What is ABM Intent Data & How to Use It Effectively in Your ABM Strategy

What is Intent Data in ABM?

Intent data in ABM (Account-Based Marketing) refers to information that signals when a company is actively researching or showing interest in a specific product, service, or topic relevant to what you offer.

It helps you identify which accounts are ‘in-market’—meaning they’re more likely to buy—based on their online behavior, like what they search for, read, or engage with.

Rather than guessing who might be ready to hear from you, intent data lets you focus on those already showing signs they’re in the buying journey.

Here’s an example: 

Let’s say your company sells cybersecurity software. You have a target account list of 100 companies you want to close this year.

Out of those 100, only a handful are likely shopping for a solution right now.

But how do you find them?

Now imagine one of those companies has several employees suddenly researching “how to prevent insider threats,” reading whitepapers about “endpoint detection,” and comparing “cybersecurity platforms for mid-sized businesses.” That’s intent data at work.

It tells you:

“This account is showing real interest in what you sell, now is the time to follow up and engage.”

Types of ABM Intent Data

First-Party Intent Data

This is behavioral data collected directly from your digital properties. This includes how prospects interact with your website, social media pages, emails, landing pages, gated content, product demos, chatbots, or webinars.

• Where it’s collected from: Your CRM, marketing automation platform (like HubSpot or Marketo), website analytics (like Google Analytics or Hotjar), and product engagement tools.

Examples:

• A target account visits your pricing page three times in a week.
• Someone from a prospect company signs up for your newsletter and clicks on three nurture emails.
• A buyer watches your product demo video and downloads a case study.

This is the clearest signal of buying interest in your brand. It’s accurate, real-time, and tied directly to your content.

DB Nuggets → Use first-party data to score account engagement and personalize outreach with specific messaging based on what they’ve interacted with.

Second-Party Intent Data

This is essentially someone else’s first-party data that you have access to through partnerships or data-sharing agreements. It’s collected directly from another company’s digital property but made available to you.

• Where it’s collected from: Typically gathered from publisher sites, review platforms, or events where you sponsor content or have integrations. Sometimes acquired through partnerships (e.g., a co-hosted webinar with a media company or another vendor).

Examples:

• An account on your ABM list spends significant time on your partner’s website reading about similar solutions.
• A prospect downloads a whitepaper you co-published with a third-party research firm.
• An ideal buyer spends time comparing your tool to a competitor on a review platform like G2 or TrustRadius.

Second-party intent data helps expand your visibility beyond your own ecosystem. It shows intent from prospects who may not be on your site yet but are still exploring your space.

DB Nuggets → Use this data to proactively reach out to accounts that are showing interest in your category (even before they hit your website).

Third-Party Intent Data

This is aggregated behavioral data from across the web, collected by external intent data providers who monitor millions of websites, forums, and publisher networks.

• Where it’s collected from: Cookies, IP address tracking, ad networks, B2B content hubs, and proprietary data co-ops.

Examples:

• Top stakeholders in a company are searching for “best ABM platforms for enterprise” across various sites and articles.
• They’re reading blog posts about customer data platforms (CDPs) on industry blogs.
• They download multiple resources on “revenue attribution models” from third-party content networks.

This is more like an early signal system. It catches accounts that are researching solutions before they ever land on your site.

DB Nuggets → Integrate third-party data into your ABM platform or CRM to prioritize outreach to accounts showing early-stage intent signals.

Quick Recap

• First-party = They’re engaging with you.
• Second-party = They’re engaging with your partners or trusted platforms.
• Third-party = They’re showing intent across the web.

Related → How to Use Intent Data for B2B Sales and Marketing

Benefits of Using Intent Data for ABM

Hyper-Personalized Outreach and Campaigns

• Benefit: Send messages that directly match what the buyer is researching.

Intent data reveals the exact topics and keywords your target accounts are engaging with.

That context allows you to craft highly relevant messages tailored to what they care about.  From email subject lines to landing page content, you can align every touchpoint with the buyer’s current interest.

Example: If the data shows a prospect is reading content about “AI-powered lead scoring,” your outbound emails or ads can lead with exactly that benefit, rather than a generic product pitch.

Related → Understanding AI Lead Scoring: Definition, Benefits, and How to Get Started

Shorten Sales Cycles With Better Timing

• Benefit: Move deals faster by engaging when intent is high.

Intent signals tell you when an account is entering the consideration or decision phase. This gives your marketing and sales teams the power to intervene at the optimal point in the buyer journey.

If used properly, it leads to faster responses, more productive conversations, and fewer no-shows or stalled deals.

Example: Your SDR team can prioritize outreach the moment an account surges in activity around “customer service automation,” indicating they’re in the market for your solution.

Reduce Wasted Spend on Low-Intent Accounts

• Benefit: Make your marketing campaigns more efficient and cost-effective.

ABM budgets are often concentrated and high-touch. Every email, ad impression, direct mail piece, or sales call costs time and money.

Intent data ensures you’re spending that marketing effort on high-value accounts that are more likely to deliver ROI.

Example: Your marketing ops team can exclude low-intent accounts from your LinkedIn or programmatic ad campaigns, reallocating spend toward those showing strong signals across research platforms.

Related → How to Effectively Prioritize Accounts in Sales

Better Alignment Between Sales and Marketing

• Benefit: Unite both teams around the right accounts at the right time.

Intent data acts as a shared source of truth that both sales and marketing teams can rely on.

Instead of marketing sending leads based on basic metrics like form fills, and sales chasing a cold list, both teams work from the same prioritized account list, powered by behavioral insights.

Marketing nurtures with relevant content; sales follows up with context-aware conversations.

Example: If both teams see an account’s intent score spiking on “customer data platforms,” sales can prepare contextual outreach while marketing delivers retargeting ads and one-to-one content simultaneously.

Related → B2B Sales & Marketing Alignment: 7 Timeless Strategies for Growth in 2025

Discover New Accounts You Didn’t Know Were in Market

• Benefit: Spot buying signals before your competitors do.

In traditional ABM, you might rely on firmographic filters or ICPs to build a list, but those don’t tell you who’s ready now.

Meanwhile, intent data gives you behavioral evidence that a target account is actively researching topics related to your product or category.

This early visibility gives you a head start, giving you more time to educate them, build trust, and shape their perception of the solution and your product.

Example: Your Demand Gen team may find that a mid-market company outside your existing target list has started researching “RFP management software.” This is a strong buying signal that opens the door for outreach.

Related → How To Engage Buying Committee Decision-Makers Through Account-Based Marketing

How to Prioritize the Right Accounts with ABM Intent Data in 3 Steps

Define All First-Party Intent Signals

Start by cataloging every possible behavior a target account can take on your owned channels that could indicate buying intent.

Here’s what to include:

• Page visits (e.g., pricing page, demo page, case studies)
• Time spent on site
• Email opens/clicks from known contacts
• Webinar registrations and attendance
• Form submissions and gated content downloads
• Product trials or freemium signups
• Return visits from known companies (via reverse IP lookup or user tracking)

Next, create a unified view of these signals inside your CRM or marketing automation platform. You can use website tracking tools, email platforms, and product usage analytics to gather them.

Finally, integrate all these activities under each account to build a behavioral history.

Example: Let’s say a prospect visits your homepage → spends 6 minutes on your pricing page → returns three days later to download a whitepaper → opens two nurture emails.

This behavior shows that the account is warming up, indicating research intent and buying interest.

Assign All Intent Signals a Value

Intent signals are not equal across the board. Reading a blog post doesn’t hold the same weight as spending 10 minutes on the demo page or booking a webinar slot.

Once you’ve defined all your signals, you need to assign them relative weights or point values based on your sales cycle and how closely they correlate with buyer readiness.

Here’s an example:

Example: If a target account’s intent score rises from 30 to 75 in a single week, that spike indicates accelerating interest. You can flag this for your SDR team to act quickly.

On the other hand, an account with a stagnant score may not yet be ready for outreach.

Set an SQL and MQL Threshold

Once your scoring model is in place, you need to define what score range or behavior pattern qualifies an account as an MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) or an SQL (Sales Qualified Lead).

These thresholds should trigger handoffs between teams.

• MQL Threshold: A lead hits a certain score (say, 50+) and exhibits mid-funnel intent, like engaging with a webinar or reading a comparison guide.
• SQL Threshold: The score hits a higher threshold (e.g., 80+), and behaviors show high purchase intent, like requesting a demo, viewing pricing, or comparing vendors.

Example:

• MQL: Company X scores 55 after downloading a guide and opening 3 nurture emails. Marketing continues nurturing with case studies.
• SQL: A week later, they revisit the pricing page, trigger a Bombora surge for “AI compliance tools,” and someone fills out the demo form. Their score hits 90, pushing them to the sales pipeline. That triggers an alert to sales with a full activity summary.

7 Ways to Use Intent Data in Your Account-Based Marketing Strategy

Refine Segmentation and Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Beyond targeting known good-fit accounts, intent data also helps you discover new ones that fit your solution based on their active research behavior.

Over time, you’ll notice trends in which types of companies are researching your topics, what their triggers are, and which content they respond to.

How to apply it:

• Analyze which industries, roles, or geos are showing consistent surges for your priority topics.
• Identify net-new accounts showing early-stage intent—even if they’re not yet in your CRM.
• Feed refined audience segments into lookalike campaigns or outbound prospecting.

Personalize Website Experience Based on Intent

Your website is often the first real interaction potential buyers have with your brand. When you overlay intent data with web personalization, you create micro-targeted experiences that speak directly to their pain points and buying journey.

How to apply it:

• Use reverse IP lookup and account identification tools (e.g., Demandbase) to identify website visitors.
• Map visitor accounts to their known intent topics or surge keywords.
• Dynamically update homepage banners, headlines, and CTAs to match what they’re researching.
  • → E.g., a user from a surging account on “risk analytics” sees “How We Help Data Teams Automate Risk Reports” as the homepage headline.

Build Dynamic Ad Campaigns That Match Buyer Intent

Intent data can power precision-targeted advertising, letting you match ad creative to what specific accounts are actively researching, all in real time. 

Instead of broad campaigns, you serve precise, highly contextual ads to buyers during their consideration phase.

How to apply it:

• Sync surging topics with dynamic ad platforms like LinkedIn, Meta, or Demandbase Ads.
• Build creative sets based on topic clusters (e.g., “data governance,” “regulatory compliance,” “SOC 2 certification”).
• Use account lists + topic filters to ensure ads only show when both conditions are true (e.g., high-intent + in healthcare + mid-market).
• Test messaging variations by intent intensity (e.g., “introductory” for early signals, “demo CTA” for hot leads).

Related → Buyer Intent Explained: B2B Sales Signals That Convert

Feed Intent into Orchestration Platforms

At scale, ABM success requires automation, coordination, and intelligence, which is where orchestration platforms come in.

Feeding intent data into tools like Demandbase allows your entire GTM motion to respond to buyer behavior in real time.

How to apply it:

• Integrate intent data feeds into orchestration platforms that manage dynamic journeys, predictive scoring, and audience segmentation.
• Use AI models to adjust ABM campaign touchpoints based on signal changes: e.g., an account that stops researching “compliance automation” and switches to “SOC 2 frameworks” automatically sees different creative and messaging.
• Sync these insights across CRM and MAP platforms so marketing, sales, and RevOps see the same truth.

Related → Understanding ABM Orchestration for B2B Marketing

Prioritize High-Intent Accounts

When every account looks like a potential fit, intent data helps you separate those curious from those committed.

Start by identifying and ranking accounts based on surge scores—i.e., intent indicators that suggest an increase in research activity around specific topics relevant to your solution.

How to apply it:

• Use platforms like Bombora to monitor “surging” interest in your core topic clusters.
• Rank accounts based on recency, frequency, and volume of signal activity.
  • For example, a company reading 10+ articles about “data security for fintech” over 7 days is likely much closer to buying than one passively viewing 1–2.
• Build a tiering model (e.g., Tier 1: high-intent & ICP fit; Tier 2: medium intent, etc.) to help sales and marketing prioritize time and resources.

Related → The Undeniable Impact of Account Tiering for a Modern ABM Strategy

Optimize Content Marketing Strategy Based on Buyer Topics

Let intent data inform what topics your content team should write about, based on what your target audience is actually researching right now.

How to apply it:

• Analyze top surging topics across accounts in your TAM.
• Identify content gaps where you don’t have assets that map to active interest areas.
• Create blog posts, whitepapers, landing pages, and playbooks aligned with those rising themes, e.g., a spike in “SOC 2 Type II vs ISO 27001” becomes a perfect explainer blog.

Identify Churn Risk or Expansion Opportunities in Existing Accounts

Intent data can reveal negative signals, too. If a customer starts researching your competitors or exploring how to “replace [your product],” that’s an early indicator of dissatisfaction or churn risk.

How to apply it:

• Set up alerts or tracking for competitor keywords, “alternatives to [product]”, or “how to cancel [product name]”. 
• Monitor current customers in your ABM list for intent surges on competitive keywords or replacement topics.
• Flag these as potential churn risks and trigger CS outreach or upsell/cross-sell conversation.

Also consider detecting surges in complementary use cases (e.g., “workflow automation” if you sell collaboration tools) and pitch relevant upgrades.

Best Tools for ABM Intent Data

Demandbase: Intent-Based Account Journeys and Orchestration

Demandbase offers a comprehensive ABM platform with deep capabilities in real-time intent monitoring, dynamic orchestration, and pipeline acceleration.

It captures both third-party and proprietary intent signals to inform account prioritization, personalize engagement, and align GTM teams.

Key Features:

• Intent Topics: Tracks over 12,000 customizable topics across the web, identifying accounts researching content aligned with your solutions.
• Predictive Account Scoring: Combines intent, engagement, firmographics, and CRM data to rank accounts based on their buying stage.
• Journey Builder: Automatically moves accounts between funnel stages based on changing intent behavior and interaction patterns.
• Sales Intelligence: Provides sales reps with account-level intent summaries and recommended actions directly in their workflow.

Demandbase excels in orchestrating entire account journeys based on shifting intent. This makes it ideal for mature teams looking to automate personalization and tightly coordinate sales and marketing actions in real time.

Bombora: Third-Party Intent from Publisher Networks

Bombora is the industry standard for third-party intent data, drawing from a massive co-op of over 5,000 B2B publisher websites. It captures behavioral signals based on content consumption trends across the internet.

Key Features:

• Company Surge: Measures the intensity of research around specific topics at the account level, comparing it to a baseline of normal activity.
• Topic Taxonomy: Offers over 10,000 pre-defined B2B topics to track signals across verticals.
• Data Co-op: Access to behavioral data from trusted, privacy-compliant publisher partners (not scraped).
• CRM + MAP Integration: Push surge data into Salesforce, HubSpot, or Marketo for seamless campaign activation.

Bombora helps you identify previously invisible buying signals long before a prospect reaches your site. It’s essential for uncovering in-market accounts and expanding your total addressable market (TAM) early in the funnel.

6Sense: Predictive AI & Intent Scoring

6Sense is an AI-powered ABM platform that combines buyer intent data, predictive analytics, and multi-channel orchestration to drive pipeline from cold to close. It’s especially strong in predictive buyer journey modeling, helping you act at just the right time.

Key Features:

• AI-Based Buyer Detection: Identifies anonymous buying behavior across multiple sources and predicts where an account is in its journey.
• Intent Network Signals: Aggregates third-party signals across the web and combines them with first-party behavior (web visits, email clicks, etc.).
• Keyword Clusters: Tracks specific keyword groups that align with your core value prop or product categories.
• Segment Builder: Allows you to dynamically build audiences based on a combination of behavior, intent, and ICP filters.

6Sense is ideal for teams that want advanced intent modeling and a predictive engine that tells them who’s likely to convert next. Its strength lies in coordinating multi-touch campaigns based on AI-projected outcomes.

G2 Buyer Intent: Tracks Software Buyer Behavior

G2 Buyer Intent taps into the behavior of millions of software buyers researching, comparing, and reviewing tools on the G2 platform. It’s unique because it captures bottom-of-funnel intent, signaling high purchase readiness.

Key Features:

• Category Views & Comparisons: Know which accounts are viewing your category, looking at competitors, or comparing alternatives.
• Profile Views & Review Engagement: Alerts you when a buyer reads reviews on your product—or even clicks the “Request a Demo” button.
• CRM Alerts: Pushes buyer behavior into Salesforce or Slack, giving reps real-time visibility.
• Competitive Monitoring: Understand what prospects are reading about your competitors and tailor your pitch accordingly.

G2 is essential for late-stage buying intent, especially in the software space. If an account is actively comparing tools in your category, it’s a clear signal that sales should act now.

ZoomInfo: B2B Contact & Company-Level Intent

ZoomInfo blends contact intelligence, technographics, firmographics, and intent data into a single platform. It’s especially valuable for mapping intent signals to decision-makers and org charts, bridging the gap between interest and access.

Key Features:

• Intent Topics (via partnership with Bombora): Tracks third-party content consumption across topic clusters.
• Intent Scoring with Contact Mapping: Maps surging intent back to specific job titles and personas within the account.
• Real-Time Alerts: Notifies users when key accounts or job functions begin researching intent topics.
• Workflows & Plays: Automates outreach with predefined cadences based on intent triggers.

ZoomInfo makes intent data actionable at the contact level, helping SDRs and AEs target the right person within the right account, right when interest peaks.

Forget Cold Calls. Demandbase Warms Up the Right Accounts for You.

Gambling is bad… If so, what do we call cold calling?

You’re dialing into companies hoping someone, somewhere, just happens to be thinking about a problem you solve.

All of this just to deliver your ‘pitch’—and *silence.* Or worse, ‘we’re not interested.’ 

It’s demoralizing for reps, inefficient for marketers, and expensive for your pipeline. And yet, this is how traditional ABM often plays out.

Unfortunately, hope ≠ signals.

But here’s the switch:

Right Place, Right Time, Right Buyer: Demandbase Makes It Happen

Demandbase helps you identify, prioritize, and engage accounts that are already in-market, already exploring your solution space, and already halfway through their buying journey.

• Score and Segment Like a Pro. Demandbase’s AI-driven scoring ranks accounts by fit and intent. That means your team focuses its ABM efforts on the most promising targets (not just big names).
• Bridge Sales and Marketing Around the Same Data. Everyone (sales, marketing, SDRs) works from the same real-time data. That alignment means less friction, fewer missed handoffs, and more revenue.
• Know Where Each Account Is in the Buying Cycle. Whether an account is in research mode or nearing decision, Demandbase knows—and adapts your campaigns in real time. Emails, ads, landing pages, and sales plays shift dynamically based on where they are in the journey.
• Integrate With Your Stack. Demandbase plays well with Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, LinkedIn Ads, and more, so you can plug in insights without starting from scratch.

Read Case Study → Case IQ levels up their ABM strategy and operations with Demandbase

Want to be first in line when they’re ready to buy? Use Demandbase.