Intent data is information showing a prospect's likelihood to buy, inferred from behavior such as pricing-page visits or whitepaper downloads, and typically supplied by an intent tool that watches one slice of that activity and flags the accounts that appear to be researching your category.
Intent data gives you one axis of the Demand Compass, readiness, and usually a noisy version of it. It says nothing about whether the account has heard of you, which is the difference between a relevant conversation and an ambush. The Compass refuses to act on intent alone, because intent without awareness is the cold spam the last era trained buyers to delete. Awareness without intent is vanity. The accounts worth acting on are the ones where you see both.
Almost nobody tries to measure awareness; almost everybody thinks they have already solved readiness, usually by buying an intent tool and switching it on. The tool is real. The reading is where it falls apart, in three predictable ways. Treating one signal as readiness: a single pricing-page visit can be a misclick, a competitor, or a job seeker killing time, and it is the repeat that means something. Reading the signal at the person instead of the account, when the individual emitting it is often not the buyer. And ignoring decay: a docs visit this week is live, the same visit seven months ago is archaeology.
Coverage is the other limit. Readiness has to be captured across the whole dark channel, not just the corner an intent tool happens to watch, and across your whole market, not just the fifth you have already mapped. Most teams do not have a signal problem; they have a looking problem. The signals were already capturable inside their own stack: the docs read twice, the repository starred, the stack-revealing job post, the pricing page hit five times from inside one company.
From The Demand Compass, by David Moreira and Marcos Stubrin. All terms · The book
