Every B2B marketer has been there. Your intent data platform lights up like a Christmas tree—accounts are surging on your key topics! The sales team gets excited. Marketing high-fives all around. Then reality hits: those “hot” accounts aren’t even close to buying. They’re just…learning.
The brutal truth? Most intent data conflates professional development with purchase intent, creating false positives that waste marketing budgets and frustrate sales teams with unqualified leads.
But here’s what the vendors won’t tell you: only 3-10% of your ideal customer profile is actually in-market at any moment. The rest? They’re consuming content to stay current in their roles, not evaluating solutions.
The Question Nobody’s Asking
A prospect reading your pricing comparison page signals buying intent. Someone reading news about your industry signals learning intent.
Seems obvious, right? Yet most intent data providers treat these behaviors identically.
Consider this real-world example: Your company sells internet security software. Your intent platform shows an account “surging” on security topics. Should sales call them immediately?
Not so fast.
If that surge comes from executives reading TechCrunch articles about the latest data breach, that’s learning behavior — they’re staying informed about industry risks. But if it comes from IT teams comparing vendor features on G2 or reading implementation guides on technical forums, that’s buying behavior.
Without knowing where content consumption happens, you’re flying blind.
Why Intent Data Vendors Keep You in the Dark
The intent data boom has created a marketplace full of “trust me” solutions. Nearly every vendor promises magic insights from billions of behavioral signals, but the math rarely adds up.
Most providers operate as black boxes because transparency would reveal an uncomfortable truth: news sites dominate internet traffic, and they’re counting every CNN article about cybersecurity as a “buying signal.”
The problem compounds when you realize how B2B professionals actually consume content:
- IT teams constantly read about new technologies (learning)
- Marketers follow industry trends religiously (learning)
- Executives monitor business news daily (learning)
- Finance teams track market conditions (learning)
This learning cycle runs 24/7, creating massive noise in your intent data. Without the ability to separate education from evaluation, you’re essentially paying for a list of professionals doing their jobs.
The Two Types of Intent That Actually Matter
After analyzing thousands of B2B buyer journeys, patterns emerge that separate window shoppers from serious buyers:
Intent to Learn (90% of Your Signals)
These accounts are building knowledge, not building business cases. They’re consuming content for professional development, competitive intelligence, or general awareness.
Characteristics of learning intent:
- Broad topic consumption across general news sites
- Individual contributors reading industry trends
- Sporadic engagement without clear progression
- Content focused on “what” and “why” questions
- No engagement from economic buyers or decision makers
What to do with learning intent: Use it for top-of-funnel marketing programs. Build awareness campaigns, develop thought leadership content, and nurture these accounts for the long term. But whatever you do, don’t send them to sales.
Intent to Buy (The Golden 10%)
True buying intent shows coordinated research across multiple buying group members, with consumption focused on evaluation and comparison content.
Characteristics of buying intent:
- Multiple personas from the same account researching simultaneously
- Engagement with vendor comparison content, pricing pages, and implementation guides
- Progressive movement from problem identification to solution evaluation
- Content focused on “how” and “which” questions
- Involvement from both technical evaluators and business stakeholders
What to do with buying intent: Deploy your full arsenal. Trigger personalized ABM campaigns, alert sales for timely outreach, serve retargeting ads with customer proof points, and ensure every buying group member gets relevant content for their role.
The WHO + WHERE Framework That Changes Everything
Separating intent to learn from intent to buy requires understanding two critical variables most vendors hide:
1. WHO is consuming content?
A junior developer reading about your technology category represents learning. A VP of Engineering, CTO, and procurement team from the same company doing research? That’s a buying committee forming.
Intent without identity is just noise. You need visibility into:
- Seniority levels of engaged contacts
- Departmental representation (IT, finance, operations, executive)
- Number of unique individuals researching
- Progression of personas joining the research party
2. WHERE is consumption happening?
Publisher quality and content context make all the difference:
Buying signals come from:
- Technical review sites
- Vendor websites and competitor pages
- Implementation forums and documentation
- Industry analyst reports (Gartner, Forrester)
- Pricing and ROI calculators
Learning signals come from:
- General news sites
- Social media platforms
- Industry newsletters and blogs
- Educational content platforms
- Broad topic Wikipedia pages
Building Custom Models That Actually Work
Here’s where most companies fail: they accept one-size-fits-all intent scoring from their vendor. But every industry, solution, and sales cycle requires different signal weightings.
The Lookback Modeling Approach
Smart B2B teams are borrowing from their successful deals to train their intent models:
1. Analyze your wins: Pull 50-100 closed-won accounts (or whatever you have available) from your CRM
2. Map their journey: Identify which content and messaging they engaged with before purchase
3. Employ the power of AI: Use a feature like Intentsify’s AutoDiscovery Tool, which analyzes your successful content to determine the best topics and keywords
4. Filter the noise: Messaging and positioning that doesn’t covert will be filtered out
The Managed Services Advantage
Let’s be honest: most marketing teams assign junior associates to manage intent platforms, despite the complexity requiring expert-level skills. It’s like asking an intern to perform surgery because they watched Grey’s Anatomy.
Working with managed services providers who build intent models across industries brings several advantages:
- Cross-industry insights from thousands of implementations
- Continuous optimization based on performance data
- Publisher relationship insights about source quality and reliability
Key Questions to Ask Your Intent Data Vendor
Before signing that next contract or renewal, get answers to these critical questions:
Transparency Questions:
- Can you provide specific publisher URLs for each intent signal?
- Do you weight keywords and topics by relevance?
Customization Questions:
- Can we build custom models for specific solutions and use cases?
Quality Questions:
- How do you filter out general learning behavior?
- What’s your methodology for identifying buying groups vs. individuals?
Support Questions:
- Do you provide managed services or just self-service tools?
- How often are models updated and optimized?
- What expertise do you have in our specific industry?
For additional questions to ask your intent data vendor, check out this blog post.
The Bottom Line: Quality Over Quantity
The promise of intent data remains compelling—identify prospects actively evaluating your solutions and focus resources where they matter most. But that promise only delivers when you can separate the 10% of accounts actually buying from the 90% just trying to stay current.
Stop accepting black-box scoring. Demand transparency. Build custom models. Focus on quality signals that correlate with closed deals, not quantity metrics that impress in QBRs.
Because at the end of the day, your sales team doesn’t need more leads. They need the right ones.
Ready to separate buying signals from background noise? Learn how Intentsify’s transparent, customizable intent data solution helps B2B marketing teams identify the 3-10% of accounts actually in-market for their solutions. See how our buying group intelligence works.
