Finding in-market accounts and high-quality leads is a top priority for any B2B sales professional today. And data is the key to success. Unfortunately, most B2B data types, on their own, don’t provide a complete picture, making it difficult to fully leverage sales data.
Take firmographic data, for example. It tells you whether a prospect ticks all the boxes for your ideal customer profile but leaves you wondering if they’re actively trying to buy.
Of course, you could try to make sense of it by combining it with prospects’ activities on your website, but how would you know what they’re up to when they visit third-party sites for research, as they normally do?
That’s where intent data providers come in. They collect intent data signals from across the web to determine when target accounts are in buying mode.
In this article, we’ll review the 14 best intent data providers, discuss types of intent data, and give practical examples of how sales teams use it.
What Is Intent Data?
Buyer intent data indicates when companies are actively looking to purchase a specific solution.
Through their digital footprints, such as pages visited, content consumed, keywords used, social media interactions, etc., buyers leave clues behind on what they’re up to. These footprints are what intent data providers gather and turn into actionable insights.
If you can lay your hands on those customer journey insights, more deals will be yours to close.
However, intent data alone is hardly useful since someone’s willingness to buy doesn’t equal their ability to do so. This is why most B2B data providers pair it with other types of data, such as firmographic and technographic data, to get you the full picture.
Intent data also comes in various types; each one has its own merits as well as limitations. Below are the three types of intent data:
- First-party intent data: First-party intent data originates from your own resources, such as your website, social media pages, subscription campaigns, and CRM. This tracks all lead's interactions with your brand in order to understand their intent.
- Second-party intent data: Second-party intent data is obtained from other businesses that sell their own first-party intent data to other organizations. This can come from independent publishers or review sites like G2 and TrustRadius.
- Third-party intent data: This is the type of data obtained from third-party data vendors, who collect behavioral data from numerous data sources across the web, clean it, aggregate it, and organize it to provide you with a comprehensive perspective of your target accounts' interests.
How Sales Teams Use Intent Data
Before we get into the core of this piece, we thought you’d like to see some examples of how sales teams use intent data in real life. Correct?
Here are four real-life use cases for intent data:
- Use an account-based marketing strategy (ABM): As a sales professional, you already know the power of ABM in closing best-fit accounts. With the wealth of insights offered by intent data, you can quickly identify and go after the right fit accounts when they have a purchase intent. This is much better than a wild goose chase after your ICPs that aren’t in buying mode.
- Convert leads faster: Intent data is highly comprehensive and will help you take note of minor signals that can be a telltale sign of a lead’s readiness for purchase. When you see the B2B buyer journey and map their actions to the right stage in your sales pipeline, you can move leads faster down the sales funnel.
- Minimize churn rates: The footprint of a customer on the Internet can be a strong indicator of churn. Sometimes, the difference between customer churning and prevention is knowing early when their behavioral signals change.
- Upsell and cross-sell: When a customer begins to do new searches online, makes changes in their content consumption, or focuses on a specific tool, this might be an indicator that they need additional features or products. Intent data will ensure such opportunities don’t slip out of your hands.
14 Best B2B Intent Data Providers for Sales Teams To Close More Deals 🚀
Here comes the part you’ve been waiting for: a review of the 14 best intent data tools on the web today.
Let’s get into it.
1. Segment
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If you’d like to have all your customer data in one place, cleaned, organized, and ready for use, Segment can help you. It collects customer data from different touchpoints, including social media signals, email CTRs, your website, and so on.
Then it analyzes all the data gathered to determine an account’s propensity to make a purchase or not. And by tagging them based on what they’re likely to do next, it empowers you to take the right action, whether that’s to make sales offers immediately or to nurture them.
Best for: Engineering, marketing, and product teams
Free trial: No
Price: Only available upon request
2. Klarity by Demand Science
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Thinking about a data-backed B2B prospecting tool? Demand Science has over 88,000,000 contact records in its dataset from over 1.5 million companies across the globe.
Needless to say, this covers different industries that you can get information on. What I like most is its Chrome extension, which lets you pull information about a LinkedIn profile from their database when you’re browsing on LinkedIn.
You can also drill down into those millions of contacts to find your ideal customers. On top of that, it provides information on your prospect’s current tech stack so that you can either conduct a competitor displacement campaign or make further recommendations.
Best for: Enterprise sales teams
Free trial: No
Price: Only available upon request
3. Sonar
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Sonar is a sales intelligence tool that lets you monitor your market segment in real time so you'll know when they are in the market for your product.
As you know, hounding leads to buy is not as effective as seizing the right opportunity when it comes. With the kind of intent signals Sonar provides, you can jump on sales opportunities as soon as they present themselves.
What’s more, its integration with Close allows you to view the signals as notes and tasks in your CRM.
Best for: Startup and SMB teams
Free trial: No
Price: Only available upon request
4. 6Sense
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6Sense helps you make sense of the Internet’s dark funnel. If you work in B2B sales or marketing, you’re probably familiar with the "dark funnel."
To be clear, the "dark funnel" refers to those channels your prospects use for research but you can’t track, e.g., third-party sites, Slack communities, etc.
Instead of sitting back and fantasizing about what you could do only if you knew what they were doing on some channels, you could send 6Sense to go there and gather intelligence for you. That way, you’ll get more comprehensive insights into your prospects’ pain points and needs.
Best for: B2B companies using an ABM strategy
Free trial: No
Price: Only available upon request
5. Lusha
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Lusha is a B2B data intent provider for prospecting and buyer intelligence gathering. It has a robust database that hosts the contact information of thousands of companies and decision-makers.
You can use its multidimensional filter to look up prospects across different industries and verticals. It also offers up-to-date information on each contact, including their role, recent activities, or even if they’ve recently left the company.
Combining all these with the data it provides on a prospect’s past searches gives you a 360-degree perspective of what they’re looking for and how to present your offer effectively.
Best for: Sales outreach teams
Free trial: Yes
Price: Pricing plans start at $29 per month per user, billed annually
6. Bombora
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What would you do if you knew which business was searching for what topic? If you’re like most of us, you’d use that information to tailor your content to them. Right?
Well, Bombora does some heavy lifting for you in this area. Its Company Surge Analytics helps you find businesses that are looking for what you sell and understand their motivations so that you can target them with the most appropriate marketing materials.
It also looks at the number of people researching it from an organization and the intensity of their research. This empowers you to personalize your outreach and make it timely.
Best for: Sales teams, B2B marketing agencies, and publishers
Free trial: No
Price: Only available upon request
7. ZoomInfo
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ZoomInfo is a business intelligence company that provides data for B2B businesses across different verticals. It offers a RevOps system that eliminates silos and aligns departments, which include SalesOS, MarketingOS, TalentOS, and OperationsOS.
For B2B sales teams in particular, you can browse through its database to find thousands of professional profiles, direct contacts, and insights into the entire buying committee. This significantly cuts down on the amount of time you spend looking for contacts.
It also alerts you to the roles of each individual in the company, whether they’ve recently changed roles or even their job.
What’s more, ZoomInfo also provides data on advanced firmographics, which help you find your addressable market, narrow down to the best fit, and reach the right prospects in a timely manner.
Best for: Enterprise sales teams
Free trial: Yes
Price: Only available upon request
8. UpLead
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UpLead is a B2B prospecting tool that focuses on data accuracy. This is the appropriate solution if you're looking for an intent data provider that finds contacts and firms that fit your ICP, verifies their email addresses in real-time, tells you what technology they use, and helps you identify in-market customers.
My favorite UpLead feature is the email verification tool, which shows you whether an email is valid or not at the time of download or export.
Best for: Small sales development teams
Free trial: Yes
Price: Pricing starts at $79 per month, billed annually
9. Demandbase
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Demandbase is a sales intelligence platform focused on getting you to take action when your prospects need your service the most. How, you ask?
Assume your target accounts are companies launching a new product. Demandbase collects information about them regularly and notifies you when companies launch something new.
It not only provides contact and intent data, but it also lets you set sales triggers that alert you when a target account makes relevant moves. This raises your response and close rates tremendously.
Best for: GTM, lead generation, and sales development teams
Free trial: No
Price: Only available upon request
10. Leadfeeder
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From anonymous visits to contacts, Leadfeeder helps you uncover the identity of anonymous website visitors (who didn’t leave their contact details), tells you about their online behavior, and qualifies them.
It also offers Leadfeeder Contact, a feature that helps you find the decision makers' phone numbers, email addresses, and LinkedIn profiles, empowering you to pitch them directly. This saves you loads of money and time you’d otherwise spend searching for leads’ contacts.
Best for: SMBs who need fast and actionable intent data
Free trial: Yes
Price: Free plan is available, or paid plan starts at $199 per month, paid annually
11. LeadOnion
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LeadOnion is an AI-assisted platform to find your total addressable market in minutes. It provides account intent and contact data to assist you in segmenting and prioritizing accounts based on how likely they are to convert.
One interesting feature is you can optimize LeadOnion so it finds accounts similar to your past wins. The advantages of this cannot be overstated--imagine how easy it would be to sell to potential leads when they’re similar to your existing customers.
You’re already familiar with their pain points, needs, and buyer behaviors, which will serve you well when dealing with new accounts.
Best for: Sales teams interested in using AI
Free trial: No
Price: Only available upon request
12. Leadspace
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Leadspace unifies first-party data with third-party data to create detailed buyer profiles and accurate account scoring.
The Graph, its hero feature, collects data on over 70 million global companies, 240+ buying centers, and over 280 million individual buyers and unifies this into a B2B data graph to help you map leads to accounts and buying centers.
But wait, there's more: it also provides real-time intent data on each account to isolate in-market accounts and target them with your marketing content.
Best for: Enterprise sales, marketing, and merger and acquisition teams
Free trial: No
Price: Only available upon request
13. SalesIntel
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SalesIntel is a B2B data platform that provides intel on your ideal customer profile. It offers firmographic, technographic, intent, and contact data to make your targeting precise.
What makes SalesIntel's data so awesome is its dedicated human verifiers who review contacts every 90 days to confirm they’re still active. They also use that opportunity to confirm the company’s tech stack, location, and role updates.
Best for: SDRs, BDRs, sales, and marketing teams
Free trial: No
Price: Only available upon request
14. DiscoverOrg
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DiscoverOrg by ZoomInfo is a B2B data intent provider for sales teams using account-based marketing (ABM). It allows you to define lead criteria, identify key decision marketers, and prioritize accounts with a higher propensity to purchase.
Best for: Sales, marketing, recruiting, and go-to-market teams
Free trial: Yes
Price: Only available upon request
Want to Boost Your Conversion Rates? You Need Intent Data
Intent data is an invaluable asset for B2B sales teams, offering profound insights into prospects' online behavior, including search history, content consumption, and engagement with marketing campaigns.
Using intent data helps you identify which prospects are actively researching your products so you can prioritize outreach programs. Partnering with the best intent data providers will help your team uncover prospects' interests and pain points, tailor your sales pitches and deliver highly personalized messaging. This personalized approach increases your chances of conversion and helps your sales reps close more deals.
Need an all-in-one CRM to centralize all your sales efforts and intent data? Sign up for a 14-day free trial of Close.
