Intent data has changed how sales and RevOps teams identify and engage with potential customers. It shifts the focus from random cold outreach to a more strategic approach.
That’s why intent data providers are in demand because they help sales teams spot ready-to-buy prospects by tracking their online behavior and interest signals. This awareness allows marketing and sales teams to prioritise leads, personalize outreach, and drive faster sales cycles with more focused efforts.
Definition and purpose of intent data
Intent data is the behavioral signals that show a prospect's interest in a product and their readiness to purchase. These signals are captured through various digital touchpoints such as website visits, content downloads, social media engagements and search queries.
The purpose of collecting and analyzing intent data is to pinpoint which accounts are exploring products related to your business. This helps you find potential buyers early and engage them at the right time.
Types of intent data: first-party, second-party, and third-party
Intent data comes in three primary forms, each with distinct characteristics and use cases.
First-party data
First-party data is collected from your own digital properties like website visits, email engagement, content downloads, product usage and social media interactions. This is highly valuable because it reflects a direct interest in your brand but is limited to prospects who are already interacting with your brand.
For example, if a prospect repeatedly visits your pricing page is first-party data that signals a strong buying intent.
Second-party data
Second-party data is shared by partners who collect their own first-party data. This often comes from industry-specific websites, technology publishers, or social media platforms that track user behaviour.
For example, G2 is a peer-to-peer software review site that provides data to other businesses to get insights into the prospects evaluating similar products. This data expands your visibility into potential buyers while maintaining a high level of reliability.
Third-party data
Third-party data is collected from external sources such as business news sites, research portals, and industry forums. It provides the broadest coverage by capturing signals from prospects who haven’t yet engaged with your brand.
For example, if a company is actively researching a keyword across multiple sources, the third-party intent data can help identify them as potential leads. However, since this data comes from a wide range of sources, it requires careful validation to ensure accuracy and relevance.
The importance of intent data in modern sales strategies
Having a great product and a large market isn’t enough to drive revenue. You need to reach the right prospects at the right time with the right message. You need to identify when they need your product and introduce it timely.
This requires constantly monitoring multiple channels for intent signals from potential buyers. These signals could be anything from social media interaction to a website visit or attending an industry event. You should be able to interpret these actions in context and engage at the right time.
Intent data makes analytics-driven sales possible with improved ROI. By revealing those accounts that are actively exploring specific solutions, intent data allows businesses to allot resources optimally and contact prospects with greater personalization.
Highperformr
Highperformr is a sales intelligence platform that provides real-time intent signals to identify, filter and prioritize leads based on their readiness to buy. The tool scans social media for insight into your contact's social media activity and comes up with personalized conversation starters.
You can track job changes and get real-time updates when key contacts switch roles to re-engage them as potential champions for your product in their new company. You can also spot new promotions in your existing champions to find opportunities to cross-sell.
Highperformr helps you to build lead lists based on a keyword or topic and helps you search for companies or contacts similar to your ideal customer profiles. You can also find leads attending an event that you’re heading to or working near cities you're travelling to.
Unique selling proposition of highperformr
Highperformr has real-time access to first-party data and helps businesses enrich lead data with contact information, firmographic data, social intent data, and B2B buying signals. It helps filter and prioritize these leads from your account book. Unlike traditional lead generation tools, you also get social signals on how active they are, what topics they talk about, and who their recent LinkedIn connections are.
Highperformr pricing
Highperformr provides a free, user-friendly product for individuals. Teams and enterprises can access a 14-day free trial to explore advanced features. Paid plans start at $59 for lifetime access, with optional credit add-ons beginning at $10 for 1,000 credits. View pricing for more details.
User reviews: What people are saying about Highperformr
✅ Real-time intent signals with first-party data
✅ Intuitive and easy-to-use tool offers white-glove onboarding
✅ Easy integration with any CRM and supports 60+ sales tools.
❌ The tool is not accessible via mobile app.
❌ Intent signals are not available in the free plan but you need to purchase credits for it.
Cognism
Cognism delivers intent data solutions focusing on B2B revenue teams. Their framework combines intent signals with a contact database to generate actionable insights for outbound prospecting and account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns.
Cognism prioritizes compliance and data accuracy. Their premium feature "Diamond Data" offers phone-verified mobile numbers for B2B sales teams through multiple verification techniques and regular updates. The platform particularly excels in European marketplaces, with excellent protections for GDPR integrated into their processes for compiling and supplying information.
Unique selling proposition of Cognism
Cognism provides compliant-first data backed by GDPR, CCPA, and SOC 2 standards. This tool cross-references contact data with do-not-call lists across 13 different countries in Europe. This is particularly important for enterprises working in European markets and industries dealing with sensitive information. Their diamond data methodology combines intent signals with verified business contact information for pinpointing and connecting the right decision-makers.
Cognism pricing
Cognism does not publicly disclose its pricing. They offer a tiered approach with different levels of access to demographic, signals, and firmographic data.
The Grow plan includes essential demographic data such as emails, mobile numbers, and work history, along with firmographic insights like revenue and headcount.
However, advanced signal data such as champion job changes, funding, and intent signals is available only in the higher-tier plan named “Elevate.”
User reviews: What people are saying about Cognism
✅ Good for prospecting European companies.
✅ Better mobile number coverage that includes manual verification.
✅ Easy to integrate with your existing tech stack.
❌ Inconsistencies in task updates, and slow performance.
❌ More expensive for advanced features.
❌ Some data can be inaccurate or outdated.
“One drawback of Cognism is its pricing, which can be on the higher side for smaller businesses or startups. Additionally, while the data is generally accurate, occasional outdated or incorrect entries can still slip through, requiring manual verification.” Source: G2
Bombora
Bombora is a leader in the intent data space. It focuses on providing high-quality B2B intent signals through its ‘Company Surge’ analytics. It will help you identify which businesses are researching the products or services that you and your competitors sell.
Bombora is easy to implement on your tech stack and adaptable for the use cases you want to deploy. You can activate data across multiple use cases through direct integrations and partners.
Unique selling proposition of Bombora
Bombora’s USP lies in its Company Surge technology which is a data science methodology that measures shifts in B2B content consumption. Bombora analyzes research frequency, depth of engagement, and content relevance to detect real buying intent. This makes Bombora stand out from generic intent data providers.
Bombora pricing
Bombora’s website doesn’t mention pricing but customer reviews indicate that it is an expensive sales tool for small businesses.
User reviews: What people are saying about Bombora
✅ Intent data comes from publisher networks and has high accuracy.
✅ Integrate and collaborate all your data with your company's systems.
✅ Incredibly intuitive and the user experience is easy to use.
❌ Costly for a small firm to implement.
❌ Companies are misclassified by size and industry.
❌ Provides account-level intent data and not contact-level data.
“Access to tons of intent categories that integrates easily with HubSpot CRM. Lack of high-quality company data makes Bombora almost useless. If you are trying to focus on specific industries and company sizes the Bombora database is really bad. I have to spend significant time cleaning up the data before being able to use it. Lots of companies are misclassified by size and industry. I get the industry and company size data is not going to be perfect but compared to other tools available it feels much worse.” Source: G2
ZoomInfo
Zoominfo is a popular B2B lead generation tool that offers intent data with broad coverage and granular insights. The intent data Zoominfo offers is a part of their go-to-market platform which ensures smooth data integration with your CRM and other tech stack.
You can match your ideal customer profile against Zoominfo’s database to identify prospects who are searching for topics related to your businesses. By enriching this data, you can reach out to them via phone, mail or LinkedIn for personalized engagement.
Unique selling proposition of ZoomInfo
Zoominfo stands out with its solution called “Guided intent” which uses predictive artificial intelligence (AI) to identify patterns and anticipate prospect behaviours. With these insights, the sales team can pick out intent topics that tell you what topic or keyword matters most to prospects in the crucial moments before conversion.
With one of the largest B2B contact databases, ZoomInfo helps you get firmographic, technographic, and buyer intent data. It has also been recognized as a top-ranked provider of buyer intent data on G2.
Zoominfo pricing
Zoominfo does not provide exact pricing details but has plans for three different use cases.
- Sales: Provides accurate contact data, intent signals, and integrations for sales acceleration.
- Marketing: Offers lead generation tools, company insights, and digital marketing solutions.
- Talent: Focuses on candidate sourcing, alerts, and recruitment insights.
However, internet users claim that ZoomInfo pricing starts at $15k which is way costlier than other Zoominfo competitors.
User reviews: What people are saying about Zoominfo
✅ Easy to build a call list with contact names and their mobile number.
✅ Integrates easily with CRM.
✅ WebSights and Intent information is so valuable.
❌ Very expensive for small businesses looking to grow.
❌ The data isn't always accurate.
❌ Difficult to manage multiple features.
“I find the interface between Intent and Advanced Search inefficient because I cannot save an Advanced Search if I start with Intent data. The separation of Intent from Advanced Searches section makes it feel rather separate, and it interrupts my workflow.”. Source: G2
Demandbase
Demandbase is an account-based marketing (ABM) platform that uses real-time ad bidding data to detect which companies are showing interest in specific topics. The tool also has access to a wide range of publisher/advertising networks to observe the trending intent.
For example, when the employees of a company start reading about a particular keyword much more than usual it is marked as a trending intent to suggest the account is interested in that topic. It also measures the strength of the intent by calculating the number of people at similar accounts reading webpages on the same topic.
Unique selling proposition of Demandbase
Demandbase differentiates itself with AI-powered keyword expansion that goes beyond predefined keywords. Businesses can detect early buying signals with their “Trending Intent” as discussed above. It has a combination of first-party and third-party intent data with integration from popular sites like G2, and TrustRadius.
Demandbase pricing
Demandbase website doesn’t mention pricing but the data from 159 purchases says it costs $65K
per year.
User reviews: What people are saying about Demandbase
✅Easy to use, customize and analyze data using specific filters.
✅Helps to prioritize accounts based on engagement and improve multi-contact follow-up.
✅Combine engagement data from ads and website visits into a unified view of target accounts.
❌ The platform is challenging to learn to navigate and not very intuitive.
❌ The tool needs more data about employees and phone numbers.
❌ Contact information is out of date.
“Demandbase as a platform can be challenging to learn to navigate. Some of the commands and functionality within the platform are not very intuitive. Without the guidance of our Demandbase support team, setting up campaigns, creating lists, and standing up dashboards would be exceptionally challenging. We are learning through doing, but I'd say the learning curve for the platform use itself was steep. API data integrations setup have also been challenging.” Source: G2
6sense
6sense is another ABM platform that helps in identifying your perfect prospects with the help of intent signals. The platform offers intent reporting through identity resolution and noise filtering by sourcing sales intel from industry publications, blogs, social networks, and product review sites.
6sense also has this "bring-your-own-data" model feature that allows clients to upload their own data sources such as CRM data, marketing automation data, or even custom datasets to enrich the 6sense intent insights.
Unique selling proposition of 6sense
6sense’s USP is that it is more than an intent data provider with an analytics-first approach that centralizes marketing and sales insights. The bring-your-own-data model allows businesses to integrate competitor signals into the core dataset for lead prioritization. 6sense also delivers high-precision intent insights across a broad range of industries.
6sense pricing
Exact pricing details are not listed and likely require a demo. However, 6sense offers four pricing plans:
- Free Plan: Includes 50 credits per month, buyer discovery, contact & company data, alerts, list management, and a Chrome extension.
- Team Plan: Everything in the free plan plus technographics, psychographics, web & CRM integrations, CRM/SEP data syncing, and dashboards.
- Growth Plan: Everything in the team plan plus 6sense intent data (keywords), third-party intent, corporate hierarchy insights, and prioritization dashboards.
- Enterprise Plan: Everything in the growth plan plus it provides advanced AI-powered features like predictive AI modeling, AI-recommended actions, and CRM & MAP activity tracking.
User reviews: What people are saying about 6sense
✅ Using intent data to identify in-market accounts.
✅ Enables personalized engagement with tailored ads.
✅ Lead prioritization based on the buying stage for better conversions.
❌ It is hard to decode the actual intent activity of prospects.
❌ It requires a significant learning curve making it difficult to onboard people to the platform.
❌ It can be quite expensive.
“Some of the intent signals or firmographic details might not always be 100% reliable, leading to outreach based on incomplete or misleading insights”. Source: G2
Lead Forensics
Leadforencis is a B2B website identification software to track who’s visiting your website and what they do. It provides detailed information about your anonymous website visitors along with their company information, engagement signals and potential of conversion.
The best part is that you can automate the entire process by integrating the tool into your CRM and other sales automation tools to transfer the website visitor data without any manual work.
Unique selling proposition of Lead Forensics
Lead Forensics specializes in identifying previously anonymous B2B website visitors with real-time insights offering detailed reporting for sales teams. Its real-time ABM tracking, automated alerts, and first-party intent data help sales teams engage prospects at the perfect moment, maximizing conversions and pipeline growth.
Lead Forensics pricing
Lead Forensics doesn’t mention exact pricing details but offers two pricing plans:
- The essential plan is for small and medium-sized businesses with core features such as identifying website visitors, accessing business contact details, tracking keyword-driven traffic, and managing leads through the lead manager portal.
- For enterprises requiring advanced automation, the “Automate Plan” includes all of the essential plan features plus CRM integration, fully customizable workflows, automation for sequencing actions and maintaining clean data. Both plans come with a free trial, allowing businesses to explore the platform before committing.
User reviews: What people are saying about Lead Forensics
✅ Good onboarding experience.
✅ Easy to identify and generate multiple qualified leads.
✅ Visitor history with detailed information is available.
❌ There are a lot of seemingly non-relevant leads.
❌ Cannot automate email list generation of categories and job titles.
❌ It has outdated information and no real-time job tracking.
“Sometimes the contact is not correct, but this is sometimes due to clients having left the company.” Source: G2
G2 Buyer Intent
G2 buyer intent is a powerful tool that tracks the buying activity of the 80 million users on G2 and provides insights into those looking at your profile, category, or competitors. By integrating this data into your CRM and marketing workflows, you can target in-market accounts and enhance your chances of closing deals.
By providing insights into prospect's behavior, sales and marketing teams prioritize their outreach to engage potential buyers effectively with personalized messages.
Unique selling proposition of G2
Every month, millions of people visit G2 to research software. That’s why G2’s intent data is special. It offers actual product research and evaluation activities which creates more qualified indicators of purchase readiness. G2 also provides insights into which product categories and features matter most to potential buyers so that sales reps can personalize the outreach for the needs of the buyer.
G2 Buyer intent pricing
There is no specific pricing information available for G2 buyer intent. Pricing often depends on your business needs and the integrations you require.
User reviews: What people are saying about G2 Buyer Intent
✅ Get signals about competitors' audience activities.
✅ Ease of use.
✅ Good customer service.
❌ It can only provide account-level identification.
❌ CRM integration is poor.
❌ Targeting smaller local companies that don't frequently use G2 is tough.
“It only shows intent from accounts/companies instead of contacts/leads directly, so Sales still need to put in a lot of effort to prospect here. The G2 Buyer Intent integration with CRM and other Sales tools performs quite poorly, as it merely compiles the information without being intelligent enough.” Source: Capterra
Choosing the right intent data provider
The intent data providers have diverse approaches to capturing buying signals with each platform having unique strengths and specializations. Your choice depends upon specific business needs, your existing tech stack and sales strategies.
Criteria for evaluating intent data providers
Here are a few questions you should ask while evaluating the intent data providers:
Is the data sources and coverage relevant to your target audience?
Check if these data providers rely on first-party that is accurate or third-party data sources that is broad but low accuracy.
Are the integration capabilities in line with your existing technology stack?
Ensure the provider has in-built integrations or third-party integration with your CRM and other sales tools.
Is the pricing aligned with your budget and expected ROI?
Not all businesses require enterprise-featured solutions. Understand your needs and choose the platform that offers what you need with the ability to scale up as per your requirements in the future.
Do these providers offer implementation support and success resources?
A platform without reliable support can become a major hassle if you encounter bugs, issues, or simply need guidance over time. Make sure it offers comprehensive onboarding, helpful resources, and responsive customer support to assist you if things go south.
Future trends in intent data provision and utilization
Data quality
Data quality will become more important than ever. As intent data gains popularity, more businesses will start relying on it for their business. The quality of the intent data will be the difference between success and failure. That’s why finding a reliable intent data provider like Highperformr is crucial. You should know how they source their data and enrich them, ensuring they are real-time and compliant with privacy regulations.
Innovative use cases
Today, intent data is changing how businesses find new opportunities by tracking job changes, identifying event attendees, and monitoring research activity on platforms like G2 and other review sites. All these insights were nearly impossible to access in the past.
Beyond customer acquisition, intent data will play a key role in churn prevention by identifying early signs of disengagement. Other possibilities for the future include hyper-personalized marketing campaigns, dynamic pricing based on buyer intent, and AI-driven sales automation that engages prospects at the perfect moment.
The rise of diverse data signals
As businesses recognize the value of intent data and see measurable ROI, the demand for other data types like firmographic, technographic, demographic, and engagement data will also grow.
Companies will be more willing to invest in data providers that offer a 360-degree view of their prospects and combine multiple data signals in a single dashboard for more precise targeting and personalization.
Final recommendations based on business needs
Different intent data providers excel in specific use cases. Based on common business requirements, budget constraints, and scalability needs, Highperformr stands out as the best option for businesses of all sizes looking for a reliable intent data provider.
With real-time, first-party intent signals Highperformr combines intent, social intelligence, and lead enrichment to prioritize leads based on the most promising opportunities.
Whether you’re a startup or an enterprise, Highperformr is built to support businesses of all sizes. Book your demo today.
