5 Critical Questions To Ask When Evaluating B2B Intent Data Providers
Intent data is a valuable tool for prioritizing and finding prospects already in the market for your product or service. A prospect with high purchase intent is likely to move through the sales process quickly. By reaching out to them, you can start a conversation before your competitors would even know about the prospect.
But, there are a wide number of intent data providers. Each one can initially appear like they’re offering the same thing: intent data. There are critical questions you can ask them to better understand each vendor before you move forward with a purchase. Let’s go over them.
1. How Actionable is Your Intent Data?
When you look into purchasing intent data, you can receive it from three different sources.
Internet service providers directly
Advertising companies that have gathered sales data
Aggregator companies that bundle as much intent data together from different sources
Depending on where you’re acquiring the information, you may receive a massive amount of web traffic data, but only a portion of it is likely to be relevant to you. Knowing the ISP address of everyone who has searched for your site will give you an overwhelming amount of information to comb through for actual prospects.
Instead, you’ll want to make sure the intent data will be processed in a way that will be directly relevant to taking action. You’ll want a list of companies in the market sending a wide range of intent signals (searches, research reading, and visits to product sites) that can be boiled down to a company score to help you know who you should target.
2. How Will the Intent Data be Integrated into Your Sales Process?
This is a question for both you and a potential provider to figure out. After you get the intent data, how will the data be integrated into your sales process?
You have to think through the technical aspects (how will get into your CRM, how will your team access it, and how often will it be refreshed?) and the sales reps' process (how should sales reps divide up the list, what precedent should high intent prospects take over other leads, how should sales reps fully qualify leads?).
Ideally, you’ll want your intent data bundled with other types of data. Your intent data provider should also provide or integrate with firmographic, technographic, and contact data. Your sales team can then find leads in the market, pre-qualify based on company data, and start outreach with available contact data.
3. How is the Intent Data Collected?
The first two questions cover the big issue of the intent data increasing sales for you. Next is making sure you’re getting the best data available. You’ll want data from a wide variety of sources to increase intent accuracy. You’ll also want to make sure the web traffic is correlated to companies actually being in the market. Have your potential provider walk you through as much of their process as they can.
Next, you’ll need to guarantee the data is compliant with GDPR guidelines. Intent data should be anonymous and tracked by session or account and then tied to different companies. Non-anonymized Intent data on the individual level will cause legal problems down the road.
4. How is the Data Updated?
Similar to how you want data to be accurate across a range of sources, you also want intent data to be fresh. Telling me someone wanted to buy my product last year doesn’t help me much. Learn what the process for updating the data and keeping it clean and usable is. How much verification is being done, and is it by hand or by machine? How does the provider handle so many companies working remotely now?
Make sure you’ll have a process for high-intent leads to be quickly passed from your provider to your sales team. The whole point of intent data is to know who is currently shopping around. Have a process for getting new leads right away.
5. Can You Test the Data?
Finally, before purchasing you should be able to do your own test of the data. Testing the data is an industry-standard. If a provider is unwilling to provide data samples for you then you’ll want to consider other options.
As part of your data testing, you’ll also want full clarity on their pricing structure, tiers, and flexibility. Make sure both parties are clear on the cost for each portion of data. Some providers limit by data type while others section data by industry. The last thing you want is to close a deal and realize you didn’t buy what you were expecting or that you needed a lot less than what you bought.