"Intent data" has become a catch-all phrase in 2023. It means everything from "someone visited your pricing page" to "a mid-market CFO downloaded a whitepaper on our competitor's site last Tuesday." Those are wildly different signals with wildly different predictive power. If you're paying for the wrong kind, you're just buying noise.

The five signals that actually predict buying

  1. Job changes — A new VP of Marketing in their first 90 days is 3–5x more likely to buy new software than one at month 18.
  2. Funding events — Series A and B rounds consistently trigger a 6–12 month spending window.
  3. Tech stack changes — Removing a competitor, adding an adjacent tool, or switching CRMs all signal openness.
  4. Hiring signals — A company posting for three SDRs is about to buy outbound tooling. A company posting for a Head of Growth is about to rebuild its stack.
  5. Engagement on your own content — Still the most predictive signal of all. Known visitors to your pricing page convert at 8–15x cold rates.

What doesn't work as well as vendors claim

Third-party "content surge" data — the stuff sold by big intent providers — is real, but it's expensive and it tells you a company somewhere in this category is researching. It rarely tells you which person, and whether they have budget. For enterprise teams with large ACVs, that's enough. For SMB outbound, it's often an expensive lottery ticket.

The 2023 stack for small teams

You don't need a $60k 6sense contract. In 2023 a small team can build a working intent stack with:

Total monthly cost: under $500 for a team of 3–5 reps. That's the price point where intent stops being an enterprise-only game.

Timing is the whole game

An intent signal is worth something for about 72 hours. After that, your competitor has already called. The teams winning in 2023 are the ones who reduced the gap between signal and outreach to hours, not days. This usually means automating the trigger and the first touch, even if a human takes over from touch 2.

"Speed to lead doesn't mean speed on inbound forms. It means speed on signals. If your prospect just raised a Series B, being the first call matters."

How to start next week

Pick one signal. Job changes is the easiest. Export a list of your ideal customer profile, tag anyone who changed jobs in the last 30 days, and run a clean, honest sequence acknowledging their new role. Do nothing else differently. Measure the reply rate against your baseline. Most teams see a 2–3x lift on that single signal alone.