What if salespeople could track how fast B2B buyers can go from flag off to finish line?
Some don’t even finish the race, others are just too darn slow. Then there are buyers that get stuck somewhere along the way and need some pushing. But today we’re looking at the select few that manage to zoom through to the finish line and onto the podium.
We’re talking about the fastest and the most furious of all B2B buyers — high purchase intent buyers.
But What is Purchase Intent?
The purchase intent or buying intent of an individual or organization can be defined as their likelihood to purchase a product or service. An entity’s buying intent can be inferred by examining and evaluating behavior such as webpage visits, media consumption, requests, collateral downloads, event participation, and form completions. Learn more about what is purchase intent and who’s buying it.
And What is High Purchase Intent?
High purchase intent, as the name suggests, is the increased readiness of a prospect to buy from you. Your sales reps need to be aware of how fast a B2B buyer will move through your sales funnel (or sales flywheel if you want to be modern about it) to sell better.
What is a High Intent Customer?
It’s common sense. A high intent customer is one that is highly likely to turn into a customer—one that has high purchase intent. The more likely a buyer is to make a purchase, the quicker your sales team is at closing deals. And of course, more deals = more revenue for your entire organization. Sounds simple? It is!
But the question is, how do you stick a speedometer onto a B2B buyer and find out if they’re exhibiting high purchase intent?
What is Purchase Intent Scoring?
Purchase intent scoring is nothing but the process of determining user behavior. This can mean a range of things from analyzing what they read, the kind of media they consume, the amount of time they spend on each, etc.
Every action they take that shows that they might be your ideal customer adds to their purchase intent score. Meanwhile, actions they take that show less interest in your product negatively affect their purchase intent score.
How is Purchase Intent Measured?
Measuring purchase intent is a complex task that involves evaluating a series of different inputs and establishing a correlation between them to create an intent score. Needless to say, it cannot be done by humans effectively. So, it is best handled by software like Slintel’s Chrome extension.
There are several ways you can measure purchase intent—analyzing readership on your newsletters, for example. Or tracking your visitor’s IP address. However, you cannot rely on a single input, say, technographic, or demographic insights. You need to look at the big picture.
To get a more detailed idea, let’s look at high purchase intent signals.
What are High Purchase Intent Signals?
The role of a purchase intent signal is to determine how fast a prospect moves from the unaware/aware stage to making a purchase decision.
If there’s one thing modern sales has going for it, it’s technology.
Technology has bestowed upon every sales rep the ability to find out whether a prospect is worth pursuing or not with just a quick search. Now, how cleverly each rep goes about doing this can drastically alter your sales productivity.
So, brain over brawn, let us skim through a basket of high purchase intent signals that will transform the way you sell.
1. Technographics
Targeting businesses based on the technology they use is possibly the most powerful buyer intent indicator out there. A prospective organization’s tech stacks can give you insights into how they spend their money on tech products.
For example, prospects that:
- Currently use products similar to yours
- Have used products similar to yours
- Use products that supplement or integrate with yours
may already be high up on the intent speedometer. Besides, who doesn’t want to nick their competitors’ customers whose contracts are up for renewal?
Slintel Technographics can help you find all of this and more.
2. Thematic Intent
The internet is a seemingly infinite resource of buyer intent data. In short, thematic intent condenses and interconnects relevant data points on the internet to semantically analyze what companies are talking about. This helps discern pain points and other intent signals, unearthing prospects that have an immediate need for your product.
3. Firmographics
An important indicator to look at when prioritizing a prospect is understanding how their organization currently fares. Few firmographic indicators that might help you identify high intent prospects include funding, merger and acquisition news, financials, and number of employees. Firmographics can help you pinpoint well-to-do companies within your ICP that are expanding rapidly, and as a result, open to exploring solutions such as yours.
4. Psychographic Intent
Apart from organizational intent data, you also want to know who’s door to knock on. Psychographic intent shows you which decision-makers have a need for your product, where their interests lie and what they want to hear from you.
Have they used tools like yours before? How much decision-making power do they have? Are they cat or dog people, so can you send them a funny picture of one in your outreach opener? The possibilities are endless.
5. Inbound Intent
Inbound intent is the intent data collected by your marketing automation and GTM orchestration tools when users visit your online real estate and interact with it. This includes content consumption, resource downloads, form fills and demo bookings to name a few. Inbound intent is the most straightforward and concrete form of direct intent.
How Do I Find High Purchase Intent Data?
Intent data is a spectrum. Some simple, some complex. Some free, some not so free. Here’s how you can determine some of the aforementioned buying intent signals.
1. Technographics
The problem with technographics is that it is impossible to find manually. You’ll need a tool like Slintel that crunches billions of data points using complex AI and ML algorithms in order to obtain concrete insights into technology usage.
As a consequence, technographic data remains proprietary to a very limited number of intent solutions like Slintel. But worry not, here’s how you can find the tech stack of any company for free in just a few simple steps.
2. Thematic Intent
You can manually search for keywords across the internet, social media, forums and groups that denote a pain point or need for a product like yours. Knowing where to search and what to search for is key if you want to get good at digging out thematic high purchase intent signals.
3. Firmographic Intent
A simple Google search will lead you to some rich firmographic insights that can instantaneously help you prospect a lot better. Most funding, merger and acquisition news, company financials, and other firmographic data can be found in just a few clicks.
4. Psychographic Data
Google and social media come to your rescue yet again. Whether it’s LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or any other page on the internet, there’s a lot of digging you can do to improve your interactions with the right decision-makers. Relevant psychographic intent data helps you prospect better, get desired responses, and close faster.
5. Inbound Intent
With marketing automation and GTM orchestration tools, all of your inbound intent data can easily be collected and automated.
A River of High Intent Prospects, Mountains of Revenue
How do you turn a stream into a river?
Simple, automate and optimize your sales processes for high intent prospects using a precision sales intelligence tool like Slintel.
Having recently joined hands with 6sense, we’ve combined a full-spectrum intent solution with unparalleled GTM orchestration to redefine what revenue numbers should look like. You’ve got to see it to believe it.
