The intent conversation has, for too long, been about the data. We hear it constantly. Customers come to us having invested significant budget in intent platforms and are still asking the same question: why aren’t the signals translating into revenue?
The instinct is to go looking for a data problem. Better coverage. Cleaner signals. More keywords. And yes, data quality matters. But working across the thousands of GTM teams that rely on Demandbase every day, the data is rarely the culprit. What’s missing is something harder to fix than a noisy dataset: a shared understanding of what signals actually mean, and what actions that data should instantaneously trigger across every team.
Here’s what we observe over and over. Marketing sees a signal. It lands in a dashboard. Someone exports it to a CRM field or routes it to an SDR queue. The SDR calls. The prospect doesn’t respond. Marketing starts investigating lead quality. And somewhere in that sequence, the most important context – who should do what, and when, on which channel to move the prospect ahead – is never considered at all.
