In B2B sales, actionable contact and prospecting information might be the most important piece of the “success” or “failure” puzzle. Did you know that sales reps, on average, waste about 60 minutes per day due to poor data? For some businesses, that’s almost manageable. It’s hard enough to manage your team goals, cover your accounts, and provide consistent training. Sales leaders shouldn’t have to worry about the looming fear of “bad data.”
Buyer intent data has become an effective and powerful analytical tool for B2B marketers. Quite simply, it’s changed how we approach campaign development, because we’re now able to generate leads from targeted, in-market buyers. What is sometimes overlooked, however, is just how impactful intent data is to salespeople. The following statistics show how intent data can help sales better understand prospects and offer targeted, timely solutions to meet their needs.
1. 50% of sales leaders use intent data to improve account prioritization.
One of the hardest parts of being a salesperson in the digital B2B space is knowing when and how to prospect certain accounts. It’s not uncommon for salespeople to feel like they’re wasting their time with their outreach activity. With intent data, instead of guessing what type of content will resonate with the prospective buyer, sales can create an educated conversation based around information the buyer is actively looking for.
2. 55% of sales leaders saw an increase in lead conversions when using intent data.
The driving force behind any sales team is the ability to create new and reoccurring business opportunities. True intent data will use a variety of informational streams to help aggregate the best possible snapshot of a specific buyer. This is extremely valuable to sales reps as they’re able to personalize their outreach to specific groups of buyers, instead of the entire account book. In short, you’re able to convert leads faster because your prospecting is more targeted.
3. Intent data is used by over 40% of B2B sales leaders to enrich their CRM.
If you’ve worked in sales for any stretch of time, you know the CRM or sales database can get a little stale with old, tired data points. You can only use the same value prop in your email prospecting so many times. That’s why sales teams have looked to intent data to help bolster their CRM with new insights. Intent data not only tracks what your buyer is doing, but it can also look at more specific insights like competitive intel, budget allocations, or even new company initiatives. Essentially, if the information can be put into an AI-based analytics machine, you can gather buyer intent from it.
4. 50% of leaders said intent data helps with sales and marketing alignment.
Both sales and marketing teams are driven by revenue goals and are tracked on specific KPIs. Intent data, by nature, is usually collected and augmented by the marketing team and delivered via leads to the sales team. This interaction helps bridge the gap and create true alignment between sales and marketing reps. Rather than trying to generate more leads to satisfy sales quotas, marketing can improve sales enablement and make it easier to close deals.
5. 48% of B2B leaders say that intent is a core part of their revenue strategy.
Regardless of how you feel about introducing even more technology into the sales process, the truth is, your competitors are most likely using intent data to help them generate more sales. B2B technology sales is an extremely competitive environment where the lines are often blurred between the various vendors in any given space. Therefore, anything that might give you a leg up on your competition should absolutely be prioritized. However, just like all other strategic aspects of B2B sales, intent data must be used correctly for it to really impact your team.
The Challenges of Intent Data
Just like other data trends, intent offers its own source of challenges. In fact, over 25% of sales leaders feel that intent data ROI is just too hard to track. There’s a lot of truth to that. In some aspect, tracking the success of something like intent data, which is mostly an AI-aggregated source of probabilities, can be daunting. It’s a strategy that is fairly hard to quantify, seeing that you’re leveraging information that you assume to be correct about a buyer. So, yes, of course you’ll have better results if you gather the data yourself, from real customer interactions. The misconception about intent data is it’s a “fix-all” solution to an ongoing problem. In reality, B2B buyer intent is one of many ways to segment your audience to help with prioritizing campaigns.
Luckily, we conducted a survey to collect the trends and benchmarks around modern intent data. If you’re interested in learning more about intent data and how it applies to your sales team, check out our intent data benchmark report.
