What Is Intent Data?
Intent data captures digital signals that suggest a company or buyer is actively researching a topic relevant to your product. It's typically divided into two categories:
- First-party intent data — behavior tracked on your own properties (website visits, content downloads, email engagement, demo requests)
- Third-party intent data — behavior tracked across the broader web by data cooperatives and publishers (content consumption on review sites, industry publications, and forums)
Intent data providers aggregate these signals and deliver "surging" accounts — companies showing above-average research activity in topics relevant to your solution.
Benefits and Limitations
Intent data can be valuable for prioritizing accounts, but it has well-known limitations:
Benefits:
- Identifies accounts researching relevant topics before they fill out a form
- Helps focus outbound on companies with demonstrated interest
- Can trigger timely, automated outreach sequences
Limitations:
- Often anonymous and imprecise — you know a company is researching, but not which individual
- Signal decay is rapid — intent surges may reflect research that's already concluded
- High false positive rates — content consumption doesn't always equal buying intent
- Limited actionability — knowing someone read an article doesn't tell you what to say
How Salesmotion Helps
Salesmotion complements intent data with concrete buying signals — leadership changes, funding rounds, earnings insights, job postings, and strategic announcements — that are specific, attributable, and actionable. While intent data tells you someone at a company might be interested, Salesmotion tells you exactly what's happening at the account and generates outreach anchored to those real events.