Glossary · Data & enrichment
What is intent data?
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Definition
Intent data: Signals that a company is actively researching solutions in your category — third-party browsing patterns, content downloads, job posts, recent funding, or stack changes. Used to prioritize prospects within an ICP.
Intent data comes from three buckets. First-party intent: your own analytics, such as who visits your pricing page. Second-party intent: data your partners share. Third-party intent: vendor-aggregated browsing signals across the web. Practical use: rank ICP-matched accounts by intent strength, then sequence the high-intent ones first.
What are the types of intent data?
First-party intent comes from your own channels: website visits, content downloads, product sign-ups and replies. Second-party intent is another company's first-party data shared with you, for example by a partner or review site. Third-party intent is aggregated by vendors from activity across many websites and sold as account-level signals.
What counts as an intent signal?
Anything that suggests a company is moving toward a purchase in your category: repeat visits to your pricing page, research on competitor or category topics, a new leader hired in the buying team, relevant job posts, a funding round, or a change in the tools they use. Several weak signals together beat one strong guess.
- Website: pricing or comparison page visits, demo-page views, returning visitors from one company.
- Hiring: job posts for the team that would use your product, or a new head of that function.
- Company events: funding, expansion into a new region, a merger.
- Technology: adopting or dropping a tool that yours replaces or connects to.
- LinkedIn: someone engaging with your posts or viewing your profile.
How do you use intent data in LinkedIn outreach?
Use intent to decide who to contact first, not to replace targeting. Start from your ideal customer profile, rank matching accounts by signal strength, and put the strongest into an outreach sequence. Reference the trigger only when it's public and natural, such as a job post or funding announcement, never private browsing behaviour.
What are the limits of intent data?
Third-party intent is usually account-level and probabilistic: it says a company may be researching a topic, not which person or why. Signals go stale quickly, and providers model them differently. Treat intent as a ranking input, test whether high-intent accounts actually reply more for you, and check how each provider collects its data.
Related terms and pages
- Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
- A specific, tightly-defined description of the company and person profile most likely to buy your product. One of the strongest predictors of outbound reply rate.
- Data enrichment
- The process of taking a partial prospect record (just an email, or just a LinkedIn URL) and filling in firmographic, contact, and behavioral data from third-party sources to make it actionable.
- LinkedIn automation
- Software that performs LinkedIn outreach actions — connection requests, follow-up messages, profile views, InMails — on your behalf, on a schedule and within volume limits.
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