Buyer Intent Isn’t Enough: Buyers Need to Be the Right Fit

Confirming buyer intent matters. But confirming a buyer’s fit is just as critical. Even if the lead you’re handing to Sales has high intent to purchase, they won’t be a viable lead if you don’t serve their industry or can’t meet their needs. However, if Marketing can ascertain the prospect has intent to purchase and expressed that their needs and goals fit what your organization provides, you have a qualified lead to give to Sales.

Marketing Automation Has Transformed Both Marketing and Sales

Marketing automation systems have changed the lives of marketers. They can personalize content or send timed, targeted emails to prospects who have expressed intent to purchase. But beyond executing and streamlining tedious processes, marketing automation technology has also transformed the sales funnel.

In an EverString blog post titled, “Why Should I Care About Fit & Intent?”, Matt Amundson writes that when marketing automation tools hit their peak roughly six years ago, consumers quickly caught the scent of these new stacks. It was obvious when they started receiving engagement (sales calls, digital follow-ups) immediately after viewing a first-party site. Once the automated engagement and lead generation became apparent, consumers underwent a transformation of their own: they started consuming content based on the the topical authority of third-party sites like Forbes or Business Insider.

For first-party firms, this meant a loss of control and zero visibility into the information captured by the marketing automation systems at those third-party sites. In simpler words, it threw a major kink into marketing operations. Marketers need context to determine whether a visitor to their website has intent to purchase and is the right fit to be considered a quality lead.

Buyer Intent Data Only Matters If the Buyer Is a Fit

Buyer intent data is the fuel that keeps the many moving parts of the marketing automation system feeding sales funnels. But, without the right fit, intent data alone doesn’t guarantee valuable prospects. Engaging a client who fits your targeted demographic and intends to make a purchase on a product like yours saves your organization money, time, and energy. It also saves the client time and energy. Amundson posits that if a prospect meets your buyer intent and fit criteria, and if you understand theirs, that prospect is more likely to spend more, and to spend quickly, which results in a shorter sales cycle through the funnel.

Aberdeen supports much of this sentiment; buyer intent context fuels everything we do. Our job is to ascertain the most crucial factors that determine a qualified lead. Who is in-market to buy? Who’s in which market? What are their perceptions of the market and its players (including you)? How do they engage with which types of content? These are the kinds of context we discover, investigate, synthesize, and then provide. A qualified lead isn’t boiled down to a “win.” A qualified lead means your organization has diverted its energy, dollars, and minutes to a prospect who had buying intent and was the right fit.

So, to answer the question in Amundson’s headline: You, and we, should care about both fit and intent, because buyer intent data missing that critical fit context is not much more than extra unstructured lead-gen data.

We don’t like wasting our time. We have zero intent of wasting a client’s time. Ensuring that any prospect who indicates intent to buy is also the right fit is, at Aberdeen, the right way to qualify a prospect.