7 Best Tools to Uncover Intent Signals

7 Best Tools to Uncover Intent Signals

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Imagine not knowing when your prospects are ready to make a purchase. That could make you lose out on sales opportunities that can contribute to your revenue. 

However, you can avoid these issues using the right intent signal tools. In this article, we will explore the top 7 tools that can help you uncover intent signals. 

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What's an Intent Signal Tool?

An intent signal tool refers to the technologies used to reveal the digital footprints made by an employee or a company to show their need for specific products or services. These signals could be observable activities or intelligence that often indicate whether a prospect is ready to make a purchasing decision. 

However, not all intent signals are created equal. They mean different things and require different actions to leverage their full potential. That said, here are five types of intent signals: 

• Engagement Signals: These show the prospect’s specific actions which indicate their interest to buy a product or service. Some examples include downloading an ebook, attending conferences, and more. 

• Hiring Signals: What kind of role is the company hiring for? A hiring spree in a particular field shows that they are looking for solutions in that area. For instance, a company hiring a marketing team could indicate they need a new marketing solution. 

• Technographic Signals: What technologies does the company use? Does it require a change or an improvement? If a company complains about a specific pain point and you know the right technological solution, you can leverage the situation to your advantage.

• Company Activity Signals: Is there any newsworthy activity that indicates the company’s interest in making a purchasing decision? If yes, leverage it to your advantage. It could be a new funding event, expansion or relocation update, layoffs, and more. 

Recommended Reading: 53 Sales Triggers to Find Clients (and How to Leverage Them)

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Top 7 Tools to Uncover Intent Signals

Now that you know what an intent signal means, let’s look at the top 7 tools to help you uncover these signals. 

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1. RB2B

Best for: Identifying anonymous web visitors

Rating: 4.6 out of 5 on G2

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Overview

If a person visits your website, that’s a sign they are likely interested in your products or services and have buyer intent. But how do you identify them? 

RB2B identifies your website visitors, enabling you to figure out who’s most likely to buy from you. To start with this tool, install the site’s script in your website header. This script enables RB2B to combine software cookies, IP addresses, and device IDs that identify your web visitors. Then, it collects their contact details (emails, LinkedIn profile URL) and pushes the information to your Slack account.

Thanks to this information, you can identify your warmest leads and strategize how to pitch to them. RB2B only works for US-based visitors. As a result, you may not have adequate information about a web visitor outside this location. 

Key Features

• Identifies anonymous website visitors
• Obtains your visitors’ contact information 
• Integrates with Slack
• Works for US-based visitors

Pricing

RB2B offers a free version and a paid version that costs $99 per month

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2. Unify

Best for: Identifying prospecting companies

Rating: 4.8 out of 5 on G2

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Overview

Unify leverages your website, G2 listings, and champion tracking to identify your prospects, particularly companies intending to make a purchasing decision. This AI tool provides key information, showing you the right time to reach your target audience.

With a 120+ million database, you can identify these high-quality leads and obtain their contact information (work emails and phone numbers). This enables you to reach out to them and accelerate your sales pipeline. 

Unify integrates with eight tools like Slack, 6Sense, Salesforce, G2, and Clearbit to enhance your sales process. 

Key Features

• Leverages your website to identify prospecting companies
• Provides the right signals to reach out to your prospects
• Features a vast database that provides prospect’s contact information
• Integrates with eight tools such as 6Sense, Slack, G2, and more. 

Pricing

Unify’s growth plan starts at $700 per month while the other plans — pro and enterprise — require a custom quote.

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3. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Best for: Identifying prospects on LinkedIn, whether high-key accounts or companies

Rating: 4.3 out of 5 on G2

Overview

Next on the list is LinkedIn Sales Navigator. This platform provides buyer intent alerts through prospect interaction to signal their level of interest in your company. 

Whether they like your ads, make a comment, follow your company page, or perform other relevant activities, each action indicates an intent signal. 

These alerts, based on LinkedIn Insight Tags, are of two types: 

• Leadership alert: This shows you when an owner, partner, or VP views your company’s page or website.

• Employee alert: This tells you when a non-leadership employee views your LinkedIn company’s page or website. 

Additionally, you can leverage the product category intent filter to know whether a prospect has interests in a specific product or service. For instance, if a prospect has visited various product pages, the LinkedIn Sales Navigator will highlight such prospect’s activities to enable you to tap into those opportunities. 

The platform also adds similar buying intent signals into its search filter to alert users. This filter enables you to search for accounts indicating interest while searching for new opportunities. The buyer intent feature is only available to Sales Navigator Advanced and Advanced Plus edition users. 

Key Features

• An account Hub feature that shows your prospect’s level of interest in your business
• A product category intent filter that shows you clues on a prospect’s intent towards a specific product or product category
• A buyer intent search filter to search for accounts showing intent and discover new opportunities
• An alert on the homepage that shows whether a leader or an employee engaged with your company’s page or website

Pricing

Sales Navigator’s core plan costs $99.99 per month. Meanwhile, the advanced plan costs $169.99 per month and the advanced plus plan requires a custom quote.

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4. Pocus

Best for: Providing real buying signals that generate warm leads

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 on G2

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Overview

Pocus provides real buying signals for modern go-to-market (GTM) teams to build their sales pipeline and close more revenue. Its wide range of features enhances your prospecting efforts, enabling you to know who to target during your sales process. 

With the Pocus inbox feature, you can scan your inbox to identify who’s engaging with your website, content, or products. This enables you to identify new intent opportunities and target the right account at the right time. Additionally, you can leverage the account research feature to provide a 360° view of your key prospects. You get to know who to reach out to and why you’re reaching out to them. 

Pocus also offers a signal-based playbook library to optimize your sales efforts and impact revenue. Powered by third-party companies, these playbooks streamline your sales operations while ensuring you hit your target. 

For instance, while you can use the website traffic playbook to identify a high-value prospect that visits your website, you can use the outbound playbook to generate more qualified leads. 

You can also receive reports about your sales team’s performance, enabling you to know how their efforts impact their revenue. The intent-based software integrates with various tools such as Airtable, BigQuery, Clari, Gong, HubSpot, Outreach, Slack, and more. 

Key Features

• Provides a comprehensive overview of your prospects including why you should reach out to them
• A signal playbooks optimize your sales efforts.
• Integrates with various software like Salesforce, HubSpot, Zapier, and more. 

Pricing

Pocus’ pricing information is available on request. 

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5. PredictLeads

Best for: Sourcing Company Intelligence Data

Rating: 4.9 out of 5

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Overview

PredictLeads is a company intelligence data platform that provides company signals to enhance your sales efforts. It provides signals that help identify qualified companies, understand your target prospects, and improve your outreach efforts. 

With PredictLeads, you can track companies’ past activities and receive alerts about their current state to fully understand how they work. These insights help you to understand how to approach the company. 

You can also identify growing companies with signals such as hiring intent, location expansion, technologies used, product launches, and more. This helps you find the right context to use to engage your target prospects.

The company intelligence platform also helps you understand the supply chain relationships going on among your prospects. For instance, you can receive alerts when your prospects sign a new client or map out their networks.

Key Features

• Track the company’s past activities to understand its history
• Identify growing companies with signals such as new customer signed, location expansion, and more
• Provides insights about the supply chain relationship that involves your prospects.

Pricing

PredictLead’s professional plan costs $500 per month. 

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6. Trigify.io

Best for: Identifying sales triggers

Rating: Not available

Overview

Trigify offers sales triggers to help you engage with the right prospects. A unique advantage of this product is the pre-intent data that enables you to foresee customer’s needs before they enter the market. 

You can also receive sales trigger alerts about when a potential client matches your ideal customer profile. These trigger alerts range from hiring data to role changes, new announcements to tracking accounts. 

Here is a quick summary of how Trigify works:

• You choose a sales trigger event and define the criteria for your ideal customer profile
• You monitor the market to identify and automate new opportunities
• The software compiles a list of your targeted leads enriched with validated contact data
• You push the list into your preferred outreach platform to contact your prospects.

Furthermore, Trigify integrates with various platforms to automate your sales processes and streamline your workflow. Some examples of these integrations include Airtable, Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesloft, Apollo, Hunter, and more. 

Key Features

• Offers pre-intent data to foresee your prospect’s needs
• Receives trigger alerts when it finds prospects that fit your ICP
• Provides an enriched lead list that features prospect’s contact details
• Integrates with various platforms such as Hunter, Apollo, HubSpot, and more. 

Pricing

Trigify’s four-tier pricing plan includes: 

• Solo plan for $185 per month
• Growth plan for $495 per month
• Scale plan for $715 per month
• Unlimited plan for $1148 per month

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7. Crunchbase

Best for: Sourcing company intelligence

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 on G2

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Overview

Our final option on the list is Crunchbase. The AI-powered company intelligence platform offers valuable company insights that enable you to make informed decisions. It provides real-time alerts on trigger events such as fundraising, acquisitions, industry events, revenue data, and more. 

With these data-driven insights, you can target the right account at the right time, build your sales pipeline, and strategize how to reach your prospects effectively. 

Crunchbase also features an all-in-one prospecting tool that enables you to identify new prospects and connect with key decision-makers. With its advanced search feature, key signals, and automatic recommendations, you can identify accounts most likely to buy from you.

Additionally, you can monitor industry trends, tracking various news and signals to identify market changes within the industry. This provides you with a competitive advantage you can leverage for your business. 

Overall, Crunchbase remains one of the top tools for accessing real-time alerts about specific companies, improving your sales efforts, and growing your revenue. 

Key Features

• Offer real-time alerts on trigger events like fundraising, revenue, and more.
• An all-in-one prospecting tool to find new prospects and connect with decision-makers
• Market Research to track the company’s activities and identify industry changes

Pricing

Crunchbase’s three-tier pricing plan includes: 

• Monthly plan for $99
• Annual plan valued at $49 per month 
• Enterprise plan that requires a custom quote. 

Recommended Reading: 9 Ways to Leverage AI for Sales

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Factors to Consider When Choosing an Intent Signal Tool

Choosing the right B2B intent signal tool is a strategic decision that should align with your business objectives. It’s not about riding along the hype but discovering what solution works best for you. We’ve narrowed down these five factors you should consider when shopping for an intent signal tool. 

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1. Data Quality

Before you sign up for a particular intent signal solution, you need to ensure it provides quality data that are accurate and recent. Nothing beats having an accurate buyer intent data provider that can deliver reliable information about your prospects. 

Since their information can affect how you plan to reach your prospects, you should check their track record. Visit review sites such as G2, Trustpilot, and more to determine whether they truly deliver accurate data. 

Similarly, you should select a tool that delivers recent data. If the information is about six months old, chances are the prospect has made a purchase, making your outreach efforts late. Hence, the solution must provide relevant data that reflects current market conditions and suit your needs. 

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2. Data Analytics and Reporting Capabilities

Data collection from various sources is just the first step. This data is only valuable when you analyze it to find patterns and insights. Otherwise, it’s just a piece of information in a spreadsheet. 

An effective intent signal solution must have analytic features that enable you to find meaningful patterns. For instance, if a company announces an expansion to new offices and your solution indicates they made a similar announcement the previous year, that’s a pattern you can leverage. 

Combine that signal with firmographic data to determine how your solution can help them. For instance, if you supply office equipment, this may be a good time to reach out to the prospects. 

Additionally, the intent signal tool must have a robust reporting feature that enables you to determine the effectiveness of your campaign performance. This enables you to know whether your outreach efforts need improvement or not. 

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3. Data Enrichment Capabilities

Every intent signal provider must go beyond providing the search intent data. After all, you will need a lot more information other than the target company’s name. An intent signal provider with data enrichment capabilities provides these pieces of additional information to your list. 

Some of this information can include:

• Employee name and job title
• Their valid email address and phone number
• The company’s profile includes its annual revenue, valuation, number of employees, and technographic (technology used) details.

So, before you choose a particular solution, you must ensure that they provide enriched details that provide insights about your prospects and let you reach out to them. 

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4. Compliance

Don’t forget data compliance and privacy regulations when choosing an intent data provider. Institutions around the world have laws such as GDPR, CCPA, or SOC 2 to protect people’s personal information. 

If you’re collecting people’s information to sell to them, you must ensure that the intent data provider complies with these data regulations. Otherwise, it could land you in serious legal issues even if you purchased from a vendor. That’s why you should work with a data vendor that complies with these rules. 

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5. Integration Capabilities

A great intent data solution shouldn’t only be a tool that stores your prospect’s information but also connects the valuable data to other systems. This streamlines your workflow and helps you do your job efficiently. 

Some common integrations the solution should integrate with include CRMs, sales engagement platforms, data management software, and more. Hence, choose a solution that streamlines your current sales operations and accommodates future changes. 

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Finding the Right Partner to Uncover Intent Signals for Your Business

Utilizing these tools to its full potential can be a daunting task. That’s why you have ColdIQ to ensure you don’t miss out on future sales opportunities. 

Our sales experts leverage these AI sales tools to look out for intent signals that impact your revenue positively and grow your business. Book a call today to get started!

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FAQs

What are Intent Signal Tools?

Intent Signal Tools uncover the observable activities or intelligence that often indicate whether a prospect is ready to purchase a product or service.

What’s the Best Intent Signal Tool?

Each intent signal tool has its unique features and benefits. Select one that aligns with your business goals, team size, use cases, and other variables.

Who Can Use Intent Signal Tools?

Any expert across different fields can use intent signal tools to determine when a prospect is likely to make a purchasing decision. Whether it’s marketing and sales teams, recruiters, office equipment suppliers, investors, and more, leverage the insight and take the required action to generate sales.