How 3 Top Sellers Use Intent Data

You wouldn’t want to prepare a hearty home-cooked meal and offer it to someone who just finished dinner at a buffet; you’d want to give it to someone whose stomach is starting to growl. Sales is sort of like that too. Even when your product or service is amazing, you’re not going to have much success selling to people who aren’t currently in the market for what you offer.

That’s where intent comes in. With buying signals, you can see which companies have a current need for your solution, giving you a huge competitive advantage. It’s a powerful tool, if you know what to do with it. But like any tool, it gives you the best results when you know the tricks of the trade.

Nobody knows Intent better than Lusha’s sales team, so we asked them to share their top tips for using intent data to uncover demand.

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1. Use insights from intent for personalization and get a 400% connection increase.

– Tony Ramos, Cold BDR Manager

Intent signals are a core piece of what can turn a cold call into Warm Outbound. Sales reps working with cold leads are no strangers to getting hung up on in the first 5 seconds. It can be discouraging to rely on “spray and pray.” But with buying signals, you have relevancy and timing on your side, and that conversation gets a little easier.

In our own experience at Lusha, we use that intent data to offer a more personalized pitch on our cold calls. Based on the intent topics a prospects’ company has matched with, we can open the conversation with relevant topics and quickly figure out where their priorities are. When you can show up to a conversation and immediately offer something relevant within the first 30 seconds, a prospect is more likely to stay on the line and be open to a conversation.

We’ve only been using intent data at Lusha since October 2022, but it’s already the source of the majority of our leads. With Intent, we know we can count on being relevant to those prospects, and it makes a huge difference. When you can personalize your pitch, you can make a more immediate connection that opens doors instead of taking a shot in the dark. Just this year alone, our connection rate has increased by 400%.

2. Track topics like competitors or tools that integrate well with your solution.

– Jill Fama, SMB Account Executive

When you pick intent topics, it’s like searching for what your prospects are interested in. You can only track so many topics at a time, so choosing wisely is key. With intent you’ll be able to see what’s on your ICP’s radar. You get a peek into their buying process earlier than your normally would be able to and can see exactly what they’re interested in.   The challenge comes in narrowing it down to what’s the most relevant to you.

Often, you’ll see advice to select topics that relate directly to what you offer. But you can take it a step further. Say you sell a CRM software. You’ll get great results tracking topics like “crm system” or “sales process.” If you want to try a different angle, though, try tracking searches of a top competitor. If your prospects are searching for a competitor, then you know they’re looking for something similar to what you offer. Use that opportunity to come in and offer them something better.

Another strategy that’s been a good fit for Lusha is to target based on certain programs or softwares that typically fit our ICP. If we target based on a program that’s similar to our price point, we know that the prospect likely has the budget to invest in our product. Or if it’s a program we integrate with, we know we can be an easy addition to their tech stack.

3. Prioritize companies that search for  multiple relevant topics.

– George Nammour, Director of Sales and Business Development

Intent topics are scored based on the level of interest a company has in that topic. This directly correlates to how likely they are to purchase something related to that topic. The way the score is calculated is by comparing a company’s interest to all of the other companies in the database. So a company with a high score is researching a certain topic more than the rest of the companies typically do.

Let’s put that in more plain terms using the CRM example again. If a company that meets your typical customer profile has an intent score of 80 for the topic “customer relationship management (CRM),” then it means that they’re searching for that topic a lot more than other companies in the same sphere. Using this information, you can reach out to 3-5 potential contacts at that company location with confidence.

The score of intent topics allows you to prioritize your outreach and start with those companies that show the most interest. Those are the ones you’re most likely to meet in the right stage of the buyer’s journey . Those are the ones you should go after – the companies who are going to be active buyers.

It’s tempting to go for the company who scores highest on a single topic. But if you want the best prospect, prioritize those who match for several topics, even if they don’t score as high.  To expand on the example above, a company who scores 70 on “CRM best practices,” 62 on “Salesforce (CRM),” and 65 on “CRM software” is likely more ready to buy than a company that scores 80 on just “customer relationship management (CRM).”

This is just a taste of how you can use Intent data to find prospects who are most ready to buy. Join us for a free webinar on March 28th featuring a panel of experts from Lusha and our partner Bombora. We’ll be discussing how you can leverage intent data, stand out among other outbound efforts, prioritize your prospects, and identify what makes good intent data different. Register here.

Key Takeaways:

• Intent signals can be used to personalize your pitch, leading to warmer cold calls.
• Looking into topics like competitors or related tools can up your Intent strategy.
• The more topics a prospect scores on, the more likely they are to buy — even if they’re not the highest scorer for a particular topic.
• To learn more about buying signal secrets and using Intent to go outbound in 2023, sign up for our March 28th webinar with Bombora.