Sales Triggers vs. Intent Data

Intent data is data that captures signals of a person's or organisation's behaviour that indicate a potential interest in purchasing a product or service.

This data is generated by analysing the digital footprints that people leave behind as they interact with various digital channels and assets, such as search engines and websites.

There are two main types of intent data: first-party and third-party. First-party intent data is generated by a company's own digital channels and assets, such as their website or social media accounts. This type of data is particularly useful for understanding how customers interact with a company's products and services.

Third-party intent data is generated by external sources, such as data providers or publishers. This type of data is useful for understanding broader industry trends and identifying potential customers who are outside of a company's existing customer base. Intent data can be collected through a variety of methods, such as website tracking, IP address monitoring, and social media analysis.

Some companies use cookies or other tracking technologies to follow a person's online behaviour and build a profile of their interests and intentions. Other companies use natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to analyse text-based data, such as social media posts or email communications, to identify signals of intent.

The benefit of intent data is based on the premise that a person's online behaviour can reveal their interests and intentions.

For example, if someone searches for "best CRM software" or visits a CRM software vendor's website, it can indicate that they are interested in purchasing a CRM solution. This type of data is particularly valuable for sales and marketing teams, as it can help them to identify potential customers who are actively researching solutions or are ready to buy.

Intent data can be used to serve a number of purposes. Perhaps most obviously, sales teams can use intent data to identify potential customers who are actively researching solutions and prioritise their outreach efforts accordingly.

Marketing teams can also use this data to personalise their messaging and content to better align with a potential customer's interests and needs, while product teams might use intent data to inform their product development decisions, prioritising features and functionality to align with customer needs. However, intent data does have its limitations.

While perhaps a tried-and-test approach might appeal, intent data is fairly old-school in the sales industry now. Although it can provide valuable insights into a person's interests and intentions, this doesn't necessarily indicate that they are ready to make a purchase.

For intent data to be reliably useful, it needs to be used in conjunction with other types of data, such as demographic and firmographic data, which enable the user to build a more complete picture of a potential customer. And this is not a one-size-fits-all scenario either. With everyone in sales now looking for an edge that will take them to the next level, intent data is sadly being left behind.

Just because you read a blog to learn about how to write the perfect outbound email or the optimal ad frequency for LinkedIn, it doesn’t mean you’re interested in email outreach products or ad agency.

Getting the right balance of intent data, relevant to your company and sales team, needs a lot more focus to have any value. Sometimes there is no black and white way to measure someone’s interest in your product, so for success you’ll need to start looking outside of the box.

Sales triggers, event triggers, or sales trigger data, refers to a range of events that happen to a company, triggering an opportunity for a business change.

For a sales professional this can be gold dust as any such trigger can indicate the potential for upselling, new business, and customer acquisition.

At Selligence, we provide the industry-leading answer to sales triggers. We currently track 45 unique sales trigger events - but we go further than that too.

Within these individual triggers, we also recognise a further 71 sub-types. That means we can be delivering 116 sales trigger types to you on a daily basis.

To find out more about every trigger we track, click here.

Sales triggers alert you to outreach opportunities, so you can reach out as soon as ideal buying conditions arise for your prospect. They offer the earliest step in the customer journey for relevant outreach but can also offer market intelligence for competition monitoring too, providing insights and market trends for those monitoring their industry’s position.

Sales triggers are revolutionising the way companies approach sales and customer relationships. Understanding sales triggers, and being able to track them, is paramount to staying ahead in increasingly competitive times and is quickly becoming an integral part of the sales industry. In fact, using sales triggers, you can expect a 3-5x higher outbound success rate compared with other lead gen tools.

We like to think of the insights sales triggers offer more as pre-intent data, and so should you!

Sales triggers get you in the game one step earlier than intent data, and they arm you with the facts earlier than any other data can.

Sales triggers highlight when a business will be going through function spend in the next three to six months. So, rather than waiting for a prospect to show ‘intent’, sales triggers let you know in advance when you can expect to see that intent, allowing you to act on it earlier.

There are many advantages of using sales triggers, not least that they help you to separate hot leads from cold ones and help you avoid waiting in line for a piece of the action.

Reaching out to a company at the right time allows you to speak to decision makers when they have a need for a service or product, rather than trying to get them to consider spending when their need is unrealised or not as great.

Sales triggers get you into the action ahead of an intent data trigger – meaning you can beat your competition to the line with a three-month head start.