What is Buyer Intent?
Signals that indicate a prospect is actively researching or considering a purchase in your category.
Definition
Buyer intent captures the digital footprint of someone moving through a buying process. That includes searching for relevant keywords, visiting review sites like G2 or TrustRadius, reading competitor content, attending webinars, or downloading whitepapers. Intent platforms aggregate these signals across thousands of publisher sites and score accounts based on research intensity. First-party intent tracks behavior on your own site. Third-party intent tracks behavior across the broader web.
Why It Matters
Timing is everything in B2B sales. Reaching an account six months before they're ready to buy wastes effort. Reaching them two weeks after they've signed with a competitor wastes even more. Buyer intent data tells you which accounts are in-market right now, so you can prioritize outreach to companies that are already thinking about solutions like yours.
Example
Bombora detects that a target account has had multiple employees researching 'CRM migration,' 'Salesforce alternatives,' and 'HubSpot enterprise pricing' over the past three weeks. The intent score spikes from 40 to 85. Your SDR team gets an alert and moves that account to the top of their outreach queue with messaging focused on CRM switching costs.