How to Use Buyer Intent Data for Sales Development

If there's one thing that will help your sales goals get ahead, it's understanding the customer. It is vital to know why they're looking for a solution, such as your product or service, or how their current situation is holding them back.

Attached to this, knowing how your buyer is reacting and exploring their options is also essential. The more you know about how your buyer is thinking about and interacting with your offer, the better you can tailor your approach to them, qualify them, and close the sale.

This article is all about using this information to your advantage in sales, helping you meet your quota and find success.

Buyer intent data is any information you can glean from your users that falls under certain indicators to help qualify them as real prospects. This data can provide you with an outline of the target market you are aiming for and where they are in their purchasing process.

Armed with this information, you can then qualify them to find the most likely buyers and tailor your approach to match them at their current purchase stage.

Some of the many factors to consider when studying buyer intent data are:

• Frequency of visits to your webpage or website
• Spending more time on specific sections of your site
• Level of engagement with different types of content, such as marketing emails or social media posts
• Browsing activity as part of the buyer's journey.

Knowing about buyer intent data is one thing, but using it effectively to close more sales is another.

Seeing the data is not enough, you need to understand it and then learn how to use those insights to enhance your own strategy.

Here are a few tips on how:

Buyer intent signals are a prospect's interest or readiness to buy a product or service that solves a problem that they're looking to solve. Classic examples are downloading an ebook or case study, signing up for a demo or free trial, and attending a webinar - these are all clear examples of someone looking for more information to purchase in the not-so-distant future.

More covert buyer intent signals are spending time on your webpage, on your pricing page, reading reviews, or asking about your company as an option - all of these you can also leverage into a sale.

As a salesperson and as a company, you need to keep a lookout for these signals, as these will help you close a lot more, a lot faster, and a lot more efficiently.

In sales, you want to close as much as possible. One of the ways to do this is by identifying the hotter, most likely to close prospects as fast as you can.

Buyer intent data helps you identify these prospects to prioritize them and close them quicker, leaving you with time to work on nurturing and outreach strategies. Because you know what pages they've been looking at and what materials they've been interacting with, you have a fair idea of who looks to be most likely to close soon.

You can focus on those as a starting point to close them faster and use the buyer intent data to help you along as you continue qualifying the hotter prospects, before moving on to the ones that require more time.

There are different outreach strategies you can use. From cold calling to cold emailing to social selling - these are all strategies that have been proven to work. The best way to go about cold outreach of course is always to have multiple outreach channels and strategies at once.

But with buyer intent data, you can take this a step further. If a prospect is heavily interacting with your social media posts, that's where you want to aim your outreach. If they're responding to marketing emails or opening them and their attachments, focus on connecting with them via email. Use the language of a webpage they've been spending time on, or read up on a blog they've read several times before making your cold call.

With buyer intent data, you can customize your outreach strategy and personalize it so that you address their exact concerns and needs, getting closer to closing successfully.

Similar to the above, with buyer intent data, your lead nurturing can be a lot more tailored to your audience's interests. You see what marketing email gets the most attention, or what webpage or blog is generating the most visitors to your sites, and you can use this information in your subsequent emails, blogs, social media posts, and more.

You continue to grow your content with your audience in mind based on what they've shown interest in, allowing you to nurture them with direct examples and content of how you can help them.

By the time they're ready to purchase, you've already done a lot of the legwork required, making the sales process a lot faster.

Having their buyer intent data allows you to discover where you may be able to offer more to prospective buyers. If they're looking at one webpage in particular but you've seen them respond to a social media post about a different product, you can use this information to identify whether or not they'd be interested in purchasing both products.

So that when it comes time to have a product demo or discovery call, your AE can tailor their presentation to include this additional product or service you can offer. Or they can mention it during their call.

It's a great way to offer more without feeling like you're being pushy, as the intent data can confirm that they are indeed interested in other aspects of your product or other products.

It's important for any company to understand their customer journey and how this impacts their sales goals. With buyer intent data, it becomes a lot easier to analyze this journey and adapt it as needed.

Similar to a buyer's journey, a customer journey encapsulates every interaction your customer has with your company - whether by call, email, online, filling out a form, etc. - until they hit that purchase button.

The data you obtain as buyer intent can help you adjust aspects of this journey to make them more likely to buy. For example, a complicated interface when filling out a form or an unpleasant interaction with a chatbot can turn people off. These would be aspects that would be reflected in buyer intent data, allowing you to fix them.

Buyer intent data is instrumental in helping you measure and refine your sales and marketing campaigns. Knowing which links are being clicked on, which subject lines are working, which topics are drawing attention - all of these are numerical data points you can capture and study.

Based on that data, you can then shift your approach to outreach campaigns accordingly.

Maybe you're targeting the wrong titles, using the wrong vocabulary to truly describe your offer, and not focusing on the right pain points. These are all key pieces of information you can extract and study with buyer intent data.

Our first recommendation is G2 Intent. With this tool, your sales team can be provided with timely buyer insights to aim for the correct prospects.

By helping you narrow into which buyers are actually in-market at any given time, G2 Intent helps you tailor your sales and marketing campaigns to the right audience. This optimizes outreach and focuses your sales efforts on going after leads most likely to buy with relevant information.

Additionally, it is possible to seamlessly integrate it with a variety of tools such as CRMs, LinkedIn, Slack, and more, making it an easy addition to your tech stack.

Another tool we recommend is Cyance. It is a multilingual platform that helps you track intent across multiple channels with keywords.

You can find your buyers quickly and effectively, and see what they're saying they're looking for to tailor your approach accordingly.

The platform also helps you work on your own content linked to what you're finding in your keywords. And, as it is multilingual, it is particularly useful in the non-English speaking landscape for companies looking to expand.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a trusted companion for any salesperson worth your time. With new features being constantly added, Sales Navigator helps you narrow down your prospect search and find what they post about.

The personas option added earlier this year allowed users to create lists that would best fit their customer profile criteria and see them populated with leads constantly.

More recently, the buyer intent beta has been rolled out, to help salespeople further narrow down on those prospects.

Finally, Signals AI is a great tool to use to make the most of your webpage visitors.

It helps you recognize and track companies visiting your website to know what they're interested in, segments visitors into customer profiles to target them with the right approach, and helps you find the best leads within those companies to reach out to.

An all-in-one solution that is a must for anyone looking to learn more from their webpage visitors and further improve their buyer intent data!

Buyer intent data is information that any company looking to find success in sales needs to have access to and consider. It helps you make decisions when it comes to your approach, both in terms of content and outreach type, and it is instrumental in helping you find success.

Without buyer intent data, you're effectively flying blind. Even more so in the interconnected world of today when your competitors are making ample use of this same data to get ahead.

Take the time to collect this data, study and understand it if you want to find success - and once you're ready, reach out to us here at SalesPipe for the right SDRs to make use of that information and help you build your pipeline.