How to Use Intent Signals for B2B Marketing & Sales

B2B buyers don’t just wake up and decide to fill out a form or book a demo. Their journey is packed with digital breadcrumbs—web searches, content downloads, ad clicks, and company review visits.

Every one of those actions leaves behind a clue about what they’re thinking and where they are in their buying journey, and these clues are called intent signals.

When tracked and used correctly, intent signals can show you who’s in-market, what they care about, and when they’re most likely to convert.

Below, we’ll break down what intent signals actually are, the different types to watch for, and how to use them to improve targeting, accelerate sales, and close more deals.

What Are Intent Signals?

Intent signals are behavioral data points that show a potential buyer’s interest in a specific topic, product, or solution. 

In B2B, that might include reading comparison articles, clicking on competitor case studies, or checking out pricing pages—behaviors that quietly say, “I’m in the market.”

These signals can come from your own properties (like your website or email engagement) or from third-party sources (like review sites, job boards, or industry publications). 

They help sales and marketing teams understand who’s actively in the market, what stage of the buyer’s journey they’re in, and what problems they’re trying to solve. 

Why is Intent Data Important for B2B Sales & Marketing?

Below are some of the most practical ways purchase intent signals can support your sales and marketing efforts:

• Shortens the sales cycle: When you engage a buyer who’s already in research mode, you skip the "why now?" stage and go straight to the “why you?” conversation.
• Streamline ABM campaigns: You make account-based marketing more efficient when you target only B2B companies that show actual buying behavior instead of those that just match firmographic criteria.
• Spot in-market buyers earlier: Intent data surfaces prospects before they ever fill out a form or show up in your CRM. That gives your team a first-mover advantage to build relationships before competitors even know those buyers exist.
• Increases message relevance: Generic outreach kills deals. With intent insights, you can personalize your message based on what the buyer has been reading, watching, or comparing.
• Aligns sales and marketing: Both teams can work off the same playbook when they’re looking at the same buying signals. Marketing stops handing off unqualified leads, and sales stops ignoring marketing-sourced opportunities.
• Delivers competitive intelligence: If prospects are spending time with your competitors’ content or comparing solutions in your space, you’ll know.
• Reduces churn risk: When a current customer starts looking at competitors or revisiting pain point content, that’s a red flag. Intent signals can help you intervene early with the right messaging or support.

Common Examples of Intent Signals

Intent signals come in many forms. While some are obvious, others are easy to overlook. The key is learning how to recognize them and connect the dots between behavior and buying readiness.

Here are some of the most common (and useful) intent signals to watch for.

• Repeated visits to your website: One visit could be curiosity. But when someone returns multiple times over a short period, especially to high-intent pages, it’s usually a sign of growing interest or internal discussion.
• Spending time on educational content: Reading blog posts, watching webinars, or completing learning modules shows they're trying to understand a problem better. They might be in the awareness or consideration stage.
• Searching for competitor names or “alternatives to” content: If someone’s looking for “[Your competitor] vs. [Your brand]” or “Top [category] platforms,” they’re trying to understand which tool fits best.
• Reading reviews on third-party sites: Visits to sites like G2 or TrustRadius show that someone is actively evaluating vendors. If you’re being compared or researched there, you’re likely on their shortlist.
• Single company surges: A sudden spike in engagement from a specific company, whether across content, ads, or emails, usually means something is happening behind the scenes.
• IP-based engagement from target accounts: Even if a specific person hasn’t raised their hand, seeing consistent traffic from a target company’s IP shows there’s activity happening inside.
• Participating in industry forums or communities: Comments, questions, or activity in niche communities or Slack groups can reveal what topics are top of mind.
• Filling out demo or contact forms: This is one of the clearest signals of intent—they want to talk. The faster you respond, the better your chances of converting that lead.
• Technographic changes: If a company adds or removes a tool from its tech stack, it can signal budget changes or gaps it’s looking to fill. For example, dropping a CRM tool might mean they’re looking for a new one.
• Funding or M&A activity: Recent funding or acquisition typically leads to new goals, restructured teams, and new budgets. That makes it an ideal time to introduce your solution, especially if it helps with scale or integration.

Types of Intent Signals

Intent signals come in many forms, depending on where the activity happens and what it reveals about buyer behavior. 

Let’s break down the main types you should be tracking:

Engagement Intent

Engagement intent shows up when someone interacts directly with your brand’s channels—primarily through your website, content, or emails. These actions help you spot who’s paying attention and how serious they might be about buying.

Examples include:

• Visiting specific pages on your website (like pricing or product features)
• Downloading gated content such as whitepapers, templates, or reports
• Subscribing to your email newsletter or content updates
• Registering for or attending webinars
• Clicking links in product-related emails
• Spending time on high-intent blog posts or landing pages

Technographic Intent Signals

Technographic intent signals show when a company adds, removes, or shows interest in certain technologies. These changes often signal upcoming needs, budget updates, or new initiatives that your product could support.

Examples include:

• Installing technologies that commonly integrate with your solution
• Removing a competitor's product from their technology stack
• Adding new marketing automation tools
• Setting up enterprise systems that indicate company expansion
• Adopting technologies that create integration opportunities for your product
• Going from legacy systems to cloud-based solutions in related categories
• Mentioning specific technologies in job postings

Company Activity Intent Signals

Company activity intent signals show changes inside a business that often lead to new purchasing decisions, like growth, restructuring, or budget changes.

These signals don’t come from direct engagement but can still point to strong buying intent. Spotting them early helps you reach out before your competitors do.

Examples include:

• Announcing a new round of funding
• Opening offices in new geographic markets or regions
• Launching new product lines or entering different market segments
• Merging with or acquiring another company
• Reorganizing internal departments or leadership structures

Hiring Intent Signals

Hiring intent signals give you a glimpse into a company’s upcoming priorities based on the roles they’re looking to fill. Job postings often reveal projects they’re planning, tools they’ll need, or challenges they’re trying to solve.

Examples include:

• Posting job openings for roles that commonly use your type of solution
• Creating new leadership positions in departments relevant to your offering
• Hiring multiple positions within a department that uses your technology
• Recruiting specialists with expertise in your specific solution category
• Expanding teams focused on projects that typically require your solution

Where to Get Intent Data Signals

To put buyer intent data to work, you first need to know where it comes from. Let’s look at the main sources, both inside and outside your organization:

First-Party Intent Data

First-party intent data comes straight from your own digital channels, including your website, CRM, product, and marketing tools.

It’s the most reliable type of intent data because it’s based on how prospects interact directly with your brand. You own it, you control it, and when used well, it can tell you exactly who’s leaning in.

Here’s where you typically find it:

• Website analytics: These tools track how website visitors behave on your site. You can spot intent by looking at:
  
  • Specific pages viewed (e.g., pricing, specific product features, case studies)
  • Time spent on high-value pages
  • Content downloads (whitepapers, guides, playbooks)
  • Form submissions (demos, free trials, contact requests)
  • On-site search queries that reveal pain points or topics of interest
• Marketing automation platforms: These platforms give you insight into how people engage with your marketing campaigns. Useful signals include:
  
  • Email opens, link clicks, and CTA engagement
  • Landing page views and conversions
  • Webinar registrations and attendance
  • Interactions with nurture sequences or lead scoring changes
• CRM systems: Salesforce, HubSpot CRM, and similar tools contain engagement data logged by your sales team. Intent signals often appear in:
  
  • Logged calls and meetings that mention specific pain points or specific needs
  • Email conversations that show active evaluation
  • Deal progression stages or field updates indicating buying interest
  • Interactions with collateral shared through the CRM
• Product analytics: For SaaS companies, product analytics tools (like Mixpanel) can show in-app behavior that suggests expansion, upsell potential, or churn risk. Signals include:
  
  • Frequent use of high-value features
  • Trial users exploring advanced functionalities
• Customer support platforms: Support tools show intent through user questions and issues. Look for:
  
  • Repeated questions about certain features or pricing
  • High engagement with help center articles related to specific use cases
  • Tickets that signal friction or unmet needs that your solution can address

Third-Party Intent Data

Third-party intent data comes from external sources, and it’s collected by specialized vendors that track buyer behavior across the broader web.

You typically access this data through a subscription or partnership, and it helps you spot companies researching solutions in your category before they ever land on your site.

Here’s where third-party intent data typically comes from:

• B2B publisher networks and co-ops: Intent data providers often partner with B2B publishers, research sites, and event platforms to track what content users consume across their network. If employees from a company start downloading reports on topics related to your product, that’s a strong sign of early interest.
• Bidstream data: This refers to anonymized data that comes from programmatic ad exchanges. By analyzing browsing patterns linked to company IPs, vendors can infer which businesses are actively researching specific topics based on where and what they’re viewing across the web.
• Public web monitoring and scraping: This is when vendors aggregate signals from publicly available sources, including:
  
  • Online activity on review sites like G2 or Capterra, such as visits to your profile, competitor pages, or category listings
  • Mentions or discussions on forums, social media, or community platforms
  • Company news, funding rounds, press releases, or M&A announcements
  • Job postings that reflect upcoming projects, tool needs, or new department priorities
  • Technographic updates, like changes in a company’s software stack
• Proprietary data partnerships: Some providers also use exclusive data partnerships, panel data, or historical usage patterns across their platforms to get more specific insights.

The most successful lead generation and marketing strategies usually combine first-party data (direct engagement with your brand) and third-party data (market-wide behavior). Together, they give you a complete view of what your buyers are doing and when to act.

PRO TIP 💡You can use HockeyStack’s G2 Intent Dashboard to get a full view of how buyer activity on G2 influences your pipeline—from first intent signal to closed-won. 

It tracks everything from G2 profile views, competitor page website visits, and category interest, to how those signals impact form fills, MQLs, SQLs, and revenue.

For example, you can track lift reports to see how G2 activity, like checking your competitor pages or viewing your profile, actually impacts form fills, MQLs, and deals. 

These lift reports isolate G2’s contribution, so you know which actions push deals forward and which ones don’t move the needle.

There’s also the G2 impact report section that shows how G2 intent affects your core metrics—MQLs, SQLs, ACV, conversion rates—and lets you compare them to companies that never engaged on G2.

With the funnel impact reports, you can track the full path from G2 to closed-won. 

You can follow a potential customer as they search your category, view your G2 profile, visit your site, and move through the funnel. It helps you spot exactly where intent shows up and how it influences each step.

You can also keep an eye on account penetration reports where you upload your target account list and see which companies are active on G2. 

Then, check whether marketing or sales actually followed up. If they didn’t, you’ll know who to reach out to next, and if they did, you’ll see whether those efforts paid off.

You’ll also be able to:

• See intent scores and timelines for every account
• Break down G2 influence across inbound and outbound deals
• Measure how many intent accounts your team actually targeted
• Tie pipeline and revenue back to specific G2 actions and levels
• Compare G2 against other touchpoints in look-back reports
• Spot long-term trends, especially if you have longer sales cycles

You’ll see where buyers start their journey, where they drop off, and which intent levels consistently turn into closed-won deals. 

How to Use Intent Signals in Marketing and Sales

Intent signals only create value when they’re tied to action. Here’s how to apply them across sales and marketing in ways that actually move pipeline:

Dynamic Content Strategy Based on Market Trends

Intent data should tell you what the market cares about right now. When you can analyze anonymized, aggregated intent trends across your industry, you can spot topic surges and hot interests before your competitors do.

For example, if you see a sudden spike in interest around “data privacy compliance,” you can quickly create blog content, launch a targeted webinar, or build a landing page that covers that theme. You can get a first-mover advantage in thought leadership, demand gen, and even product marketing.

PRO TIP 💡Want to automatically prioritize follow-up based on website engagement? Use HockeyStack’s account intelligence workflows to:

• Identify high-intent accounts: Automatically spot customers most likely to convert based on their website visit patterns.
• Filter low-value prospects: Easily exclude accounts at the evaluation stage that don't meet your criteria, saving your team time.
• Tailor your outreach: Segment audiences by intent level (based on website activity) and trigger automated, appropriate follow-up actions for each group.

Predictive Churn Modeling and Proactive Retention

Churn often looks like a surprise, but in reality, customers drop warning signals long before they leave.

• They start researching alternatives on G2
• They read “how to migrate off [your platform]” posts
• They show interest in your competitors’ integrations

If you’re only watching product usage, you’ll miss all of this. With intent data layered on top of your customer base, you can create churn risk scores that combine internal data (logins down, support tickets up) with external signals (competitor research, category keyword spikes).

This gives customer success a 2–4 week advantage, which could be enough to deliver strategic check-ins, surface underused features, or offer retention incentives before renewal conversations turn south.

Refining Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) with Behavioral Data

The best ICPs are usually reverse-engineered from your highest-intent and highest-converting behavior patterns.

Let’s say your original ICP includes 500+ employee SaaS companies.

But when you overlay third-party intent data, you notice a completely different pattern – 200–500 employee B2B marketplaces are disproportionately engaging with “usage-based billing” content, and they’re converting faster.

That’s a niche you probably overlooked. Intent data lets you re-prioritize verticals, update cold outreach cadences, and distribute ad budget around actual behavioral patterns. 

Optimizing Multi-Threading in Complex Deals

If multiple people from the same company are researching your product, especially across different topics, you’re likely dealing with a buying group.

One person checks out your integrations, another explores ROI content, and a third hits your G2 profile. You can use that as your cue to map roles – a technical buyer, a financial decision-maker, a champion.

Instead of lumping them together or following up generically, equip your reps with persona-specific outreach that speaks to each contact’s interest.

Contextualizing Sales Outreach Beyond “I Saw You Visited Our Site”

Sales outreach falls flat when it feels generic or uninformed, but intent data gives them context that actually lands.

Rather than saying, “saw you on our website,” reps can say, “noticed your team explored our Salesforce integration—want to see how it works with your existing setup?” 

These can be amazing credibility builders that show the rep is informed, relevant, and not wasting anyone’s time.

Triggering Nuanced Marketing & Sales Plays Based on Intent Combinations

Most marketing and sales teams react to individual actions, but the most successful ones look at patterns. If someone visits the pricing page and downloads a case study, they understand that it’s not just casual browsing.

You should build plays around combinations like this, whether it’s a competitive research + high-intent visit or feature exploration + trial sign-up. Each combination can trigger a specific sequence.

For example, when a lead compares you to a competitor and browses integration pages, you can launch a competitive positioning play. If they view content tied to pain point A and ignore demo CTAs, send them a use case deck instead of a generic follow-up.

PRO TIP 💡Need to automatically get audiences showing third-party intent into your ad platforms? Use HockeyStack workflows. Simply integrate intent data sources, automatically build a list of high-intent accounts matching your ICP, and let the workflow sync this audience directly to your ad platforms for targeting.

How HockeyStack Can Help

HockeyStack is a revenue analytics and attribution platform built for modern B2B teams. 

It connects first-party data, third-party intent signals, and buyer behavior across the funnel, so you can understand what’s driving pipeline, which accounts are in-market, and how to act on that insight in real time.

Here’s precisely how it helps:

Connect First- and Third-Party Intent Signals in One Unified View

Most intent data platforms operate in silos, where one tool shows you third-party surges and another tracks first-party website activity. At the end, you’re left trying to stitch the story together across a dozen tabs.

HockeyStack, on the other hand, gives you a unified intent foundation that connects multiple third-party data sources—like G2, Sales Navigator, or Bombora—with your own website and ad engagement data.

Instead of siloed dashboards or vague scores from different systems, you get a single, unified view of buyer activity across all major touchpoints. 

You’re not just seeing that someone might be in-market—you’re seeing exactly how they’re engaging with relevant content, where they’re spending time, and which channels are influencing them.

Understand the “Why” Behind Buyer Intent

Intent scores are only useful if your team understands what’s behind them. Most providers give you a number or maybe a vague label like “high” or “medium”, and expect you to run with it.

But without context, your sales team is left wondering – what triggered this? Is this account actually showing interest or just browsing?

HockeyStack explains the intent. Instead of dropping opaque scores into your dashboard, it shows the actual actions that contributed to that intent signal. You can see which pages were visited, which campaigns drove engagement, and what topics the account has been researching.

Build Dynamic Audiences and Get Real-Time Activation

HockeyStack lets you create precise target account lists using both first-party and third-party intent signals, then sync them directly with LinkedIn or Google Display Network.

You can define real-time rules, like “showing high intent on G2 and viewed our pricing page in the last 7 days,” and use them to build active audiences that update as behavior changes.

There’s also real-time activation included. When someone from one of your high-intent audiences lands on your site or views a key page, your team can get notified instantly. From there, you can trigger internal workflows, launch personalized email sequences, or route the account to the appropriate SDR.

Find Out Which Intent Signals Actually Drive Pipeline

Not all intent signals are created equal, but most platforms don’t tell you which ones matter.

HockeyStack’s lift reports solve that. They show you which sources of intent—G2 competitor page views, content downloads, ad engagement, etc.—actually move the needle on conversions, pipeline creation, and revenue.

You can compare how different signals contribute to key stages like MQLs, SQLs, or closed-won deals, and adjust your strategy accordingly. If G2 Profile Views consistently lead to demos while a certain third-party topic cluster doesn’t convert, you’ll know to prioritize one and de-emphasize the other.

Replace the Intent “Black Box” with Transparent, Actionable Insights

Intent data often feels like a black box, where scores show up in dashboards, but no one can explain where they came from or what triggered them.

HockeyStack takes a different approach. It provides intent scores, explains why each score exists, and shows the exact combination of touchpoints and behaviors that contributed to it.

This level of transparency is especially important for go-to-market teams who need to trust the signals they’re acting on. Whether you're building a list for outbound or trying to understand why an opportunity suddenly warmed up, you’ll have the full context.

Make Smarter GTM Decisions with HockeyStack’s Unified Data Approach

Intent data shouldn’t live in silos or feel like a mystery. With HockeyStack, you see exactly who’s in-market, what they’re researching, and which intent signals lead to pipeline. No black box, just real buyer behavior that’s stitched together across tools, teams, and touchpoints.

If your team’s still struggling to understand who to target or which campaigns move revenue, it’s time to fix that. Book a demo and see how HockeyStack turns raw intent into clear, measurable GTM plays.