Buyer Intent

What is Buyer Intent?

Buyer intent is an inference, not a fact, and treating it as a fact is the most common way teams waste it. What you observe is behaviour — pages read, terms searched, reviews compared, content downloaded, questions asked — and from that you estimate whether a buying process is underway. The estimate is far stronger when several independent sources agree: a third-party surge on your category, plus repeated visits to your pricing page, plus a new hire in the relevant role is a very different signal from any one of those alone. Intent also decays quickly. A surge that is sixty days old is usually noise, because either the evaluation finished without you or it never began. The operational discipline is therefore to rank intent by observed conversion, act inside days rather than weeks, and always pair intent with fit — an in-market account that will never buy from you is not an opportunity, it is a distraction.

Why it matters

• Surfaces accounts in active evaluation that would otherwise stay invisible until a form fill.
• Multi-source agreement is dramatically more reliable than any single intent feed.
• Value decays fast, so intent is only worth buying if the team can act on it within days.

Use cases

• Prioritisation. In-market, ICP-fit accounts move to the top of the queue this week.
• Play selection. The topic driving the surge decides which message and asset get used.
• Spend allocation. Paid budget concentrates on accounts already researching the category.