In a world inundated with data and the solutions that promise you the ability to achieve a competitive edge, we’re often left thinking: “How?”
Just how do businesses with access to so much rich information actually use it to their individual advantage? Selling points and promises aside, without fully understanding their prospects, companies can amass all the data in the world without actually using it to its full potential.
Imagine, however, that on top of having access to a universe of sales and marketing data, you could sift through it all quickly to zero in on just those in-market prospects on the hunt for a solution like yours — actively doing more research online for a problem that you can solve. That’d be something.
In this article, we walk you through how ZoomInfo Intent can give you the superpower of foresight when it comes to your prospects’ intent to buy, as well as help you identify the right customers and get ahead of your competition.
The Basics: What Exactly is ZoomInfo Intent?
Let’s begin with a very basic definition: Intent data shows which accounts and prospects are actively researching solutions on third-party sites. When research on a particular topic of interest is higher than usual, the account spikes on those topics.
Over the last three years, intent data has emerged as the fastest growing data category according to TOPO’s 2020 Intent Data Market Guide. Its growth is changing how teams prioritize their time and gather behavioral signals about prospects and accounts.
We’ll dive into more details shortly, but here’s a quick overview video:
Before engaging with a sales team as they’re making a purchase decision, your prospects embark on the digital journey of research and vendor assessment to narrow down their options. They visit websites and read articles and product reviews — you know the deal — and it’s this type of online activity that’s trackable and at the heart of what makes Intent possible.
Intent identifies the companies doing an above-average amount of research on topics relevant to your business, looking for a solution like yours to address their pain points. If you’re an information security vendor, for instance, you can track what companies are doing more research on cybersecurity or fraud prevention.
With Streaming Intent (more on this later), you can get real-time signals every 10 minutes as soon as a company does more research on a topic you care about. From there, you can then trigger go-to-market activities based on the signals that matter most to your business with ZoomInfo Workflows.
Erwin van der Vlist, CEO and founder of Speakap, experienced the power of Streaming Intent firsthand:
“We recently closed three opportunities in half the time of our typical sales cycle. Why? Because we got in front of interested buyers before our competitors could. We captured their attention and delivered value at exactly the right time. Access to ZoomInfo Streaming Intent is like having a superpower.”
In a nutshell, Intent allows you to better enable your go-to-market teams to connect and engage with key prospects at the very start of their purchasing venture — all while your competition sits on the sidelines. Pretty cool, right?
The Intent Data Difference: How it Works
For you to see success with buyer intent data, you’ll need a broad range of signals that indicates whether a company is actually in-market for your solution — so you can reach out at the right time. ZoomInfo tracks web browsing activity for a breadth of diverse content.
Another important factor involves looking at spikes in research that matters to your business. ZoomInfo ingests all the keywords on a particular webpage to understand if there’s a solid connection between the keywords and the topics you choose to track. Through that, ZoomInfo validates that the content your prospects are researching is actually about the topic that’s relevant to your business. You can choose from our growing list of 4,000 topics.
ZoomInfo maps this activity from IP addresses to a specific company, even while folks work remotely. We then evaluate whether a company is doing more research over the past seven days. Once it hits an above-average amount, an Intent signal shows in the ZoomInfo platform for a company spiking on that topic. You can get these signals weekly, daily, or as soon as companies start to do more research in real time, so you can connect with prospects before your competition.
Finally, with the rise of privacy regulations and cookies being phased out to better safeguard user information, your intent data solution needs to work despite these changes. Because ZoomInfo Intent doesn’t rely on cookies, you have a future-proof way to discover accounts searching for a solution like yours while helping you meet privacy requirements in a cookieless future.
A Recap: The Benefits of Intent in a Nutshell
- Discover prospects and accounts researching problems you can solve: Identify prospects and customers doing an above-average amount of research on topics vital to your business, prioritize your outreach, and engage in relevant conversations earlier in the buying journey.
- Access the right, most timely, and accurate behavioral signals: Get a high volume of quality signals to identify companies that are in-market for your solution.
- Gain a competitive edge: With Streaming Intent, engage prospects in relevant conversations right at the start of that buying journey.
- Get more targeted: With Custom Intent, customize your topics to fit your business.
Interested in learning more about Intent? We’ve got you covered with this list of resources: