How to transform
intent into
action

Don’t rush your preparations for the ball

Even miracles take a little time. Every team that's struggled to get ROI from intent data has one thing in common: they tried to activate before their setup was tuned up.

The signals and accounts were real, but the workflows were broken, the data was siloed, and nobody had mapped out what a buying group needs to move towards a decision.

The prep work has got to happen if you want results that don't reverse at midnight. Before getting into the weeds of workflows and automation, figure out what you can provide to reduce friction in the buying group’s journey – because the wrong message sent at the wrong time to the wrong person can seriously erode buying group alignment. Answer these 3 questions to the right to get clear on what's needed.

A lot of teams jump from "we have intent data" to "let's send demo emails to in-market accounts", without planning or prepping for a journey that takes time to mature. But skip this and you pitch too early in the game – and end up with a big, fat waste of intent data.

1

What does every member of the group need to understand and feel confident to move forward?

STEP 1

2

Who should be in the buying group that isn’t engaged yet – and what content will bring them in?

3

What signal tells you the group has advanced, and what should trigger when it fires?

Sync up your stack

Only 38% of CEOs report having the right data and insights to achieve their commercial goals. The chances are they do have that data, they just can't see it.

If your goldmine of insights sits alone in a dashboard, disconnected from your other platforms and activities, you’ll never make use of them. That’s why you’ve got to sync up systems to surface intent signals and give them a clear direction.

Mature intent activation setups usually have a third-party intent provider, a revenue content platform, and a CRM – all connected and speaking to one another.

More often than not, workflow design (not commonly touted technical issues) sits at the heart of integration frustration. When we’re setting up intent tools, the most important question to ask is: “When a signal fires, how do we build up a picture of the buying group – and what happens, in what order, to help them align?”

Once that’s clear, get to building. And try to minimize manual intervention. The more hands-off your setup, the quicker signals turn into (the right) action.

We have to be careful how we present intent data it's a clue to intent, not the answer.

Jon Miller
Co-founder of Marketo

_{Source: Woods, S. (2024). The new B2B GTM playbook: An interview with Jon Miller. Velocity Partners.}

STEP 2

The buying stage intent map

Fill this in before you configure anything. For each buying stage, think about the buying group as a whole as well as the individuals within it.

If you can't fill in the "intent signal trigger" column, that's the gap to fix in your platform configuration before moving to Step 2. If you can't fill in "who needs to believe it", that's the buying group visibility problem to fix first.

(If not, your answers will be lost to the void forever…)

Woah there! Don’t forget to: Fill this out → Download it → Exit

Patience is the most underrated skill in ABM. A breadcrumb of engagement isn't a signal of readiness. Your job is to follow the trail, not act as if the door is already open. Sales earns its moment when the buying group starts to align and not when the first hand goes up.

Judit Szabo
Director of AI – ABM Transformation, Sage

Pull inspiration from several places

You can't put your faith in intent signals gathered from a single vantage point. That's the reason over half of B2B marketers lean on multiple data sources.

Third-party intent signals are the spark, the outward sign someone’s beginning to explore the problem you solve.
First-party signals show if you’ve fanned the spark into a flame – if they’ve connected you with solving that problem.

Combining first and third-party data boosts the chances of identifying a pattern of genuine intent, giving you the invitation to pursue and woo your perfect-fit accounts.

Without first-party signals	With first-party signals
Acting on a spark as if it's a flame	Third-party spark fanned into flame by your own data
SDRs reaching out to buying groups at the wrong stage	Outreach triggered by buying group behaviour, not a single data point
Closing content served to accounts still figuring out whether they've got a problem	Confidence in where the group is in its deliberation before activating
No feedback loop on who's in the buying group or what they care about	A feedback loop that reveals who should be in the group and isn't

STEP 3

Turn the signal into an enchanting experience

You're at the ball. You've spotted a group quarrelling about who to dance with. One of them steals a glance in your direction; your signal to convince the group you belong on their card. Win them over, and you’re ready to waltz. Miss the moment, and the music moves on without you.

Buying groups are funny beasts: individually, there's clarity. Collectively, it's chaos. When a group comes together, they're pulling in a million directions – dealing with conflicting priorities, struggling to align, failing to decide.

To restore order, every person in the group needs a bespoke experience that fits them perfectly, one that addresses their unique questions and concerns.

Back in ye olde days, before digital self-education became fundamental to B2B buying processes, that experience was delivered face-to-face by

sales teams. Now, content shoulders that load – and that's where the glass slipper comes in.

Dynamic content that adapts to individual-level signals gives every person in the group the peace of mind that leads them to alignment.
But responding to account signals with buying-group-aware experiences at speed and at scale is not as simple as bippity-boppity-boo.

In most companies, a team of craftsmen works tirelessly to deliver deep personalization. Either that or it's scaled at the sacrifice of quality.

82% of B2B buyers expect tailored sales and marketing experiences, but without automation (built to distribute human-designed narratives), meeting that bar will never be more than a fantasy.

An intent signal is an early warning that an account may be entering the market – not a lead to chase, but a catalyst. It’s your cue to engage the wider buying group through account-based branding and to empower the stakeholders who’ll carry your story from the inside. Do this well and you don’t compete for a place on the shortlist - you become the de facto standard the shortlist is measured against.

Robert Norum
Propolis ABM & Demand Strategy Expert, B2B Marketing

STEP 4

What signal-driven experiences look like in practice

An enterprise financial services account and an SMB technology company hit the same campaign. Same asset, different experience.

The financial services account sees the compliance case study, the regulatory risk framing, proof points from similar firms at similar sizes, with each buying group member seeing the content that speaks to their specific concerns. The tech account sees something entirely different, but just like the financial services account, it's perfectly personalized and relevant to every person deliberating.

Even though it feels like it, neither version was built by hand: the content adapted automatically the moment the account (and the buying group member) was identified.

Buyers are sophisticated. They’ve been through eight or nine purchase cycles on average. Vendors that can’t provide clear answers upfront aren’t even making the shortlist.

_{Source: The Timeline for Influencing B2B Buyers Is Shrinking — 6sense}

With the right tool (cough cough, shameless plug up ahead), identifying accounts and tailoring content can happen even without a form fill. With reverse IP lookup, Turtl's Dynamic Personalization can do this in real-time for every account that hits your ecosystem.

The intent signal, the content experience, and the engagement data all connect in the same session – and feed more signals back into your CRM for even deeper account intelligence and personalization that gets stronger and sharper every time.

The better the experience, the easier the buying group aligns, and the bigger the chance you're top of their shortlist when the clock strikes midnight.

Kerry Cunningham
Head of Research & Thought Leadership, 6sense

When intent signals work as intended, big things start to happen.

Case in point? Kantar’s story.

View case study

What signal-driven experiences look like in practice

An enterprise financial services account and an SMB technology company hit the same campaign. Same asset, different experience.

Even though it feels like it, neither version was built by hand: the content adapted automatically the moment the account (and the buying group member) was identified.

Buyers are sophisticated. They’ve been through eight or nine purchase cycles on average. Vendors that can’t provide clear answers upfront aren’t even making the shortlist.

With the right tool (cough cough, shameless plug up ahead), identifying accounts and tailoring content can happen even without a form fill. With reverse IP lookup, 'Turtl's Dynamic Personalization' can do this in real-time for every account that hits your ecosystem.

The better the experience, the easier the buying group aligns, and the bigger the chance you're top of their shortlist when the clock strikes midnight.

When intent signals work as intended, big things start to happen.

Case in point? 8x8's story.

View case study

_{Source: The Timeline for Influencing B2B Buyers Is Shrinking — 6sense}

Kerry Cunningham
Head of Research & Thought Leadership, 6sense

What signal-driven experiences look like in practice

An enterprise financial services account and an SMB technology company hit the same campaign. Same asset, different experience.

Even though it feels like it, neither version was built by hand: the content adapted automatically the moment the account (and the buying group member) was identified.

Buyers are sophisticated. They’ve been through eight or nine purchase cycles on average. Vendors that can’t provide clear answers upfront aren’t even making the shortlist.

The better the experience, the easier the buying group aligns, and the bigger the chance you're top of their shortlist when the clock strikes midnight.

When intent signals work
as intended, big things start
to happen.

Case in point? OneAdvanced’s story.

View case study

_{Source: The Timeline for Influencing B2B Buyers Is Shrinking — 6sense}

Kerry Cunningham
Head of Research & Thought Leadership, 6sense

Polish up your sales handoff so it sparkles

The most expensive friction point in most intent workflows is the handoff between Marketing and Sales, with over 53% of companies reporting broken handoffs. In early-maturity intent activation setups, the signal fires, it gets routed to an SDR, and the SDR calls cold, armed only with a company name and an intent score they don't fully trust. The pitch lands in the lap of someone still working out whether they've even got a problem worth solving.

A great handoff looks like Sales having the intel they need to join the buying group's conversation where the group is at – not where we wish they were.

The goal when a signal fires is to show up as a useful resource while the buying group is deliberating – with intelligence about where the group is, and content that helps them deepen their alignment. This kind of intel is what restores Sales’ faith in Marketing.

When signals enable Sales to sell better, to move deals faster, and to raise close rates, it’s crystal clear what value they (and we) bring to the table. To nail your handoff, an alert to Sales should include:

Which buying group members are engaged – and who's still missing. The members you can see tell you part of the story. The members who should be there but aren't tell you the rest.
Which content each member engaged with, at what depth – the assets they explored reveal what matters in their decision-making process.
Which specific topics held their attention – this tells you the problem they're trying to align on, and where they sit in the journey.
What they skipped – as important as what they read.
Return visit patterns – an account that came back three times is a different conversation than one that bounced.

Most GTM teams aren’t struggling to find signals anymore. They’re struggling to act on those signals fast enough to influence the buying journey. Teams need modern workflows that are AI-driven, that turn insights into coordinated action across sales and marketing, and give leaders clear visibility into what’s actually driving ROI. That visibility allows teams to invest more confidently in what’s working, stop what isn’t, and continuously optimize pipeline efficiency. The GTM advantage comes from operationalizing intelligence, not just collecting it.

Rachel Truair
CMO, Demandbase

STEP 5

The signal trigger audit

It's time to map your current workflow. Every "N" in Automated is friction and every gap in Owner is pipeline risk. Steps 4–7 are where most intent workflows break. These steps determine whether your intent data helps a buying group align – or just produces dashboards.

(If not, your answers will be lost to the void forever…)

Woah there! Don’t forget to: Fill this out → Download it → Exit

266

is the average number of touchpoints it takes a B2B SaaS company to close a deal.

Source: Atli, E. B2B customer journey touchpoints: The impact of deal and company size. HockeyStack Labs.

I think it's still very much underestimated how messy buying journeys actually are inside large organisations. Different people get pulled into the conversation at different times, usually with completely different concerns sitting underneath it. What intent data has really exposed is that what looks like buying momentum externally is often still a group of people internally trying to make sense of something that hasn't fully formed.

Fiona McKenzie
President, Europe, Marketbridge

Tell your success story through commercial results

It's a tale as old as time. The CFO asks what you’re getting for the price tag, the CRO needs to see which accounts it influenced, and Procurement wants to hear the logic behind continued investment. These are career conversations dressed up as data questions, and you’ve got to be able to answer them with confidence.

This is the step that changes how the room sees and values you. When you start packaging your impact in cold, hard commercials, the conversation about the value you're bringing to the table ends for good.

We've got to ditch the attribution models built on assumptions. It takes the average B2B SaaS company 266 touchpoints to close a deal, which means estimating revenue influence based on last-click or first-touch is nothing more than wishful thinking.

The CFO can challenge an argument but what they can’t challenge is the line from intent signal, to buying group engagement, to account progression, to pipeline growth. If you can prove your intent investment consistently gets you onto (and to the top of) buying group shortlists, you’re defending revenue.

And the best validation that your investment was money well spent? Sales are fighting your corner. They’ve seen the growth impact of intent signals used right, and they want more of what Marketing’s been delivering. That carries a lot of weight when reinvestment is being weighed up.

Having the support of the sales team is what gives Marketing commercial confidence, clear ownership, and the kind of cross-functional credibility that makes renewing your intent data contract a non-event.

STEP 6