Intent data helps B2B sales and marketing professionals understand who within their target audience are showing behaviour that suggests an interest in a particular area or topic. This may include people researching or interested to buy and everything in between. But how do you find intent data?

Intent Data can be sourced from intent data platforms, like Radiate B2B, web analytics tools, hiring, community review websites, event attendance, social media monitoring, surveys, customer feedback, and more.

At its simplest the dark funnel is just word of mouth – where people share their knowledge, experiences or recommendations about a product or service with others.

It can be both positive and negative and is often invisible to tracking by sales and marketing teams. Yet sales opportunities that enter the pipeline because of word of mouth tend to close more often and faster. This is not surprising as conversations start on a stronger footing due to the recommendation coming from a trusted source.

So why the rise of a new term?

Intent data is now a critical tool in the armoury for sales teams when generating leads. All business-to-business (B2B) companies are constantly seeking new ways to generate high-quality leads and drive revenue growth. Intent data does exactly this.

At any particular time, 5% of companies are in market and buying. Identifying companies who are in market in normal times is a challenge. But in uncertain economic times, generating leads becomes even harder.

Did you know you can boost your meeting generate by 30% by combining intent data with social selling?

Last week, I sat down with Alex Abbott, founder of Supero who has spent the past 12 months combining intent data with social selling.

We discussed how to approach social selling – and the 3 pillars which make social selling successful and how he combined intent data to know who to focus on and tweak messaging.