"Intent data shows which leads or accounts are actively conducting research online. As they search, they’re scored on thousands of topics. This data is used to alert sales and marketing teams when their high-fit accounts are in buying mode for their particular solution. When used correctly, intent data dramatically boosts conversions and sales."  Source - Everstring

We leave a data trail whereever we go online. How many of you automatically click accept when presented with that annoying pop up on websites or pages you visit. 

How many of you have bothered reading the full terms of business when you sign up to social media platforms, you give everything away. If we expect to have that hyper-personalised experience, then we have to relinquish data to provide insight to the businesses who want to sell to you.

Almost 3bn people use a Facebook product each month.

There are 63,000 searches every second on Google.

There are 706million people on LinkedIn.

350,000 tweets every 60 seconds on Twitter.

The average user spends 17 minutes on Instagram.

All of this leaves a digital footprint, giving insight to what we are interested in. It could be finding a new romantic partner, a new job or buying a new product or service.

You may well be familiar with the CEB / Gartner research which suggests at least 57% of the due diligence process is done, in a B2B purchasing process, before we even know this is happening.

Now you can start to understand what your buyer journey looks like.

The most obvious place to start is talk to your existing customers. Not rocket science, but rarely done and even when it is done, a Net Promoter Score is created that is it.

The next place to look is in your Marketing department.

Ask them for all and any analytics they have - website, email campaigns, paid social campaigns, all of it. It may be a hot mess, however, if you have someone who is good with excel and Tableau or Power BI, you will be able to glean some nuggets.

An example of this is email unsubscribe. An SDR (Sales Development Rep) shared a story when they asked marketing for all of the email unsubscribes. They called every single on and asked Why. They generated 3 closed sales from people who signalled intent they were no longer interested. 

How?

By asking the question why, the uncovered that they were not interested in receiving the emails as the information was not relevant. They pushed further, what would be of interest? Discussion. Transpires the recipient of said emails had no idea what other solutions that business provided - and that one of solutions was in fact what they were looking for.

How many leads are you missing because of mis-aligned assumptions from poor content or messaging in your email marketing, or any marketing content for that matter.

Use Google Trends or Answer The Public to understand how your product and services are being searched. Using this insight, work with marketing to create content based on what, and how, your target audience is searching.

Next place to look are your followers on your company page on LinkedIn, ask Marketing. If someone of interest has started following your page on LinkedIn, go and connect with them.

If you have LinkedIn Premium or Sales Navigator, montior your profile views, if an ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) looks at your profile, connect with them.

Look at which companies are seeing your posts on LinkedIn, if a company that is a target company appears, find the ICP in that company on LinkedIn and connect with them.

Consider investing in data platforms such as Bombora or Spikr where they can source volumes on 3rd party data to help you identify when your target market is in research mode, by company.

If you have Sales Navigator Enterprise you can leverage TeamLink for an effective referral.

Consider investing in tools such as Introhive to help give you clean and accurate CRM data and inisght, in a near real-time view. Businesses who invest in mining their relationship capital will accelerate their pipeline of opportunity and shorten sales cycles.

If you have any form of Sales Engagement technology, such as Salesloft or Outreach - interrogate their data. Which sequences are working? Which aren not? - act on this and do something different.

Voice is the new data in all of this. If you have Gong or equivalent, then listen to client / prospect calls, what are the trends you can spot? Build on what is working, coach on where it isn't.

In an ideal world, you want to draw all of this into one place - your Customer Data Platform (CDP)  to spot the trends for you and guide you, freeing up more of your time to do what you and your team do best, talk to your targets and customers.

At the right time, in the right place and in the right way.

In a world where humans produce 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day, as the old gold prospectors would say :

"There is gold in them hills"