The global sales intelligence market is huge. In fact, it is expected to reach $3.8 billion by 2025. The popularity of sales intelligence platforms doesn’t come as a surprise as they’re doing an important job – helping businesses make sense of internal and external data with the goal of increasing sales and improving sales and marketing processes.
One of their essential tasks is identifying buying intent. This includes collecting data about users’ content consumption and observed buying behavior to provide insights into their potential intention to purchase certain products or services.
This data is collected from various digital sources, largely cookies, monitoring them for key intent search terms which can identify when a prospect is actively looking to purchase your (or similar) products or solutions. This allows you to respond in an informed and timely manner through your marketing campaign.
Difficulties with collecting buying intent data
That said, identifying buying intent has always been one of the pain points in this industry – at least until now. With the increase in AI-powered sales intelligence systems and use of the large amount of data available today, we’re finally seeing some serious improvement in this area, primarily in terms of predictive analysis of most interesting accounts and opportunities, enabling indeed identifying buying intent – although we’re still a long way from getting there.
Since local data has a critical role in sales intelligence, another major challenge in this area is presented by data privacy legislation such as GDPR. Such legislation makes certain markets (like Europe) difficult for drawing out the necessary information for identifying buying intent, as customer data is subject to the privacy regulations within GDPR. Businesses now have to seek consumers’ consent to collect this data which means they have to make their campaigns more appealing and relevant to the target audience to give that consent. This requires reconsidering their approach – switching to predictive analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to shape customer profiles and more personalized campaigns.
Buying intent data tools
Any good buying intent data tool included in a sales intelligence platform should be able to:
- Analyze in detail online research of buyer journeys to identify buying intent signals,
- Deliver data in a timely manner which would allow businesses to directly market to prospects and customers with active buying intent,
- Create data-enriched customer profiles to efficiently segment audiences and personalize campaigns.
There are several sales intelligence platforms that stand out in the above-mentioned criteria, including:
1. DiscoverOrg
DiscoverOrg implements advances in its proprietary technology and human-in-the-loop data sourcing and validation process to deliver large quantities of automatically generated data with high level of accuracy. Although its data sets aren’t as massive as some other vendors’ and its pricing model can get expensive with the increasing number of key buyer personas, marketers will appreciate its strong functionality for sales use cases, information about buying centers, projects, budgets, as well as organization charts.
2. Leaspace
Leveraging advanced AI and machine learning (ML) algorithms, Leadspace can integrate data from proprietary, first-party sources to match leads to accounts, prioritize and segment unique buying personas, as well as activate intent data through models that identify accounts and leads which to target. Offering strong capabilities for buying intent identification and insights, it can also provide look-alike modeling for businesses focusing on new markets. Despite its account data being stronger than contact data, the platform is perfect for businesses that need a data platform with advanced data integration and management capabilities.
3. Clearbit
A plug-and-play marketing data engine for your every customer interaction, Clearbit assists its clients in understanding their customer base on a higher level, identifying their potential customers, and personalizing each marketing and sales interaction. It relies on its ML algorithms and proprietary real-time lookups to provide fresh and accurate data, upon which businesses can promptly act with their marketing campaigns. Clearbit performs better than some of its competition in terms of faster reaching ROI, lower price, although it may be slightly lagging behind in support.
4. InsideView
Not only does InsideView provide basic company and person data, but it also collates news mentions and companies’ social media feeds. It provides a comprehensive suite of tools for sales, marketing, and data management. Although it lacks digital device identification data, the platform makes up for it by delivering comprehensive monitoring and analytics functionality, as well as differentiated capabilities for account selection.
5. Vainu
One of Europe’s fastest-growing SaaS companies, Vainu is a sales intelligence platform helping its clients use real-time, high-quality company data in their customer interactions. The company collects and groups thousands of intent signals on a daily basis, providing its clients with daily and weekly alerts on signals that can be used to impact decision-making, launch new initiatives and products, and more. Compared to some other platforms, Vainu is reportedly cheaper and faster in reaching ROI.
6. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn is a popular platform among salespersons and marketers but rarely do they fully utilize all it has to offer. Namely, the platform’s paid premium service includes Sales Navigator, a tool that allows the creation of prospect lists on the basis of decision-makers’ responsibilities and job titles. It also enables its users to monitor relevant discussions, allowing them to discover more meaningful ways to engage with new and existing contacts. This tool is cheaper than some and fast to reach ROI, but there’s room for improvement in terms of support and ease of use.
How to choose a good sales intelligence platform for identifying buying intent?
When deciding on a good sales intelligence platform with a focus on identifying buying intent, make sure to ask for data on a specific case when viewing demos of a system (for example, based on a few example accounts and buyer personas). After all, it’s all fine and dandy when you look at the general demos, but it all boils down to whether the platform has the specific kind of data you need for your company, in your niche, on the level of your decision-makers, and so on.
Sales intelligence is part of Comarketers all-inclusive, managed growth marketing program. This program is backed by a scalable marketing technology stack and provides you with your very own team of growth marketers to facilitate a customer-centric growth process so you don’t have to invest in sales intelligence platforms yourself yet.
The service includes assembling a specialized growth marketing team consisting of a dedicated growth marketing manager backed by at least four specialists, dedicated to strategizing and executing your customized growth marketing program.
Sead Fadilpasic
Sead is a freelance journalist with more than a decade of experience writing news, bylines, whitepapers, blogs, and ebooks. He focuses most of his efforts on new technologies and content marketing. Based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina.