Purchase intention: What is it and how can I benefit from it?

5 minutes read

September 23, 2023

Kevin Adoul – GTM Lead at BuyingIntent

Definition

Purchase intentions are signals, online or offline, that signify that an individual or a company is or will become in a purchasing situation. They can occur on a website, in textual content, videos, podcasts, professional social networks, company legal databases, etc.

These signals exist in both B2B and B2C. We will deal here only with B2B signals, whose scraping, aggregation and analysis from public sources are legal.

Fields of application

There are many possible uses for purchase signals, and we’ll divide them here into two main categories specific to B2B:

Business development
Recruitment

These 2 fields of application have public data sources and high demand. They help improve the quality of contacts made by sales teams and recruiters.

Example of intent data in recruitment

For example, a recruitment agency looking for candidates for an IT Consultant position with 2 years’ seniority will target profiles with Linkedin Recruiter and make contact with candidates either on a personalized, one-to-one basis, or automatically.

The probability of a profile being available is low, which leads to candidate fatigue, and the major pitfall of this strategy lies in its temporality: firms carry out their sourcing only once, and not continuously.

💡 Intent data can be used to set up a continuous alert for the entire recruitment period, maximizing your chances of attracting the best profiles.

Example of intent data for sales development

A second example, this time for sales teams: a company marketing a logistics solution for e-retailers would be interested in monitoring a list of e-retailers and their customer reviews.

In this way, they could be alerted every time a review mentions the merchant’s lengthy delivery times, and thus address it with a strong temporality and strong potential interest on the part of the prospect.

How can I leverage buying signals for my business?

Custom script development

You can develop scripts in Python or Angular, for example, that will enable you to aggregate information by performing regular searches on the criteria of your choice. You can use specialized agencies such as Calibre2 or your own technical team.

This solution requires you to maintain your robots over time, and an incompressible initial setup time.

Adopting dedicated solutions

There are two types of solutions in this category: future event monitoring solutions and past event extraction solutions, which only extract a list of companies or individuals meeting certain criteria at the time of export.

Future event monitoring solutions provide the greatest leverage, as they enable you to be the first on a deal or a recruitment and to integrate this data into your own workflows or Sales Engine.

Regular manual research

If you don’t want to invest the time or resources to automate these tasks, you can manually search for this information on a regular basis.

This practice is recommended only for information that is difficult to aggregate, such as videos, interviews, podcasts, etc.

Conclusion

Purchase signals are a real way of developing b2b sales and fuelling a sustainable, automated strategy.

Whether automated or manual, the most innovative sales teams are already taking advantage of this strategy.

It’s definitely something to consider in 2023 for any sales team wishing to create a strong sales machine.

Start getting buying signals over your market