Intent-Led Marketing Is B2B’s Latest Obsession, but ‘Signals’ Alone Don’t Drive Sales

By Adam Herbert, CEO & co-founder Go Live Data

“Intent adds another layer to clean data. It helps teams assess timing and relevance, provided they understand what the signal represents.”

For businesses under pressure to grow, intent data offers an appealing prospect. Maybe to cover rising costs, meet investor expectations, repay borrowing or to keep pace with the competitors. It may have also recruited more staff or invested in technology, needing more revenue to justify that spending.

It’s key therefore to understand which companies are researching your services,  identify potential buyers earlier and give sales teams a better reason to pick up the phone. Used properly, intent data can make outbound marketing more relevant and help businesses spend their budgets sensibly. The difficulty comes when a signal is treated as a sale in the pipeline.

A visit to a pricing page doesn’t necessarily tell you whether someone has budget, purchasing authority or an approved project.

Someone reading about a particular service might be comparing suppliers, researching for a colleague or simply trying to understand a problem. While their activity is useful information, the commercial value depends on how accurately you interpret it and what you do next…

For business leaders, that distinction matters because buying another platform can feel like progress. A dashboard fills with activity, prospects receive scores and marketing has something new to report.

Yet the sales team can still be left asking the same questions. Which of these businesses can we actually help, and why should they speak to us now at this stage?

Start with the right businesses to contact

Before looking for intent, a business needs a clear understanding of its ideal customer.

That includes sector, size, location, likely challenges and the people involved in making decisions. Otherwise, teams risk chasing activity from organisations that were never commercially suitable in the first place. Strong engagement from the wrong company can consume just as much sales time as an inaccurate contact record.

This is where data quality becomes a practical growth matter.

A promising signal attached to an outdated company record or the wrong decision maker – can quickly lead to wasted effort. At Go Live Data, we refresh our business data every 30 days because the information supporting an approach needs to reflect the business as it operates today.

Intent adds another layer to that foundation. It helps a team assess timing and relevance, provided they understand what the signal represents. Account level activity should not automatically be attributed to a named individual. Equally, one isolated interaction should carry less weight than a pattern of relevant engagement. Sales teams need that context before deciding how to respond.

Give people a reason to engage

Businesses also need to consider what brought the prospect to their website in the first place.

Useful content can help someone understand a challenge, assess an approach or make a stronger internal case for investment. If every communication asks for a meeting before offering anything useful, the relationship starts with a demand on the recipient’s time.

Our approach at Go Live Data puts education first. We aim for an 80:20 balance of useful information versus sales content. That requires understanding the recipient’s role and the issues they face. A finance director considering a new investment will have different questions from the marketing manager expected to implement it, so sending them both the same generic pitch simply ignores that difference.

Repeated engagement with relevant material can help inform the next conversation.

However, it still needs interpretation. Someone exploring implementation guidance may need reassurance about resources or disruption. A helpful response would address those concerns. Immediately pushing a demonstration because their activity crossed a scoring threshold could miss the reason they were reading in the first place.

Respect the recipient

Ethical outbound means taking responsibility for the experience you create for who you’re communicating with. Frequency rules, relevant targeting and coordinated contact across teams all matter hugely. A prospect shouldn’t receive several disconnected approaches because different people have access to the same activity alert. That’s poor campaigning and it can really damage the credibility the content was intended to build.

Knowing something about a prospect’s behaviour doesn’t mean describing that behaviour back to them is a sensible opening line. The purpose of ‘intelligence’ is to improve your understanding and make the approach useful. People should be able to see why a conversation might benefit them, without feeling that every online action triggers a sales response.

Keep HUMAN judgement in the process

AI can help organise information, identify patterns and support prioritisation, but the quality of its recommendations depends on the data and assumptions behind them. Automating an unreliable scoring model can send more unsuitable prospects to sales more quickly.

Someone still needs to challenge whether the indicators genuinely relate to buying readiness and whether the suggested response makes commercial sense.

Marketing and sales therefore should agree what qualifies as a useful opportunity and share responsibility for improving that definition.

Marketing needs feedback on why leads progress or stall. Sales needs visibility of the content and activity behind a referral, alongside the prospect’s fit. Without that exchange, both teams can work hard while drawing very different conclusions about campaign performance and need to work with each other.

A sensible starting point is one clearly defined audience, a specific commercial problem and an agreed follow-up process. Review the conversations that result before expanding the campaign. This gives teams evidence about which signals deserve attention, which messages help the most and where the handover needs work, before more budget is committed elsewhere.

Measure the commercial outcome

A rise in identified visitors or engagement scores is worth investigating, but it won’t demonstrate profitable growth. Managers and leaders should examine qualified conversations, opportunities, conversion and revenue alongside the cost of generating them.

Intent data earns its place when it improves those outcomes. Its value comes from helping a business make a better approach, backed by accurate information, relevant content and people capable of having a useful conversation.