do with it and how you can automate it. Well, now buyer intent events and those company signal events, they can now be triggers with workflows. So now you have the ability to not only capture these individuals, capture these companies, but now you have a way to automate what happens next. You have a way to meet them at the right time and be proactive about it. So all of this can be automated. As you can see, I've laid out a couple examples of what those triggers could be. And on the next slide, you'll see a little bit of an example where we have enriched our CRM with those accounts, we've added the relevant buying committee members, and now we're sending them a relevant email and piece of content. As we think about all of these different intent signals and the impact they can have, I did want to just share our own success story just so you guys could see how we put this into practice and how this has impacted our business in a positive way. So when we first started out doing the buyer intent focused approach, we were a little bit at a standstill. As we know yesterday, the inbound traditional funnel, it's broken, it's starting to change, it's starting to evolve. And we knew we needed to evolve with it. So we decided to adopt this new approach and start to think about how this could future proof our business and help us gain that competitive advantage. So instead of just focusing on our lead scoring alone, just the individuals, we started shifting that focus to the collective company and all of the intent that goes with it. And we started to target and really prioritize those high intent accounts based on those breadcrumbs we were seeing from this system. And then lastly, we found that a lot of times our sales messaging that was going out in our sequences, our marketing emails, our campaigns, it was just too broad. It was not resonating, it was not hitting home with people, people. So what we discovered was using this, we were losing impact and we were losing people. So it was a great time for us to really reconsider what Buyer Intent could do for our messaging and the way that we were prospecting. So let's look at where we are today. So now that we've implemented this Buyer intent engine and this approach, we have now been able to align and define those target accounts, target those segments, and really start to target who is engaging with us. We've been able to use our ad dollars more strategically and focus on reaching out to those accounts that are already showing signs they're ready to engage with us. We're getting to them earlier. We're beating our competitors out and we're starting to have conversations much faster. So we're even accelerating the time it takes in that pipeline and in that funnel process access. We're also starting to see much stronger marketing and sales alignment with all of these breadcrumbs and the access we both have, we're able to be much more strategic in our messaging. They're able to see what we've done to nurture them. They're able to see all of the different intent signals, all of the different research topics they've searched for. And those discovery calls go much differently. They're much more impactful. And we're seeing these turn into three or four different calls that ultimately end up in closed one deals. We're able to be proactive on those high intent accounts and those alerts instead of reactive. And we're able to use this system to optimize. We don't get it right the first time, but that's okay. It's about constantly fine tuning and learning from those intent signals and the reporting that we're getting from it to optimize our funnel. So we've really shifted, I would say, our approach to adapt for the modern buyer. If we know that they're spending 70% of that buying journey anonymous, we need to start meeting them where they are. We need to start picking up on those silent signals and breadcrumbs and start getting ahead in reaching out to them and building those relationships and building that trust. We were able to leverage that intent to modernize our lead gen approach and start thinking about how we get rid of some of the noise. Constantly refilling our funnel and our pipeline and making sure the ones that mattered got into the hands of the sales team. And again, just getting to these buyers sooner and beating out those competitors to those conversations has been huge. Sometimes we're even able to talk to them about their competitors and what they're looking for and have those competitive advantage discussions early on so we can address those concerns. So this is the money slide that we'll pretend we did not see five minutes ago. But I did want to give you all as marketers a snapshot of what a funnel looks like now that we have implemented this. And it was important for us to break this down not only into just one of the funnels that we have, but also show you a breakdown of the named accounts that we had in our CRM versus the ones that we didn't. And showing you how they trickle down and work through the funnel is really impactful here because you can constantly see those non named accounts, the accounts that our HubSpot buyer intent engine picks up on, those are the ones that are contributing to a bulk of the conversions and ultimately the opportunities. And then lastly, it's always great for us to see the impact as marketers we're having. So getting to see how our wedge of this pie grows has been really, really exciting for us. So being able to see that we went from being, I'd say probably 30, 35% of the funnel in terms of attribution, we are now almost 45%. We're able to see how those conversions are increasing from MQLs to SQLs. We're able to see almost 2 million, if not more at this point in closed one business as a result of it. And then also just seeing that the number of opportunities is growing. So we started using some of these tools as the year started. So from Q1 to Q2, seeing that 20% growth in opportunities was huge. And again, when we look back at that last slide, it just goes to show that a lot of that would not have originally been in our funnel or on our radar had we not had these buyer intent signals. So with that, I hope you at least got some framework for buyer intent. I hope you were able to get a sneak peek into how you could put HubSpot's buyer intent into practice. And I hope you'll check it out. It is available in beta, so feel free to take a look in your system. And again, that's me. So if you want to connect, if you want to add me on LinkedIn, I'd be happy to talk. And thank you so much.