Using Intent Signals to Find the Top 1% of UK Companies

Intent signals can be an effective way for B2B marketing teams and sales teams to identify buyers that are interested in your product. Read on to discover more about B2B buyer intent data, and the benefits and drawbacks associated with it. We’ll also explore how Beauhurst’s growth signals can do the job of intent data more accurately and efficiently.

What is intent data?

Intent data reveals a person or business’ intention to buy a good or service, based on their online behaviour. There are three main types of intent data: first-party, second-party, and anonymous.

Different types of intent data

First-party intent data: All the information you collate on known contacts. Common examples of this kind of data include interactions with your website, social media, and marketing campaigns.

Third-party intent data: Information that can be gathered from other online sources, usually mined by bespoke intent data providers.

Anonymous intent data: This involves identifying and mapping a visitor’s IP address to their company name at a later date (either through first-party collection or via a third-party website).

Examples of common intent signals

Some common behaviours to look out for that signal purchase intent include:

• Searching for products or services like yours
• Researching your competitors
• Reading related or relevant content to your business

How effective is intent data in B2B sales?

Key benefits of intent data

Identify new leads, before your competitors: Knowing who is researching your product enables you to contact potential customers earlier.

Prioritise leads by their intent: You can also use intent data for lead scoring (deciding which prospects should be contacted first, based on their interest and likelihood of buying).

Learn more about your target audience: By classifying leads according to their intent, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of your ideal customer profile (ICP).

Personalise your outreach: Be better prepared for that initial sales call or email by knowing what topics and questions your leads are researching.

Drawbacks of intent data

Inaccurate third-party data: If using third-party intent data, there’s never a guarantee that the information you have is verified or up-to-date, which can lead to costly mistakes.

It’s limited to online behaviour: Basing decisions solely on online behaviour has its risks—face-to-face conversations can greatly influence customer opinions and behaviours, so intent data will only ever give you a partial picture.

You can’t rely on intent data alone: A salesperson also runs the risk of not reaching enough of their audience if they only focus on intent data (and are thus overly-targeted in their approach).

It’s retrospective data: Intent data can only show you past behaviour and intentions often change throughout the buyer journey. Predictive datasets, on the other hand, indicate future potential.

Beauhurst growth signals

How can you predict that a business will need your product or service in the future? Here at Beauhurst, we look for certain trigger events that indicate a company is growing fast. Many of these signals are more subtle indications of intent, and are hence likely to fly under the radar of your competitors.

Below are some example alternatives to B2B intent data (all of which are tracked on the Beauhurst platform):

• Actively hiring
• Increase in headcount
• Recent fundraising
• New key hire
• Expansion mentioned in the news
• New office location

Advantages of our growth signals over traditional intent data

Better timed approach: Beauhurst supports your lead generation efforts early on in the sales cycle, by helping you to identify companies that are high-growth or demonstrating ambitious growth plans. This means you can reach out to potential business customers at the right time, just before they need your product.

More accurate data: Our in-house Data team collects information from an extensive range of sources, manually verifying it and ensuring it’s kept up-to-date. This means you can adopt a more targeted approach in your sales and marketing efforts, without worrying if you’re basing decisions on inaccurate information.

First-mover advantage: By setting up real-time alerts for collections of companies on our platform, you’ll be the first to know when potential buyers complete a new fundraising or make a senior hire, getting ahead of your competition.

How to use Beauhurst growth signals

Using Beauhurst’s Advanced Search tool, you can combine hundreds of criteria, to create a custom lead list of high-growth UK businesses that match your ICP. Search by a company’s location, sector, stage of evolution, fundraisings, and much more.

Then, prioritise your leads by their intent. For instance, you could sort companies by their latest funding round or further narrow down your search to only include those that are actively hiring. You can even add your list of prospects to a Collection, setting up alerts to be informed when a business meets one of your top triggers. This way, you can be sure you’re approaching your leads at the right time, and increase your conversion rates in the process.

Once you have a list of target accounts, our in-depth company profiles will give you contact details and LinkedIn pages for key decision makers. Plus, with a timeline of the company’s fundraisings, innovation grants, accelerator attendances, new hires, press mentions, and more, your sales reps can quickly prepare for client-winning conversations.

With all this information available in one place, Beauhurst will also help you personalise your sales outreach. Always start your cold call or email with the reason you’re getting in touch—in this case, the intent signal—which should address the ‘why you, why now’ question. Develop this to highlight related areas that you can help with…

e.g. “Congratulations on the recent £2m fundraising. I read that it was to boost your expansion into the UK market. Sounds like an exciting juncture in your growth. I wanted to learn a bit more about how you were planning on as part of this expansion?”

The result?

With Beauhurst’s alternative to intent data, you can ensure you’re approaching your best leads, at the right time. And by using targeted outreach, you can demonstrate your understanding of potential customers, as well as their primary use cases and pain points. This will mean more meetings booked, in fewer attempts.

“With the help of Beauhurst, we’re able to effectively approach around 250 prospects a week. And the only reason that number isn’t higher is because we don’t have the capacity to deal with all the responses.”

Pete Rowe | Co-Founder | Talenty