In marketing and sales, if everything was a nail and Intent data was a hammer, life would be so much easier and we could all go golfing or whatever your golf equivalent is. Unfortunately, using intent data and behavioral signals requires just a bit more data science and work to make it all come together nicely.

To put it bluntly, sellers of Intent data by the pound have oversimplified what the data represents to the point where it can be fairly unusable and irrelevant. That’s because there are an awful lot of variables and steps that intent data vendors are missing on their way to reporting out whether an account is actively showing an intent to buy.

For the purpose of this installment of The Aberdeen Intent Data Series, I am going to focus on a critical miss made by the majority of intent data vendors that limit what your true, real-time market looks like. In fact, the oversimplified and literal approach that has been taken will limit your potential prospect pool by 20 – 60% depending on what you sell, your natural time to sale and the reasons why a company needs to buy your product/solution.

Why is this?

If there is anything we have learned, it is how companies behave on their way to making a purchase. And while every company may behave differently at different times in their buyer journey, we can say definitively that, for the most part, companies don’t buy things, they solve business issues that require things. For example, a company trying to solve an employee retention issue may not be researching HCM platforms, but will eventually be looking to add or swap parts of their HCM stack if there is a vendor that can help address the issue of employee attrition with their platform.

So, if an intent vendor is delivering oversimplified, literal intent data that only correlates to a specific product/solution, you will have missed an opportunity to intersect with an account that, once it has a strategy, will begin to figure out what tools and technology they may need to get them where they want to be.

Up to half your active market is out here doing research but you are not seeing them because:

  • They are not reading reviews and comparison of you and your competitors
  • Are not even researching in the category of what your intent vendor thinks your product/solution represents
  • Have never been to your website
  • Don’t exist in your CRM
  • But will at some point in a current buyer journey process need what you sell to close the loop on the solution they are looking for

Here is a great example:

You can see what each swim lane represents by the label to the right.  Starting from the bottom up we have:

  • How many people from the account have come to the site
  • In this case, how many ads were served to this account (this can also represent the number of people coming from any and all campaign activities)
  • The total number of UNIQUE devices involved in the research journey
  • The actual date that this account became an opportunity based on an MBL being submitted
  • The overall INTENT score given to this account over time

On the right-hand side, you will see:

  • How the Opportunity was labeled when it was opened in Salesforce (the infobox that is overlaid on top of the swim lane showing the actual OPEN date
  • And on the below right the various categories that the account was researching

This represents an account that came to a vendor’s site completely out of the blue. Why out of the blue? Because for the better part of a year the people participating in a research journey on their way to a purchase were not researching what this vendor is selling (Storage). They were, however, researching categories that will eventually require Storage. What they were spending all their time doing was trying to figure out the best way to create a hybrid infrastructure for Application Modernization and Virtualization.

As you can see the start of serious research begins in mid-May and peaks at the end of September.  Across those months, May through September no one from the account came to the site and no one actually researched Storage. Yet, on the same week, the account became an opportunity by filling in an MQL, the conversation inside the account reaches a crescendo with approximately twenty individuals sharing content, having what we call a ‘content conversation’. But because none of this content had anything to do with the literal product the vendor sells, this account came as a complete surprise – and the opportunity to see this account doing research months in advance with the chance to intersect with the ongoing research team never happened.

All to say, without any context or account intelligence, this Opportunity was a CLOSED/LOST.

To review:

  • There are thousands of companies out there trying to get smart about how to solve their business challenges
  • They are doing it without your knowledge and more importantly – without your help
  • They are looking for information and answers across the long tail of the Internet: in peer-to-peer communities, on blogs, on small publishers that mostly go unnoticed
  • As many times as not they are researching in indirect ways – they are looking for answers not trying to buy things – but eventually will need to pull the trigger
  • Being an Intent Literalist cuts you off from a large swath of your natural audience of prospect accounts
  • Don’t be a hammer because the world is filled with things that are not nails

And, as always, let’s keep the dialogue going: charlie.tarzian@aberdeen.com