s e s s e c o r M p B III 7 A t e r a h P T Intent Data (3rd Party) When an account is ‘surging’ on a topic you care • Anonymous data isn’t actionable. Even the Is the company showing signs that they’re in the about (e.g. your industry or a specific competitor), most popular intent data-vendors provide data market right now for solutions like yours? these vendors notify you that they suspect the time that is only partially actionable. It’s anonymous may be right to reach out to the account. This idea third-party data at the company level, without Some companies are using third-party intent data appeals to marketers and sales execs, as used details on WHO at the company is exhibiting the to augment their engagement data. This is correctly you can hypothetically reach the right behavior. Once you know a company is surging information collected about a person or company’s person at the right company at the right time. for a particular product, what do you do next? activity occurring on other sites, including specific That’s the holy grail of personalization, and it’s why Who do you go after? If you sell to large articles read, content downloaded, site searches, 33% of companies said they plan to invest ‘more’ enterprises, you need to know exactly which and more. or ‘significantly more’ in intent data monitoring contacts to reach out to. solutions over the next 12 months (SiriusDecisions Vendors like Bombora, Prelytix, and The Big Willow Command Center™, Oct 2017). • Low volumes. Most critically, the likelihood that work with ad networks to aggregate and track one of your accounts is surging at any given activity across B2B websites, while others, such But a word of caution: don’t rely overly on intent time is low. At Engagio, in any given two-week as Madison Logic, TechTarget and G2Crowd, track data for account selection. period, on average 2.46% of our accounts are content consumption locally on their sites. demonstrating they’re ‘in-market.’ If only 25 out • Matching inaccuracy. Match rates tend to be of 1000 are surging, what do you do with the between 40-90% between the data vendor’s other 975? “ All enterprise IT vendors sell hard report and your account list. This can result in to the same 5,000 companies. false positives, indicating the wrong account If an account is truly surging, then you really want is surging. to know about it. But, you simply can’t count on it So intent becomes key: get to them to reliably fuel most of your ABM efforts. when they’re actively thinking of • The taxonomy of surging topics may not match your kind of solutions.” your business. If you sell security software, it may not be helpful to know that a company is Henry Schuck, researching general security-related topics at CEO & Co-Founder, DiscoverOrg any given time. 42