What your ideal customer really means
Intent has become B2B marketing’s favourite shortcut. The promise is seductive. Find the accounts that are “in market”, focus your effort there, and watch conversion rates climb.
The problem? B2B buying doesn’t work like that. Intent exists. But not in the neat, predictable, high-confidence way it is often sold.
First party intent is the only signal you really own
Let’s start with what is real. First party intent is what happens in your world. Your website, your content, your events, your emails. It tells you which accounts are engaging with you, what they are looking at and how their behaviour is changing. When you layer in IP lookup and tracking, you start to see patterns. Companies coming back. Specific pages being revisited. Topics gaining traction.
This is useful. It reflects genuine interaction with your brand. But even here, it is only a signal. Not a decision.
Third party intent is inference dressed up as certainty
Third party intent platforms – including those powered by Bombora data and large programmatic networks – track behaviour across publisher ecosystems, mapping content consumption to company IP addresses and assigning “intent” to accounts. On paper, it sounds powerful. In practice, it is inference layered on inference.
Someone, somewhere in that organisation has been reading about a topic. That doesn’t mean the business is prioritising it. It doesn’t mean there is budget. It doesn’t mean there is a project. Yet these signals are often packaged as buying readiness.
The programmatic promise and the reality
Many large media networks now feed this data directly into targeting. Accounts are flagged as “in market” and automatically prioritised for spend. It feels efficient. It feels data-driven. But what you are really doing is chasing behaviour you don’t fully understand, based on signals you cannot fully see. Used carefully, this can add a layer of direction or aid account selection. Used blindly, it becomes expensive noise.
Intent: the metric that came before the outcome
Here’s where it gets more uncomfortable. Intent has not just shaped targeting. It has helped justify an entire layer of martech investment. Before revenue is realised, before pipeline is proven, intent gives you a metric to point to. Accounts are “warming”. Signals are “increasing”. Scores are “improving”. It feels like progress. It looks like measurement. More often than not, it becomes the justification for further investment. More data. More platforms. More layers of interpretation. All before the only metric that really matters – revenue – is proven.
Engagement is real. Just don’t call it intent
There is, however, a metric that genuinely matters: Engagement.
Understanding how accounts interact with your brand over time is incredibly valuable. It shows whether you’re building awareness, whether your messaging is landing and whether you are gaining traction within the buying group.
This is measurable. And when tracked properly, it can be linked to pipeline and revenue. The problem is when engagement is relabelled as intent.
A spike in activity does not mean a buying decision is imminent. A quiet account does not mean there is no opportunity. Engagement is a leading indicator of relevance and presence. Not a definitive signal of purchase.
The 95:5 problem no one talks about enough
Here is the part that breaks the model. Ehrenberg-Bass tells us that only 5% of your audience is in market at any given time. So even if your intent data was perfect, which we’ve just agreed it isn’t, you would still be optimising around a tiny fraction of your future revenue.
The real growth sits in the 95%. The accounts not signalling anything. The ones you still need to influence. If your strategy is built around intent alone, you are systematically ignoring most of your opportunity.
Buying groups are messy, not measurable
Intent assumes that buying is linear and observable. It is neither. B2B buying groups are complex, political and often chaotic. Different stakeholders move at different speeds. Priorities shift. Projects stall. New voices appear. There is no clean signal that captures this.
An account can look “cold” and suddenly move. Another can show strong intent and go nowhere. Trying to map this to a neat score may be comforting – but it is also misleading.
Individual behaviour is not organisational intent
Most intent data is driven by individual activity. One person downloads a report. Another reads an article. A third attends a webinar. None of this guarantees alignment at an organisational level. Self-directed research can easily disguise what is actually happening inside the business. Curiosity is not commitment. Interest is not investment. Without context, intent signals can send you in the wrong direction. With buying groups growing, it is easy to get misdirected
Deals do not fail because marketing stopped
A large proportion of B2B deals do not close. They stall, pause or disappear entirely. Budgets get cut. Priorities change. Internal alignment breaks down. None of this is visible in intent data.
And crucially, none of it means you should stop marketing to those accounts. If anything, it is the opposite. Consistent presence is what keeps you relevant when the opportunity returns.
So, using intent as a trigger to start or stop activity misses the point entirely.
Clicks don’t close deals. Conversations do.
Intent is largely digital. It tracks clicks, downloads and page views. But deals are not won in dashboards. They are won in conversations. In meetings. In internal discussions between stakeholders. In the moments where risk is assessed and decisions are made. Intent may help you time outreach. It doesn’t replace the need for strong sales engagement – ensuring teams are equipped to have the conversations that actually move deals forward.
So, is intent real?
Yes – but not in the way many assume. First party intent is valuable. Third party intent can add colour. But neither should be confused with certainty.
What to do instead
Use intent as one input, not the deciding factor. Focus on engagement as your true leading indicator. Build your own view using first party data, IP tracking and real interaction signals. Layer in third-party data where it adds value, but sense check it against what you know.
Continue to invest in the accounts that are not “in market”. Because that is where most of your future revenue sits. And prioritise what actually drives outcomes – insight, relevance, and conversations that move deals forward.
The bottom line
Intent is useful. It is not decisive. Engagement is powerful. But it is not intent. And if you confuse the two, you risk building a strategy that measures activity instead of driving growth.
If you’re looking to cut through the noise and focus your ABM efforts on what actually drives growth, you can explore how we approach it here.