Contact-Level Intent: Find Pain Points & Boost Conversions

Account-level intent signals have their place, but they’re limited in terms of the value they provide salespeople and marketers. When your sales team identifies which prospects they’re targeting, you can start showing them ads to create buying intent signals, instead of waiting for them to discover you. I recently listened to a chat from the SDR Leader community that highlighted how account-level intent signals can actually create friction between marketing and sales. It requires contact level intent data signals, a large volume of buying journeys to analyze, and significant AI resources with properly (unbiased) constructed algorithms. Obviously propensity to buy modeling is still well beyond the reach of even the most sophisticated marketing and sales teams. B2B marketing and sales teams use intent data to gain insights into which organizations are increasingly showing interest in specific products or services and to what extent.

But we've reached the limits of that approach. Contact-level intent tells you who at those companies is ready to buy. Account-level intent tells you which companies are researching your category. That's why the best teams use both approaches. Would you rather have 1,000 accounts with no contact info, or 100 contacts with names, context, and clear messaging angles? If contact score hits 70, create a task for your SDR.

The common lead scoring models of marketing automation and CRM systems draw exclusively on first-party data – the observations of contacts with your own digital properties. They may be disconnected from the project, or perhaps engaging with your competitors just as their colleagues are engaging with you. Many marketing automation and CRM based lead scoring systems focus exclusively on contact-level first-party data.

Step 4: Align Sales and Marketing

These signals are often collected from third-party data sources and made available from account-based marketing tools. Account-level intent signals are the collective behavior of individuals within an account that indicate they may be interested in what you’re selling. Here’s an in-depth comparison of contact and account-level intent signals, and when to use each based on your goals. On the flip side, contact-level intent helps marketers and salespeople understand and engage with specific influencers, champions, and decision-makers within an account. Learn how contact-level intent signals can give you the insights account-level data misses! Simply using intent data to select accounts for the same random marketing and sales outreach as every other account – just prioritized – is hardly efficient.

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We've also seen reassuring validation of the go-to-market approach of other companies. Most people think of contact level data as simply facilitating personalization and outbound sales – knowing who's active and having contact details to follow up. We can also see which members are engaging with which competitors, which problems they're trying to solve and what outcomes they hope for…even where each is in the buying journey.

Key Takeaways: Why This Shift Matters

Furthermore, 54% of B2B marketers are planning to increase their intent data budgets, showing a strong upward trend in adoption and belief in its effectiveness. Focus your precious sales and marketing efforts on those most likely to convert. Engaging with prospects who are already in a buying journey means less time spent educating and more time closing. Contact level intent offers a lifeline, enabling hyper-personalization that resonates. As Influ2 explains, it’s not just "people at Microsoft searching topic X," but "Bob, Head of Demand Generation, clicked on your ad about X on December 2nd."

Intent data surfaces accounts showing active research behavior, so teams can prioritize outreach and personalize messaging based on what prospects are actually investigating right now. Over the past several months, Foundry has conducted beta sessions with select clients to demo the product’s features and leverage its insights in their own marketing efforts. Our solution in Foundry Intent is to forgo these types of subjective datapoints and instead create a robust view of the buyer journey built entirely of concrete, multi-channel signals from the contact level up.” “Until now,” said Foundry President Kumaran Ramanathan, “the intent market has offered points of view from a single category of data source, and marketers have been left to aggregate and standardize account-level data in hopes of constructing their own insights. Foundry (an IDG, Inc. company), the leading B2B media and martech provider, announced today the launch of the company’s proprietary intent data product, Foundry Intent, marking the company’s first major release since it acquired data and martech companies LeadSift, KickFire, Triblio and Selling Simplified.

From Salesforce.com – "Lead scoring is an effective model that helps sales and marketing departments identify which prospects are potentially most valuable to the company and its current sales funnel." From Marketo – "Lead scoring is a methodology shared by sales and marketing that ranks leads to determine their sales-readiness. Leads are scored based on the interest they show in your business, place in the buying cycle, and overall fit contact level intent data with your business." And companies in the Martech, Salestech, and intent data spaces have responded. This interactive format allows you to explore key areas – including board performance, composition, recruitment, governance policies and the executive’s experience – and compare organizations by size and mission area. In the Methodology brief, you can find more information on our survey collection process, data sources, strengths, and gaps. EPA employees and contractors who support the CDX program are required to follow the CDX Rules of Behavior.

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We help create first-party intent signals for the prospects salespeople are actively pursuing. Most of the popular ABM tools like 6sense and Demandbase specialize in identifying third-party account-level intent data. The problem though, is a lot of marketers stop at those account-level signals, which isn't helpful for sales. If you don’t know which accounts to target or don’t have a database of prospects, there are ABM tools that can gather account-level insights to point you in the right direction.

This hybrid approach ensures you're not missing out on potential buyers who are researching but haven't yet landed on your site. First-party data provides deep insights into existing engagement, while third-party data expands your reach to new, interested prospects. The most effective contact level intent strategies combine both first- and third-party data. This is where you discover individuals showing interest in topics relevant to your solutions, but perhaps engaging with your competitors or industry thought leaders.

This reveals where accounts are in their evaluation process. We leverage this graph in our WebSights feature, which identifies which companies are visiting your website. When a company tells us they're planning to invest in a specific technology or initiative, that's zero-party data you can act on immediately. ZoomInfo surveys millions of knowledge workers every month to understand the projects and initiatives their companies are launching in the coming months. Derived intent uses machine learning to identify patterns correlated with deal success. Combining first-party intent data from your own properties with third-party signals from across the web creates a fuller picture of buyer behavior and research activity.

• When Sales has a new target prospect, Marketing can start showing them ads to create buying intent signals.
• The platforms are quietly losing the most important real estate in advertising, and most B2B marketers have not noticed yet.
• The pressure is on, with 69% of B2B marketers feeling urgency to use intent data for high-quality lead generation.
• So good that it deserved an article because I learned a lot.
• Improving lead scoring involves refining your approach to evaluating the readiness and relevance of potential customers.
• When your sales team identifies which prospects they’re targeting, you can start showing them ads to create buying intent signals, instead of waiting for them to discover you.

They often serve more to reassure marketers than to really challenge and shape a company's market approach. As contact level intent data helps to match active contacts to their likely roles on the buying team, when we overlay those we've identified on the typical team matrix, we can identify which roles are conspicuously absent. By layering contact-level data on top of account-level signals, sales teams can identify when an account is merely exploring versus actively moving toward a purchase. At that point, you still don’t know who the prospect is, what their product-specific pain points are, or if they’re even in the market. It would make more sense for salespeople to focus their efforts on Prospect B than Prospect A, since they’re further along in the buying journey.

Combining them allows for a holistic approach to B2B engagement. Account-level intent helps you identify the fertile ground (the right companies), and contact-level intent helps you find the specific seeds (the right people) within that ground to nurture. As Foundry states, this data is useful for personalized marketing and sales interactions. The pressure is on, with 69% of B2B marketers feeling urgency to use intent data for high-quality lead generation. This isn't just a fleeting trend; it's a fundamental shift in how B2B organizations approach lead generation and customer engagement.

With sales intent data, you’ve got a chance to intercept buyers before they start investigating competitors. With intent data, you’ll be able to reach potential clients earlier in their buying journey. If you’re still unconvinced, here are some ways sales and marketing can activate their intent data. Virtual prospecting intent data can give you the edge over your competitors, providing better market awareness and more context heading into cold calls. For instance, if you sell B2B data, it’s essential to know whether potential customers have an outdated CRM system or use a competing tool.