084. 6 Ways to Leverage Buyer Intent Data

Good morning. Welcome back to another episode of Boundify's Demand Gen Studio. As always, I'm Miranda Jenkins, your host, and I'm joined by Emilio Garcia. How's it going, Emilio?

Good. 15 minutes after we should have started recording because camera and the microphone and dogs and all that. Up, but that's the beauty of recording and then publishing, that our guests don't get to experience all the hiccups of pre-production.

Yeah, until you join us for one of our live webinars coming up. Yeah. Then you'll get the joy of the—

For those, we will try, you know, we will come up with whatever camera we have and whatever, and we will have to apologize for all the noise and all that.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, this morning we're going to be talking through ways to leverage buyer intent data. Marketers, especially in B2B, often rely on firmographics, job titles, demographics to target and reach the right company. But those are only telling you who someone is and not whether they're actually in the market to buy at any given point in time.

Yeah.

So buyer intent data helps us answer the extremely important question to know of who's actively researching solutions like yours right now. So today Emilio Garcia is gonna walk us through 6 practical ways that marketing and sales teams can actually use buyer intent data to generate more pipeline and not just collect another data point. Emilio, thanks for joining us as always.

Thank you for inviting me.

So before we dive into the meat of the episode, let's start with when marketers hear the phrase buyer intent data, what exactly does that mean? What does it consist of?

Yeah, that's a great question. In the long arc of history of trying to read the minds of your buyers, which is what we what we marketers try to do, right? We are— this is the part that is always fascinating to me, that especially in digital, it feels like you're dealing with numbers and attribution correlations and conversion ratios and all that. But in reality, if you think about it, you are trying to influence the mind of another human being and you have very little information about what they're actually thinking. Very little information. And until we are capable of reading people's minds, which I hope never happens, there's this beauty on the mystery of not knowing what another person is thinking. We just rely on breadcrumbs, breadcrumbs of intention, right? Of information. My point of view is that intent data or information about the buyers, as is known nowadays, It's just the next iteration that digital platforms allows you to try to guess the stage of a buyer. What's the state, their state of mind as much as possible, pulling together information from everywhere that you can. And so it have gotten very sophisticated, right? At the beginning, I think most companies have of other people and companies basically what we call demographics and firmographics, right? Basically, I want information about who you are, and in the case of B2B, what is your function or your role. But that's been changing. Started with some general information about the state of the buyer that others can aggregate from analog sources, but it has been improving, and now we have more and more data not only on the things that a buyer is doing outside of our reach, control, or assets, but more and more within the things that we control, right? Our digital properties generate information, and obviously that becomes valuable. And the reason it becomes valuable, it becomes— it's because it becomes a competitive advantage. That's the important thing about this.

Yeah.

Everybody is trying to get an edge on getting in front of the buyers and optimize their spending. So you are in the right, in front of the right person at the right time with the right message. That's the dream, right? Whatever extra information you can get about the buyer helps you to get closer to that ideal.

Yeah. What kind of buying signals would you say are like the most valuable, or what behaviors tell you that someone may be entering the buying process?

Again, I think it's hard. Part of the reason it's hard is because it should start with a very good understanding of your buyer's journey. I know it sounds like crazy, right? This time and day where you can just turn to an LLM and ask all these things. But truly, as a marketer, you need to understand how your buyers buy. I still believe that the best way to do that when you have not been doing that for a long time is to get involved into either interviews or asking clients how was their buying process. But if you cannot do that, definitely you want to understand their journey. What are the kinds of questions, behaviors, places that they usually spend time when they are trying to understand the problem that you solve? And then moving on into what are the kind of places, people, companies that they will follow when they are exploring more detailed solutions that you offer? And especially what are the words that they using? And I use this as an example all the time. The way that you describe the problems you solve and your solutions, especially at the beginning, rarely aligns with the way that your buyers are describing the problems they're having. They're not using the solutions words, they're using the problem words, right? So for example, most of our potential buyers will start with something, how do I grow my business? How do I get known? They will not start with, oh, I wanna hire a demand generation agency that focus in B2B, right? It's so specific. And so we tend to think that our attention should be focused on people that is already very close to the purchase, which is the smallest. And so all that group of people that is before that stage, you want to know where are they spending time, what kind of— if you want to use the word keywords or topics or questions they're asking, and especially who they're asking about those questions. I think that's super relevant. So that, that usually informs you. And if you can aggregate all that information, then it becomes intent data.

Yeah, and I feel like we've said it multiple times, our listeners know, um, but we primarily work in HubSpot and our HubSpot agency. And I feel like that's something that all of the changes coming in HubSpot and the new features in HubSpot, you're seeing that buyer intent data being used and leveraged, especially the prospecting agent is a big one that built in, in the tool that it's showing you the intent data coming from your website visits and who to prioritize. So that kind of leads us into our first ways to leverage your buyer intent data, and that's using it to help prioritize sales outreach. So how would you say that buyer intent data changes the way that SDRs or sales teams should be approaching their prospecting?

Yes, I, I think that's a great one, and I'm sure you will have also some comments. You have been working deeply into this issue or this opportunity. Historically, the challenge of someone doing prospecting on B2B has always been the same, right? Which is, at best, you have a great list of companies and people that you want to reach out and some information about channels where they might answer. Your request, either email, in person, or phone number. But the problem always is, who do I start with, right? Yeah, because if you have even anything beyond 100, if you have thousands of companies, the order in what you do, the approach and the timing can make the difference between a process that actually yields results and one that's just super wasteful. And I think that's the, the biggest advantage that you can get about intent data that allows you to prioritize outreach. There's any inkling of a change on a company that usually is positive for your solution, right? And the typical ones are someone changes job, someone gets promoted, a new product or service is launched. If you happen to be in the kind of services or products that benefit or usually are think of when those changes happened, called triggers, then it pays off to be in front of those companies instead of the ones that are not doing that. Growth is another one. But again, I'm thinking very professional services, marketing services. If you are in HR, Or if you are in order accounting or finance or compliance, there, there are definitely other events that are a telltale that someone might be closer to that buying process. And that's when you leverage intent data. And again, the benefit is basically it gives you a competitive advantage because others are not using that intent data, then they are doing the same work. With less results or less efficiency. So you, in theory, can hire a few people or with the people that you have and the help of AI, do more.

Yeah. Most of what we do is happening digitally where you're not seeing the buyer in front of you, but it's the same idea of in-person, physical storefront, the people, the customers you want to prioritize. Talking to and presenting your offering and asking, do you need help with anything? What are you looking for? Are the ones in your store looking around rather than the people walking by on, on the street. Um, you're going to be doing a lot less work talking to the person actually in your space looking around than just passing by.

Correct, correct. And I love that analogy and you can extend it as much as you want, right? You can always say if you happen to be in a place of business among a fair, then you can, with a good assumption, or assume that even if people are just passing by your store, but they're walking around, that they are exploring, right? And that's when you get a little bit like, do you want to try this food that I have available, or this product? You want to talk about it outside? So the people that is slightly outside of your store might be the next group that you might tackle or approach. But again, as I love what you're saying, you gotta read the room, right? If you happen to be in a place where everybody's wandering around and exploring, then you have a good chance. If not, then probably you're just being annoying. Yeah.

Um, awesome. So intent data doesn't only improve outbound outreach. It can also make your paid media much more efficient. So instead of spending budget equally across an entire audience, how should marketers think about allocating paid media spend towards higher-intent prospects?

Yes, I guess if for anyone listening, you will start seeing the pattern here. It's the same idea. The one caveat that I want to do for advertising is that, again, as I was saying at the beginning, unfortunately, you are making guesses. About the state of mind of a person, right?

Yeah.

You never know, and it happens the same for sales. You never know if whatever signals someone is sending over or is being aggregated happen to be misrepresented. The biggest example is someone doing research, right? A student, it can be someone in a graduate degree or a university is doing a research as representing a buyer. They will show up all the signals, right? And, but they clearly do not have intent because they're just trying to explore that. Just, that's a simple example of where signals will represent something that is not true. But if you move past that possibility, which happens all the time, then you can use the same criteria. If in B2B you're advertising and especially you are worried about making the most of your budget, a big edge can be, can advertise to people that have some intent that I deem important. So I get closer to their choice. And this is the other thing that is important in my mind, at least. I feel that sometimes people confuse and think that just because someone has, just because you have intent data, you will be able to persuade them.

Yeah.

More easily or faster. And it's really the other way around, right? It's someone that is already close to making a choice or to take the next step and you happen to be in front of them. So that's what you are gaining. Yes, it's true that sometimes the advertising process itself can create that urgency, can create that, I don't want to miss out, right? All the little techniques that you— that we know work, right? About being exclusive, being scarce. All those things are important. They matter. Belonging. But the basic need has to exist because if you don't have that, it doesn't matter what intent, what, what ad you use, someone will not take action. And so intent data can help you to improve the chances that you happen to be in front of someone that is almost going to take the next step, right? From problem aware to solution aware, from solution aware to vendor aware, and improve the performance of your advertising.

Yeah. And when you're using it for targeting, especially for paid media, if you think about like for B2B, the, I guess, like broadest way you could create your audience is using a platform like LinkedIn where you're, you define those firmographic job title, job seniority, industry, that type of thing, but you don't actually know who the people are and what companies they work for, that kind of thing until you start advertising for them. Yeah. Then the next step is you actually have your list like we've talked about. You have your ICP list of companies that you're layering over. I want these job titles and these seniorities, but from these companies that I'm predetermining. And then intent data can be another layer of even further narrowing that down. You know, these people in these companies, but then also of these people who's visited my website, I know what pages they visited, I know what of my con— what parts of my content they've consumed. And it just gives you another window into, like you were saying, maybe what they're thinking, maybe what they're looking for. And that can be an unlock to really personalize the messaging of your campaign as well, which is our next topic. Instead of talking about their generic pain points, you can use buyer intent data to talk about what they're actually caring about, the pages they visited. Do you have anything to add to that idea?

Yes. No, as you said, right, going into the dream, right? How do you approach the idea of an app for a person, right? An app just for your eyes. So that's the dream, right? That I create something so unique that it talks to you particularly Instagram.

And you're like, oh, how did they know that?

How did they know that? Now, obviously, the flip side, as you say, it always feels creepy, right? When someone or a company, especially that you're not familiar with, seems to know more about you than— first, be careful with that one for sure.

Right.

Now, here I also have another caveat, which is advertising or marketing is trying to do two things at the same time, and you need not to forget that other portion because if not, you will create an advertising effort that feels just like catering to the buyer but saying nothing about yourself.

Yeah.

Right? And I can use relationships or someone dating as a great example of that. Yes, if you're interested in someone, you want to personalize the experience to what that person feels. Important, but you gotta show off who you are because if not, then you are just a mirror. It's not necessarily the only point. You are really, what you are truly trying to do is to say to the market, this is who we are, this is how we think about the problems we solve.

Yeah.

And we are looking for people that think like us, or at least that agrees on the way that we think about this problem, how it's be solved, or agrees on what we stand up as a brand. And it doesn't have to be, you know, I'm not talking about ethical or political stance. It's more about simply a little thing like, am I a luxurious brand or am I a budget brand or value brand? Am I distinguished for the way that I price or for the way that I serve? All those little things tell about How is it that you optimize your business or the products and services that you do and what things you left off or are not as important? And there are people out there that will agree with your point of view on how you do business in that category. And my only caveat there is that yes, personalize, right? You can take that information and cater to your buyer, the best example is usually when you think about trust. That's the one what is fantastic, right? When you say, I want my buyers to trust our brand. If you put out there a generic case study, that's good. But if you could a case study on the industry that they happen to be, or better, right, of companies that they will consider, if not their competition, someone that they admire or strive to That's better. Everybody will feel better saying, oh, you have solved this kind of problems before. But not only for any kind of company, but companies like ours, that personalization matters because it gives them a, a window into a problem that you have solved for their industry. So that's one example where you can leverage that, right? I know the industry or I know the company size. I wanna know that you have worked with smaller business or you have worked with larger business. But again, the, the important thing is that just because you can do that, don't fall into the trap of saying, I don't work with the small companies, but I'll still, we'll use examples of work that we've done with the small companies because that person happens to be a, an employee of a small company. No, if you are just enterprise and there are things that you do just for the enterprise market, you gotta advertise that, you gotta put out. Yourself, who you truly are, instead of just mimicking the buyer.

Um, so you definitely can use it for paid media targeting, but then for your existing campaigns and audience— the audiences. But then it can also be used to open up retargeting opportunities. Are there any specific ways that Do you recommend marketers use Intent Path to build their retargeting campaigns, and what does that look like?

Yeah, I will say that a lot of the great things that you can do in retargeting or remarketing comes, come from volume, right? You really have to have a website that has a lot of visitors so you can create audiences that are large enough that you can actually implement those ideas. So I typically— great remarketing tactics are more of the realm of D2C than B2B, but there's still some other things that you can do that are interesting. For example, one that I like, an idea that I like, if you have the budget, is you can advertise on a platform that has a lot of intent but very little context. Let's say Google Ads. And then from the audience that visited your site that will have a clear intent, but you don't know who they are, you can take all those visitors and it can be the same for organic visitors and for in general people from different companies. And then you turn to a platform or a third-party tool that actually has the context and you filter out that. So instead of creating a, a everybody kind of remarketing campaign. You say, I just want these countries, these types of companies, this type of buyers, and that's the remarketing that I'll do, for example, on LinkedIn, right? And you can do the same on the other way from a, from a platform that had a lot of context, but very little intent data. You can go and take that information and put it on a campaign on intent that is broader in the kind of terms that you will use just because you know is the right person. And so to create an example, you can say, I'm going to advertise on LinkedIn where I can select specific companies and specific job titles and roles. But then when I jump into Google, maybe I'm just willing on the, on this intent side, only go to people that are looking for B2B marketing agencies or demand generation agencies or topics, very close topics about that. But if I already know that the person visited my site and has certain title or is coming from certain company, I'm willing to broaden that criteria and say, even if you're just looking for advertising, I will show up because I know is the right person, even if they're not using the right words. So those are little things where you can use intent or a previous action to leverage what you do in remarketing. The last one, which is the most popular or typical, is that you will leverage the places on your site that they visit, right?

Right.

If they visit some of your more detailed pages, right, your product pages, solution pages, case study pages, you can create smaller audiences where you leverage that and show up a specific ad that focuses just on that product or just on that case study or solution. But again, this is more typical of e-commerce, right? You see a specific kind of shoe or dress or whatever garment, and usually your remarketing will come along the lines of what you saw rather than trying to sell you or promote everything on the store.

Right. All right. Well, then next, marketing and sales alignment is something we talk about very often on this show. It's very prevalent in our line of work, but when you think about, so typically businesses like fall into the trap of having marketing as one arm of the business and sales as another arm of the business, and they both have their separate initiatives that they're working on and they're a lot of times even separate audiences that they're working with, but buyer intent data can be a really powerful tool for Bringing marketing and sales together and helping them work off of the work that the other team is doing. If you think about with your marketing targeting, if you're using ICP list of, um, you know, ideal customers layered over with buyer intent data as your marketing audience, if sales is then using that audience as their prioritization for prospecting. How much more powerful is a sales conversation gonna be when they're reaching out to someone who's not only had impressions of your ad, maybe they've had engagements of their ad, of your ad, they've visited your website. You're not a brand new concept to them that, you know, it kind of does the first leg of the work for the sales. Salesperson on that, that sales call and what they need to talk about with the buyer. Do you have any thoughts on how buyer intent data brings those two teams together?

Oh, there's so many ideas here. Hopefully I do not, um, make this episode so long.

Perfect.

Um, I'm gonna start with a, an idea that just came to my mind is in In manufacturing, in the physical world, companies that can reprocess, retake energy or resources from a process that they were doing usually get a competitive advantage against others. An example is you have a process that requires heat and you burn a fuel and the, the waste of that process, if it can be used for something else, like maybe heating the building or the byproduct of a process and you can take that and sell it for a profit or use it in another product that you might also sell as well. That usually gives you an advantage, right? Recycle, you can call it that you're recycling whatever you are making. There is something similar happening between marketing and sales every time that you use data in that way. You can think it that way. And I think at the core, that's one of the largest unseen benefits of a CRM, right? That if marketing and sales are working in the same place, in this case, the CRM, then they can recycle and reuse the efforts of each of the other teams in a great way. So yes, you mentioned one that is very clear, which is if marketing is tracking intent data from the beginning, using it for advertising, using it for personalization, but also you can track the intent on the site and in those properties. Once you take that lead and hand it over to sales for qualification, then they will have a lot of data to work on, right? They will know the, the, however, how many breadcrumbs you have collected already about that, and your conversation will be more personalized, will be more proper, faster. It will allow the sales team to prioritize the engagement and qualification. It helps this— the marketing team also to not justify but demonstrate that especially branding efforts are having an impact and they are nurturing and helping the buyer understand the offer better before they have a sales conversation. You can show it, right? They have been consuming their case studies. They have already explored our team. They have already understood our solutions and follow our content. So your job is going to be easier because you don't have to do a ton of education. You will have a better buyer on your end. But the one that is harder to see is that if sales uses the CRM and documents the engagement and interactions that they have with prospects, even if they were not brought by marketing, all that is super valuable information to create audiences. I was amazed, as you were saying about HubSpot, that we have been having some conversations with prospects, obviously, as our process, right? Conversations with them. We are recording our conversations just like regularly you will do on a sales call. And qualification and all that. And yes, your typical process is I record the conversation, I send over the script, but more and more these tools know that you're having a qualification conversation. So they're capable of detecting things like what are the pain points of the client, what are the objections of the call, and that data is being stored on the CRM. And is being labeled as, in this particular case, a pain point. So you can think it, if you think it as a marketer, right? Say, well, if the sales team is recording all these conversations with prospects, obviously with consent, of course, right? And we are aggregating all that information and we know what are the questions that our buyers are asking, what are the objections they have to the product and service, What are the reasons they bought and the reasons they didn't? And you can start creating signals out of that. Then you get closer to that idea of Minority Report, I think what it is, right? You can use to go back in time and say, someone is expressing these frustrations out there in the world, their pain points, then they might be interested in talking to us. They might be see this specific ads where we talked about this particular pain point that our solution solves. So that's the part that is hard to see. Usually it's very easy to see that intent data can be used so the marketing team shows up, one, impact, and two, help the sales team to prioritize. But the flip side is harder to see, that all that effort that is put on the sales side that usually goes to waste, that is not— Michael can be reused by the marketing team to improve targeting, right? Because for marketing, knowing what you want is important, but knowing why you lost is as important or more because losing means that you either were not the right fit The buyer didn't have the right pain point. You were not the right solution, right, for many other reasons, pricing or whatever, or you just missed timing, right? Was not the right time. So the more that you can learn about why you are losing leads or losing deals, the better that you can reuse that work and improve your process.

Yeah, yeah. We talk about a lot of like having customer conversations and from a marketing side, that's, um, there's like barrier to entry there of like, how do I have conversations with the customers? What does it look like? Am I sending out surveys that 10% of the people actually fill it out?

Yeah.

But with this, with sales, that's something that happens. Every day. They have— that's the main part of the job, is having customer conversations with current, current customers and potential customers. So you have that information, using it for marketing, finding ways to use it back again for marketing can be huge.

Yeah, you remember we had an episode where we talked about synthetic buyer personas, and I'm still not I'm still over the fence on how I feel about that. But independently how everybody feels, I think a good step forward on how do you leverage AI for that particular use case is this, what I'm describing, right? Is you can still have real conversations where you don't happen to be there as a marketer. Because if you have enough sales conversations recorded and aggregated, that are classified after the fact as sales qualification conversations, then the tools will be intelligent enough to organize all the data into exactly what I'm describing, right? Even if, even if the salesperson is not calling them objections and pain points, or the buyer is not calling them pain points, and nobody's asking them what are the reasons you started the process and why are you want to do this now and not later? All those important questions that you want to know as a marketer. If you aggregate enough of those conversations and you don't need that many, right? We're not talking about thousands of them. Sometimes you have one specific product. We're talking about hundreds, at most maybe dozens of them. So it is super, super valuable. And I can guarantee to everybody there out there that they have gotten so good that I feel every time that I get one of those where a meeting that I do not attend, I read the summary and it feel that I was, I feel like I was there. It is like, okay, I get it very well. I don't need to watch the recording anymore. I just need to read the summary and it's great at doing that. I will leverage that as a manually as a buyer intent data point, reading the scripts. But if you happen to have a CRM that is capable of storing and aggregating and classifying that, that's gonna be a big source of buyer intent that is a big competitive advantage because again, if you're doing it and your competitors are not, then you're gonna be more efficient.

Yeah. All right. So lastly, um, well, is there ways that intent data can reveal like market interest, emerging topics or priorities? You talked about specific, like, pain point of your market before they maybe would become obvious through the traditional ways you'd research, like, what your marketing— what your market is looking for?

Yes, I think that, that space is also evolving very quickly, very rapidly. We, again, we don't have expertise in— there are hundreds of tools that you can use for intent data, and I think we're getting more and not less of them. As time goes by, but most of them have something in common that I think is changing, at least from what I can see. Most of them have very typical triggers that are like vanilla to all kind of businesses, right? The ones that I was describing, you can say, well, um, is the business growing? Is the someone being hired, fired, promoted? Are they launching a new product or service? Even for a tool like HubSpot that is very heavily influenced by what's happening in the startup world, there's always the funding event, right? A startup got funded and that's usually a trigger that requires services and signals growth. What I think the edge is right now, and we are seeing some glimpse of that, is that can I define my own signal? Can I describe a series of events based on what's happening or what I know about my buyers? That is not your typical company-wide or person-specific but generic event, and I can start tracking that. And so I'm seeing the emergence of custom signals, right, that matter to you, right? It might be, I don't know, I really don't have an idea specifically right now for us. But again, what I was saying, what I was saying about a compliance event, someone researching about something very peculiar or particular that triggers, oh, this person will need help with this. And so I think that's where things are moving, that these tools are adding custom signals. And my intuition that is that those custom signals will come from your own data and that you will get suggestions from AI. About what your custom signals should be to begin with, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I feel like it, like you said, it's such a like emerging topic. It's still, you know, being shaped, but I feel like it's show, kind of shows the impact of how things are moving away from the specific keyword searches. In Google and more to the context of what someone is asking in LLMs, where you're, you're kind of moving away from me, are they searching for these specific words? And is it phrase match, exact match, broad match, and more into this is the describing the person that think are searching for it and what question is what questions are they asking? What, what are they looking for? And it's a more, I don't know if I'm describing it well, but it's like a more holistic idea of what someone's looking, if that makes sense.

Yes, it does.

It does.

Yeah, I, I think going back to that idea that the dream is I would like to know what another person is thinking, obviously without inviting or invading their privacy, right? We can see it right now happening with, with LLM models, right? We are having conversations that are— it's a two-way change. Not only are we getting more sophisticated answers, longer answers than just a link and a description and a blog of someone, we are asking more sophisticated queries, right? You're asking more complex questions. And so we are providing a more detailed, nuanced signal that if you can aggregate, then will give you the state of mind or particular situations that are, were not available to search engines in the past, right? You had 1, 2, 3 words. And so those changes will allow businesses that will rely on, maybe they just need 1,000 people all around the world to be searching for this or thinking about this problem, and they are golden, right? So to— it will allow people to create businesses out of very specific needs, very narrow needs that right now it still requires maybe a million users or hundreds of thousands of people to serve.

All right, in closing, we gave you 6 ways that you can leverage buyer intent data. But if a marketing leader listening today isn't using buyer intent data yet, what would you say is one practical way that they'd recommend— you'd recommend that they get started this quarter?

Yeah, start with a tool. Again, there's so many of them. All of them have a free version that will have a ton of restrictions, will give you an idea of the land. The best way that you can imagine it is like Google Analytics on steroids, right? It's beyond users, pages, time on site, and bounce rates, right? You still need to know that, but nowadays you can know way more than just that. So think about Google Analytics but on steroids. Look for something like buyer intent data. The price range is incredibly broad, um, and so try one and try to leverage a little bit of it. And then once you find one that works for you, obviously start thinking about how you can leverage that to create segments, to prioritize outreach, to prioritize qualification, to understand better who and why are, what people are visiting your site and what are the reasons they're doing so. I think that that's a great first step.

Awesome. All right, thank you everyone for listening, um, and thank you Emilio for joining and providing your insights, and we will see you all next time.

All right, thank you, Miranda.