If you’ve spent any time evaluating intent data solutions lately, you’ve probably noticed the market feels crowded. ABM platforms promise comprehensive revenue orchestration. Data providers offer large B2B contact databases. Walled garden providers tout their proprietary network of members. Media activation specialists focus on running demand generation programs for their clients.
And somewhere in all of this, you’re supposed to figure out which solution actually gives you the intent data you need to identify and engage in-market buying groups, while driving the rest of your target accounts down the funnel.
Here’s what makes this confusing: many of these vendors do provide value. The challenge is that most treat intent data as just one capability among many, rather than their core focus. And as it turns out, that difference matters quite a bit when you’re trying to understand which accounts to nurture, which ones sales should prioritize, and which messages will resonate with each persona in the buying group.
How Intent Data Has Evolved (And Why That Matters)
Intent data has come a long way over the past decade. What started as simple topic-based tracking has transformed into sophisticated, automated intelligence that can tell you more than just which accounts are in-market. It can also tell you which specific personas within buying groups are actively researching the solutions you offer and which intent signals have the greatest compatibility with your products and offerings.
The problem? Many vendors are still working with that older playbook—generic, account-level signals that treat all research activity the same, regardless of whether it’s relevant to what you sell.
Think about it this way: if someone at your target account spends time researching “marketing automation,” does that mean they’re interested in your specific solution? Maybe. Or maybe they’re exploring a completely different use case that has nothing to do with what you offer. Generic intent signals can’t tell the difference.
This one-size-fits-all approach might have been acceptable years ago when intent data was still new. But today’s B2B buyers research in far more sophisticated ways, and your intent data needs to keep up.
Breaking Down the Intent Data Landscape
To make sense of all this, it helps to understand how different types of vendors approach intent data. Let’s walk through what each category does well, and where they tend to fall short.
ABM Platforms: More Orchestration, Less Intelligence
ABM platforms are really good at what they’re designed to do: orchestrate account-based strategies across multiple channels. If you need to coordinate marketing and sales efforts around target accounts, these platforms offer powerful capabilities.
But here’s the thing—their focus is deliberately broad. They’re trying to handle revenue orchestration, advertising coordination, content personalization, predictive analytics, and a dozen other functions. Intent data becomes one feature among many, not the foundation everything else is built on.
What does that mean for you? These platforms can require significant resources to implement and manage. You’re looking at lengthy onboarding processes, steep learning curves, and complex interfaces that need dedicated team attention. And while they can identify intent signals, those signals often lack the breadth and depth you need to pinpoint behaviors most relevant to your solutions.
That doesn’t make ABM platforms bad. They’re just optimized for coordination, not intent intelligence. Many teams find they need to layer in specialized solutions to get the most granular, comprehensive, and actionable insights they’re seeking. This can be costly on top of an already expensive platform or analytics fee.
Data Providers: Contacts Are the Priority, Intent Is Secondary
Data providers have spent years building extensive B2B contact databases and company intelligence for enrichment use cases. Their core strength is helping you enhance buyer profiles across your target accounts.
The intent capabilities many of them now offer? Those feel more like add-on afterthoughts than core competencies. You’ll typically see generic signals that aren’t customized to your unique business and GTM motions. Signal volume is low, limiting the comprehensiveness and accuracy of your insights.
And here’s something that matters more than you might think: their intent models are usually built manually rather than using AI, which means you could miss important topics and keywords that are critical for your company to track. They also get equally weighted regardless of whether they’re actually relevant to your business.
Don’t get us wrong—if you need high volumes of contact data, these providers absolutely serve an important purpose. But when it comes to understanding the nuanced behavior and research patterns of your target buying groups, their intent capabilities often can’t match what specialists deliver.
Walled Gardens: Niche Audiences, Limited Coverage
Walled garden solutions track intent exclusively within their owned web properties. The upside? The signals you get from engaged audiences consuming content on those sites can be really high quality and specific to your unique audience.
The obvious downside is that you’re only seeing research that happens within their ecosystem. Without access to a more diverse range of intent sources, you won’t see the majority of your audience’s online research activities, leading to critical missed opportunities.
So, while walled gardens can be valuable for reaching specific audiences, they’re not giving you the complete picture of what your target accounts are researching across the broader digital landscape.
Media Activation Providers: Strong Execution, Weak Intelligence
Media activation solutions are built to execute demand generation campaigns effectively. They know how to run advertising and lead generation programs across various channels.
But this is commonly done with outdated technology, resulting in slow, manual workflows. Their intent data and media activation capabilities also tend to operate in silos. Programmatic advertising and content syndication programs often don’t talk to each other, which can create inconsistent buyer experiences. More importantly, these solutions typically don’t optimize campaigns based on evolving intent signals. They’re relying on CRM and MAP data instead or worse, running campaigns using static lists.
What that means in practice: your campaigns don’t adapt to reflect where your target accounts are in their research journey or what interests, pain points, solution categories, and competitors they’re currently researching.
And like the other types of vendors, because their intent data is one-size-fits-all, you won’t get the level of precision needed to understand when buying groups are primed for outreach and how to engage with each role based on their unique signals.
If you’re just looking to execute tactical campaigns, these vendors can absolutely help. But without dynamic, intent-powered optimization, you’re missing opportunities to engage buyers with the right content at the right stage.
What Specialization Actually Gets You
At Intentsify, intent data isn’t just one feature in our platform—it’s our foundation. Everything we’ve built, from our AI-powered modeling to our identity graph to our activation solutions, stems from that core expertise. That focus has allowed us to invest deeply in solving the complex challenges that multi-purpose platforms treat as secondary concerns.
Here’s what that specialization looks like in practice:
Custom Intent Models Tailored to Your Business
Instead of monitoring generic topics that get equally weighted regardless of relevance, we use AI to automatically customize intent models to your unique solutions. The signals you receive are weighted and calibrated specifically for your offerings, use cases, and audiences.
We’re talking 90,000+ topics (that’s dramatically more than the 16,000 topics a leading intent data provider offers) and unlimited keywords for our AI models to utilize. And if you need to add new topics? We can do that in as quickly as 48 hours.
This solution-level modeling makes a huge difference. When you see a surge in intent signals, it’s based on research that genuinely aligns with your offerings, not generic category-level signals that could apply to any vendor in your space.
Signal Volume That Actually Captures the Full Picture
We deliver 1.1 trillion monthly intent signals drawn from eight diverse data sources, providing you with the most complete view of online research behavior. This includes content consumption, advertising impressions, social media engagement, and everything in between.
Why does volume matter so much? Because B2B buyers don’t research in just one place. They explore multiple websites, consume diverse content types, and engage across numerous platforms. When your signal volume is limited, you’re making decisions based on incomplete information. You might be missing the critical buying signals that could make the difference between engaging an account at exactly the right moment or watching them slip away because you were a few steps behind the competition.
Our multiple intent sources also give you something really valuable: transparency and validation. When signals align across different sources, you can feel confident in the intelligence. When they diverge, you gain a nuanced understanding of how different buying group members are researching different aspects of your solution. Plus, Intentsify is the only intent data solution that lets you in on the exact source of research activities, allowing you to act on each signal with confidence.
Intentsify’s Identity Graph: The Engine That Powers Buying Group Activation
The Forrester Wave™: B2B Intent Data Providers Q1 2025 report called the introduction of Intentsify’s identity graph one of “the most significant innovations in the space over the past two years.”
Here’s what makes it powerful: It’s the industry’s largest B2B identity graph, converging trillions of data points to deliver comprehensive identity resolution and buying group intelligence.
This powerful data ecosystem lets you move beyond vague account-level insights to understand exactly who in the buying group is researching and what they care most about. It connects signals to specific job functions and job levels, delivering expanded intent signal coverage at the persona and device level.
That means you can:
- Identify which personas are actively engaged in research for each target account
- Understand the specific topics and keywords that matter to each buying group role
- Analyze where different personas are in their buying research journey
- Prioritize outreach based on buying group engagement patterns, not just account-level activity spikes
And because Intentsify’s identity graph powers all aspects of our intelligence and activation solutions, this persona-level intelligence flows seamlessly into your campaigns, ensuring your advertising and lead generation programs are targeting the right people with the right messages at the right time.
Intentsify Works with Your Existing Stack
Intensify was designed to integrate with existing platforms rather than compete with them.
Already using an ABM platform for orchestration? Our intent intelligence makes it better. Using other intent data providers? We can combine their signals with ours. Running media activation programs for demand generation? We can power those with better audience targeting.
You don’t need to rip and replace your stack. By integrating more specialized intent intelligence with your existing tools, you’ll get the data accuracy and precision you need without the added work.
Our fully managed service model means our team handles the heavy lifting. You get optional platform access rather than being forced into mandatory logins and lengthy subscriptions. We also offer complimentary target account analysis and optimization to proactively identify opportunities within your ideal customer profile, using AI and our team’s expertise to uncover accounts and engagement opportunities you might be missing.
Intentsify’s intent-activated solutions—from lead generation to programmatic advertising—are seamlessly integrated and powered by the same unified data set. No more static targeting or siloed approaches where your advertising team and your content syndication team are working from completely different intelligence.
Ready to See What Specialized Intent Data Can Do?
Stop settling for intent data that gets treated as just another platform feature. See how B2B teams are using AI-powered, solution-specific intent intelligence to identify high-intent buying groups, create precision campaigns, and accelerate their path to revenue.
Why B2B Teams Choose Intentsify:
- Custom AI-powered intent modeling tailored to your specific solutions, not generic category signals
- 1.1 trillion monthly intent signals from seven diverse sources for comprehensive coverage
- Persona-level intelligence via the Orbit identity graph to engage entire buying groups effectively
- Fully managed service with complimentary target account optimization and no platform fees
- Intent-activated campaigns that seamlessly integrate lead generation and advertising solutions
Learn more about Intentsify and how we stack up against the competition.
