The real secret to 3rd party intent data

Here’s a secret for you on this Sunday morning:

3rd party intent data should be used more for driving customer retention and expansion vs. new logo.

Keeping your customers and growing them should be at the top of your organization’s list of priorities every year. The problem I often see, unfortunately, is that we don’t provide enough support for our account managers and customer success managers.

3rd party intent is great data for these teams to stay ahead of churn and be proactive in having expansion conversations.

There are two types of 3rd party intent I want to highlight:

G2 Intent Data

This is going to be more related to anyone working at a SaaS company. But G2 has some of the best intent that often goes unused for software companies.

Within G2, you can create, filter and set up intent notifications for several different activities. The most important piece of data as it relates to AMs and CSMs is the ability to track when customers research your competitors, compare you to competitors or search for alternatives to your product.

If you can, one, alert your AMs and CSMs when key customers research competitors and two, enable them on how to act on this data, it allows them to stay ahead of churn risk or address any potential issues.

The second piece of intent data from G2 is setting up alerts for when customers begin researching specific products. If a customer shows a surge of interest in a product line they’re not currently using, your AMs and CSMs can be proactive and begin having discussions on cross-sell opportunities.

Keyword Intent Data

I’d consider G2 intent data as tier one and any keyword intent data provider as a tier two option. Platforms that use this type of intent data are Bombora, 6sense, Demandbase, RollWorks and more.

Keyword intent is basically a surge in activity from a person or people at a company for a specific keyword or keyword phrase. A keyword could be a brand name, like “Clari”, and a phrase is something like “forecast management.”

I wouldn’t necessarily trigger alerts or activity off of just one keyword or phrase. Instead, what I’ve done in the past is bucket keywords and phrases into groups corresponding to your products, use cases and competitors.

Doing it this way gives you a better idea of overall intent in a specific product, use case or churn risk by surfacing intent in multiple related keywords and phrases.

Just like with G2, this can be used in the same manner to save customer churn and increase cross-sells.

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