Fit vs. Intent: What Really Drives B2B Growth?

Questions we will cover:

1) What is the real difference between fit-based and intent-based targeting, and which one should marketers rely on more?

My view is that fit shows which companies are fundamentally aligned with your product, even before signals appear, while intent shows who is researching right now. Fit gives scale and predictability; intent gives timing. I am looking forward to hearing your perspective.

We will then explore:

2) When is intent data genuinely useful and when does it fall short?

Where has it helped revenue and where has it misled you?

3) How do you define and prioritise fit in your targeting strategy?

How do you identify the right accounts before they show intent?

4) How do you decide where to invest between capturing existing intent and creating demand among high-fit accounts that are not yet in-market?

Guests

• Amber Sellens, Global Portfolio Manager – Digital Marketing at Shell

• Anna Laurila, Head of Enterprise Marketing at Meltwater

• Francesca Rinni, Head of Marketing at TÜV SÜD

• Kaynan Kaplan, Digital Marketing Manager at Introhive

Transcript

Joaquin Dominguez (00:00)

welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing Futures. Today we are tackling one of the most important, often misunderstood debates in modern B2B marketing.

which is fit versus intent targeting

Francesca Rinni (00:12)

in

Joaquin Dominguez (00:12)

as marketing teams face increasing pressure to deliver pipeline while also building sustainable long-term growth the question becomes should we prioritize who is a good fit for our product or who is actively showing buying signals right now in this episode we'll explore how marketers balance these two approaches combining their predictability of fit

with the timing of intent and what this means for how we define audiences, allocate budget, and ultimately drive revenue. But before we dive in, I'd love for our guests to introduce themselves and share a bit about their background and current focus. So maybe Anna, would you like to start?

Anna (00:57)

Yes, thank you. Thank you so much for having me. So my name is Anna Lorrilla and I'm based in San Francisco, California. I oversee Meltwater's enterprise marketing in Americas and I'm very happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Joaquin Dominguez (01:13)

Awesome, welcome. Kanaan, would you like to introduce

Kaynan Kaplan (01:16)

Yeah, thanks

Joaquin Dominguez (01:16)

yourself?

Kaynan Kaplan (01:17)

for sure. Thanks again for inviting me. This is really an exciting opportunity to be here and talk to you about this stuff. Yeah, my name is Kainan Kaplan. I'm the digital marketing manager at InterHive. So I lead all of our inbound, all of our digital efforts, especially our targeting, as you kind of mentioned.

Joaquin Dominguez (01:35)

Welcome, welcome, Kenan and... Yeah, Frantiska, welcome.

Francesca Rinni (01:39)

Yeah.

Yeah. Thanks for the invitation and nice to know all of you. So I work at Toothsood and I'm responsible for marketing for the management services and security cyber suite division. My role is to act as the bridge between the regions, the headquarters, the product owners and the marketing hubs to support globally the grow of the sales and the company itself by managing concrete communication and marketing initiatives.

Joaquin Dominguez (02:06)

Well, thank you so much. Great introductions. Let's start with the core question. What is the real difference between fit-based and intent-based targeting? I can give you my perception, but...

I would love to hear yours. In my opinion, FIT helps understand which companies are fundamentally aligned with our product, often before they enter the market. And Intent, on the other hand, tell us who might be actively researching right now. So very keen to know if you agree with my definition and how do you see this in practice.

Anna (02:38)

Yeah, I definitely agree with your definition. I think fit tells you who you should care about and then intent tells you when to act. So it's really core to understand the ICP and the account fit first. And that's the core of everything. then then understand when to reach out can be based off of the intent data.

Kaynan Kaplan (03:03)

Yeah, I would agree completely, Anna. If the wrong people are showing intent, it almost doesn't matter.

Anna (03:09)

Yeah.

Kaynan Kaplan (03:10)

So you always got to start with the fit, make sure that you're looking holistically as well, right? Because I think fit is not a binary thing. I always look at it as sort of like a bullseye. And then there's the people in the middle. And then it kind of expands out to like, there's still a fit, but they're not perfect.

And those nuances can be very small. And you really need the time and the data to go back into to see who is your actual best customers, not just from closing them, but all the way to who churns and who is most likely to get an upsell and all of those things.

Francesca Rinni (03:43)

Yeah, actually, agree as well. Fit-based targeting for me is fundamental because it allows us to earn the name within the shopping list of the buyers. So it allows us to position the brand to demonstrate our expertise, to build credibility within the right accounts, even before they want to start actively demanding our service.

Intent-based targeting, on the other hand, is critical for the short-term performances. Usually they are more related to short-term leads generation. So I think that a good strategy is a combination of both. Brand awareness is usually more related to fit-based, while the intent-based is critical to concretely support the sales in the short-term.

Amber Madsen (04:31)

Amber Madsen, really excited to join the conversation today. And I'm with Shell and the global portfolio manager for digital marketing. I would absolutely agree that with your definitions of fit and intent, with the overlaying differentiator being maturity.

I think when it comes to either business or marketing maturity, so either the maturity of your customer or the maturity of your marketing organization, fit and intent can mean very different things. But I absolutely agree directionally with fit being your ICP and intent being a timestamp or, you know, direction for action.

Joaquin Dominguez (05:11)

That's a really interesting perspective and we will dig a bit deeper into FIT and the nuances of doing FIT-based targeting for a huge company like Shell in a second. But before we get into that point, I would love to dig deeper into Intent specifically, okay? Because Intent data has become a major part of modern B2B strategies, especially with ABM platforms and third-party providers like SixSense and Demandbase.

But there's also lot of debate around its reliability and limitations. Where have you seen intent data genuinely driving results? And where has it fallen short or even been misleading in your marketing strategy?

Anna (05:51)

I've personally seen success when we time, let's say we have accounts that we've been trying to acquire for years and we might take a pause in outreach, whether it's marketing or sales side of things. And then we get the intent data and then we are able to time the efforts and outreach when they are entering the market that

said, I think the big challenge with in that data is, or actually I think there are multiple and I can go through all of those. So one large and big challenge in enterprise marketing

Amber Madsen (06:31)

Okay.

Anna (06:33)

is that sometimes we don't know the context. Sometimes we get data that there is in then shown in this city at this company. And if we take

enterprise accounts such as Amazon. If we see in that based action in Seattle, where the headquarters is, there might be thousands, even tens of thousands of contacts that might be causing the intent data. For example, for us, we have multiple different departments that are our ICP and ideal customer profiles, which means then that it could be.

thousands of different people. And if we do plank outreach to all those people, it is really needle in a haystack. And the other challenge that we see is sometimes when intent data captures really research behavior, not necessarily buying readiness. So if we see the intent, it might be that the customer is already in purchase state or past that.

when the intent data is shown and then we are already too late. With longer sales cycles, it's easily missed if we only rely on intent data. So we already missed the bus. Oftentimes there are RFPs being put out. They even prepared the RFPs based on some specific conversations with solution providers.

And if we don't capture it there, if we are not part of those conversations at that stage, we miss the bus. sometimes, or you could even say oftentimes, that's already when intent is shown, that might be already too late.

Joaquin Dominguez (08:17)

100 %

Anna (08:19)

as mentioned, can definitely see success when we have, for example, invited people to our events based on the intent data.

but they have to be within our target accounts. So the fit needs to

Joaquin Dominguez (08:31)

Yeah.

Anna (08:32)

be there, but we select who we invite based on the indent data. So the timing might be fitting for them to

Joaquin Dominguez (08:40)

Mm-hmm.

Anna (08:40)

come to our events. So yeah, I think.

Joaquin Dominguez (08:45)

100%. Yeah.

There is a combination of fit and intent and some nuances as well, especially when you're targeting large accounts. What about the rest? What do think about, where have you seen intent data driving results and also falling short?

Kaynan Kaplan (09:01)

I think for me, where it's always been really successful is the stuff that's easier to track, right? So like job changes, public announcements, anything that like you can just see publicly, it just tends to be very

Amber Madsen (09:11)

Thank you.

Kaynan Kaplan (09:18)

accurate and it tends to work, right? If somebody just moved on your job, you go and talk to them, they're gonna be...

more receptive for specific conversations. I think we're personally, I've seen it fall short, is more of like the six sense kind of third party intent data where it's like, this person is looking for this thing. I think Anna made a great point where like, you don't know who that person is. So it's an office and maybe it's the headquarters, maybe it's not even the right office that's showing intent.

And then two, the intent itself is very murky, right? Like if you actually look behind the scenes on how it actually works, it's very like, I would say it's hit or miss. Like I would be surprised if it was better than like a 50-50. But I'm

Joaquin Dominguez (09:57)

Mm-hmm.

Kaynan Kaplan (09:58)

curious about what everybody else has experienced with that has been.

Amber Madsen (10:01)

Yeah, I would agree with that. Intent data is only as smart as the measurement culture behind it, right? So kind of carrying on from my prior point around maturity, intent definitely works best in mature categories and mature buying teams where research behavior actually maps to a real purchase motion. In less mature markets or less mature companies, it's often just learning, not buying. And if your marketing org isn't mature enough to validate incrementality,

over credit intent in multi-touch models and under fund the programs that actually create future demand. And so you're ending up really emphasizing activities that aren't driving revenue. I think the best way to go back and identify that is to work with the sales organizations and reverse engineer what drove revenue. right? You should be

including this in your planning. You should be including this in your fit conversations. Intent shouldn't be driving fit, but fit should help to reiterate and justify intent. So where we've seen it be really successful is when you are, when we've gone back and done essentially a sales post-mortem.

when we've gone through and we've reverse engineered that revenue stream and identified that actually 20 % of total revenue was impacted by some sort of digital connection. And when we take a look at that, they all had this thing in common.

Joaquin Dominguez (11:36)

Hmm.

Amber Madsen (11:37)

And so that is a reliable intent metric or intent marker. Whereas, what I jokingly call Jackson Pollock marketing,

where we just kind of spread paint all over the canvas and see where the footprints go, that ends up being where you can start, but it's often not the best place to stay.

Francesca Rinni (12:00)

Yeah, agree with all of you and I will add three points. So the relation with the sales team, it's critical for us. I mean, we have a B2B environment and as we have a very long contract life cycle that can last up to two years sometimes for the first contact and the first commercial appointment up to the sign of the contract. I mean,

the relation and continuous feedback with the sales team is fundamental. Otherwise, I mean, we are blind as marketing team because we cannot stop at the lead generation, but we need to track the entire funnel to ensure that our investments are worthy. The second point is that for me, interns are more successful usually when they include the new products. Okay. So people is more...

like able to look for new products and to be contacted immediately once they are starting looking for some info like technical information or everything on new products while the traditional

Amber Madsen (13:06)

you

Francesca Rinni (13:07)

products usually it's more complicated because the majority of the times they are simply looking for like regulations or changes or details. so it's most of the times for me

I'm mostly focusing on the new products or with the potential growth of these products. And the third one is interesting because I follow the entire globe and in terms of GDPR restrictions, I mean, we are a German company. my God, mean, working in Europe, it's totally different than working in the US or working in India or working in China. So unfortunately, it's not that easy everywhere.

catch the right data and to use the data because we really need to be super-compliant and respectful on the GDPR regulations. So unfortunately, sometimes even if you see some data, then you are not allowed to use it, especially as a marketing team. And that's really a pity for us.

Joaquin Dominguez (14:05)

And can you give an example of what kind of data sometimes you see that you can't use? Or I don't know.

Francesca Rinni (14:10)

Yeah, for example

webinars. Okay, so we do a lot of webinars to inform the audience of like new regulations, new rules on technicalities about our products. So you have the full list of the registrations and the attendance, but you can contact only the ones that agreed on be contacted. And usually it's like less than 5 % of the total of the attendance.

So you have the full list because they registered and they of course say yes, you can take my information. But then at the end, you cannot contact them. And it's like, my God. Yeah.

Joaquin Dominguez (14:48)

That's a very good example. Yeah. And what about feed-based targeting? Because we know that defining the right accounts upfront is arguably one of the most critical parts of any strategy, especially in long and complex cell cycles. How are you defining feed today? What signals? You gave some hints, like having conversations with cells, for example, was really important to capture those signals, signals that you can use

on intent, to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and to demonstrate that those are signals that you can use maybe more like intent data, but also

Amber Madsen (15:24)

Thanks.

Joaquin Dominguez (15:27)

fit based signals, those that are fundamentally a good fit for you, those accounts. What kind of frameworks are you using to identify the right companies before they show any intent?

Anna (15:39)

for me, I've always done pretty significant research before starting any strategies or any program plans. So basically to really dig into deeper who are the buyers, who should be the ICP, what type of accounts convert, but also expand and retain, what verticals they might be at, what

company size, employee size, revenue size, and what solutions each type of account are using, buying, expanding or retaining. So I would say significant research into that would be the first step and then understanding the parameters from there.

and then building the lists, oftentimes employee size, revenue size, and then also verticals and then buyer persona are the main drivers. So to really understand the ICP, but historic revenue data, sales feedback, and really the business data is used for, or to identify patterns there.

Amber Madsen (16:47)

Yeah, absolutely. I was going to say, you know, if you can't define your fit without intent, your go to market strategy isn't a strategy, it's a reaction engine. And so, you one of the most expensive mistakes is confusing interest with ability to implement. And so I would also say at an organization similar to what Francesca was mentioning, a global organization, we don't have just one fit, right?

And even for one single product, we could have multiple approaches for the same account based on the relationship to that product. So one of the examples that I have is, if we could have an account that is a customer of one of our products, a competitor of another, a supplier of a third. you know, and we have a five layer supply chain.

And so when you're defining that, first off, it's not as easy as, hey, I want to target this domain. We need to figure out what region, we need to figure out what product, we need to figure out what the of the commercial marketing strategy is for that space. And then a lot of the time, it's going and talking to that customer group directly.

It's going and speaking to the folks that we're trying to, usually through a third party proxy, right? We're not showing up at their offices saying, you know, tell us your pain points, but we're working with a McKenzie or we're working with, you know, a Deloitte or an agency of some sort that goes through and does those interviews and identifies those pain points. And then we take that into consideration for both our product placement.

as well as our fit strategy. Sometimes it comes back that actually this business idea isn't gonna work in this region because of what we've learned during those. And then that changes the strategy for our commercial business.

Kaynan Kaplan (18:45)

Yeah, completely agreed with both of you. think starting with the business data and doing that like reverse engineering on who buys and why. But I also think it's really important when we talk about fit to understand how our customers buy and what they're looking for. So I've been at companies where the end users are very important to market too And I've been at companies where we don't care what the end users think. We want to talk to the decision makers and the buyers.

It's also understanding, yes, from the outside, the demographics, they look like the right fit company, but now who should we talk to and what should we say to each person? I think that is often overlooked with fit, right? It's like, yeah, it's a good company. We know these three departments talk to us, they just talk to everybody there. Well, there's more nuance to that. And sometimes there isn't, but having that conversation

to everyone's point before you start and you're doing that research and planning is super critical.

Francesca Rinni (19:42)

So for us, with our products and solution, we are covering all the industries. So we can talk more or less to all the companies worldwide. So it's more a theme of we need to exactly understand who are our buyer personas and who are the influencers and the key decisions maker within the companies. And then for us is constantly talking with them.

in order to be perceived as an expert on the topic, again, to be in the shopping list in their mind so that when it would be finally time for them or to change the supplier or to approach one of our new products, they will say, yeah, Tuv Sud why not? Okay, let's go with them. Okay. And then like the relation with this prospect, it's completely different from one country to another.

For example, in China, the physical relation events are

Amber Madsen (20:37)

Thank you.

Francesca Rinni (20:38)

crucial. mean, we cannot survive without meeting personally and engage personally the prospect. In the Middle East, is the same. While, for example, in some countries of Europe or maybe in the US, again, it's different. So it's interesting to see how the same product, the same solution has really different ways of being proposed.

in all the regions.

Kaynan Kaplan (21:04)

I've worked at startups for most of my career and in startups, like we have so much green field to go after. The team might be very well defined, but we only have like, whatever it is, like 20 % penetration into that. So for us, it's less about, okay, this industry and this demographics makes sense for us.

Amber Madsen (21:24)

Thank

Kaynan Kaplan (21:24)

it's who and why actually

buys from us. So taking that one step further, so not saying, I'll

Amber Madsen (21:28)

Thank you.

Kaynan Kaplan (21:31)

give you a concrete example. I work for a company called FirmX. They sold virtual data rooms, so like corporate deal rooms for sell side investment banks. We will then do the research to see what is the size of the deal that each investment banks typically work at. right? That's not their revenue number. It's not their employee number.

It's not something that they publish, but if you do some research and talk to people, you can find that next layer of fit. And that allows you to then tier the accounts. right? So something we haven't talked about yet, but fit can mean a lot of different things. But who are tier one accounts? Who should we be going after today? Who's the low-hanging fruit that we can just kind of prove this out? I think especially the startup, that's really, really important.

Amber Madsen (22:13)

Yeah, also who's a retention fit and a renewal fit versus a new customer fit?

Kaynan Kaplan (22:19)

Exactly.

Joaquin Dominguez (22:20)

Yeah, and once you've identified fit and identify intent, the next challenge is deciding where to invest. Do you focus on capturing existing demand or creating high fit or creating demand, sorry, among high fit accounts? How do you balance short term pipeline pressure with long term growth? And how does that influence your channel and budget allocation?

Kaynan Kaplan (22:45)

I always say like the

The right balance is obviously very hard. But if you don't invest in those long-term programs, the chickens will come home to roost, right? It's like, it's sometimes hard to see when that's going to happen, especially if short-term is going so well. So as marketers, we almost have to put our foot down and be like, no, these long-term programs are important for these three reasons. And we're going to do them even if short-term domain will suffer for now.

because we just know it's the right thing to do. And those conversations can be very difficult, I would say.

Joaquin Dominguez (23:18)

What's a magic?

Amber Madsen (23:19)

Yeah.

Joaquin Dominguez (23:19)

Do you have a magic number? Is it 50 50 60 40? I don't know

Kaynan Kaplan (23:24)

I think the right answer to anything is it depends. It depends on the company, it depends on the goals, it depends on what's happening right now in the market. So I don't have a magic number. Yeah, it really depends on your entire go-to-market motion, what's working, what's not.

Anna (23:39)

.

Joaquin Dominguez (23:39)

of course.

Kaynan Kaplan (23:40)

And then, of course, for a company like Shell versus a startup, it's going to look extremely different as well.

Amber Madsen (23:46)

Yeah, absolutely. mean, demand capture is a great strategy for companies with more mature awareness and buying motions because people already know what they want. But if you're selling a transformation or a complex service or anything that requires a behavior change, you're not going to be able to out capture a market that hasn't decided to carry it. If your marketing org isn't mature enough to run, lift or holdouts, you'll.

keep over investing in Capture because it shows up in attribution, right? Capture wins dashboard, creation wins markets. So when you're going through and you're identifying how to go to market, that's a big piece of it, right? It's your channel strategy. It's seeing, again, it's that revenue postmortem. It's going back and seeing what is actually turning into legitimate funding.

identifying, honestly, one of the greatest places to do your research is in the comments of your own website products, posts, socials. People are not not quiet about what's working and what's not working. And the majority of, you know, if there's a customer problem, it's going to show up there. And that's just a gold mine of

opportunity to determine what you create next, right?

Anna (25:07)

Yeah, I would agree on really to honing into balancing both. So I would say that it also depends on the maturity of the company. It depends on in what type of marketing are you in. I'm in demand generation. So that would focus on shorter term KPIs. So definitely.

generating revenue within a year. That said, would say my pro set which would still be 70-30-70 on ongoing or fit based marketing and then maybe 30 % on intent based. And I would say that ongoing or fit based marketing and creating the demand is the core.

role of both sales and marketing and the collaboration amongst sales and marketing is really where you move the needle on creating the demand and then it's the indent data or indent based marketing is yeah, I would say 30 % at max.

Joaquin Dominguez (26:14)

And Francesca, you have a global team, right? And when you look at your global strategy, I guess when you enter a new territory, probably you need to over-invest in brand building and creating that brand awareness and that demand. And then maybe in other countries where brand awareness is already high, you just need to, not just, but...

Maybe you don't need to invest that much on brand awareness and you can capture demand more aggressively. Is that correct? Or you never

Francesca Rinni (26:45)

Yeah, that's absolutely

Joaquin Dominguez (26:47)

end investing on brand even on the very large and well-known markets.

Francesca Rinni (26:54)

Yeah, absolutely right. Just to give you two examples, so we have like Germany, where we have the market share, where we are well known. It's so many years that we are there. So, I mean, everyone knows us. While like in the US, it's like exactly the opposite. There is a huge market, a huge potential, but it's not easy to let the market know who we are. So honestly, if I say brand investment,

It's not easy because you really need a lot of money, a lot of money to position yourself. So I would say that it's more up to the marketing team rather than the brand team. So the collaboration, for example, with the US team is crucial because we need to exactly understand the market, see where we can make the difference. And it's not with all the products in our portfolio. So we really need to capture.

where our brand name can enter,

Amber Madsen (27:47)

you

Francesca Rinni (27:47)

okay, and then create a strategy together with the sales team and that is a strategy of position ourselves, generate leads for the short term, but also to be sure that operationally the sales team can support because one of the worst thing is that

Amber Madsen (28:03)

to.

Francesca Rinni (28:03)

you create the demand and then you are

Anna (28:05)

Thank

Francesca Rinni (28:05)

not able.

to support the customer. So that's the worst thing. So again, I think that it's so important to support the sales, but also to constantly be updated with them to change your strategy more than once during the year. So of course, every one of us is preparing the marketing plan at the end of the year. Ideally.

70 % of the marketing plan should be respected in the next year. But then at the end, if you look at the requests coming from the sales, you are constantly changing and updating it. And I think that's part of being a marketer, honestly. So if I look at what we are doing in terms of budget, the majority of the budget is going on the intent-based activity to generate leads and to support the sales goal of the year. Why? In terms of

efforts be like content creation, top leadership, ongoing communication with the right audience is definitely the one that is taking the majority of the time of the team.

Amber Madsen (29:09)

Yeah, I would say

Joaquin Dominguez (29:10)

Yeah.

Amber Madsen (29:10)

even on top of that, when you've got a massive brand that's known globally, right? It doesn't hold the same value everywhere. And often, so I've personally been able to assist in the standing up of two new businesses and subproducts within Shell. Polymers, which is our polyethylene business and Shell Energy, which is a renewable energy business. Now,

when we would go to market, everybody would assume that we were going to market as our oil and gas group, right? But we had to spend a lot of money and time and efforts on awareness of the sub-brand and the new product that we were bringing to market and why they should care about that, as opposed to just relying on the pectin and

and that standard also, had to really, especially with Shell Energy, we had to really go out into the market and do a lot of work. And we're still doing that work on awareness and such in the European regions because we're not viewed very positively in some of those regions because of the oil and gas and the more pro-renewable energy.

perspective of the European countries. And so even when you've got the same branding or the same awareness overall, it's a very different strategy across the regions.

Francesca Rinni (30:44)

Yeah, we have the same issue

Joaquin Dominguez (30:44)

Definitely.

Francesca Rinni (30:45)

with the cybersecurity suite. So it's something that it's really different from the normal certifications that we are providing. So it's definitely not easy to let the customers and the audience know that you are also doing that. Because you have a different team, different buyer personas within the same company. So even make cross selling, it's so complicated because...

person within the company that it's already your customer, it's not the same where you can propose another product. And it's for the salesman, it's not easy to go to the customer and say, hey, can you please introduce me to the other department? I mean, they will not do

Anna (31:23)

Thank

Francesca Rinni (31:24)

it. It's not that easy for them. So it's up to the marketing

Joaquin Dominguez (31:26)

Exactly.

Francesca Rinni (31:28)

team

Anna (31:28)

Okay.

Francesca Rinni (31:29)

to reconstruct and build again the relation from zero to identify the new buyer personas and like start again from zero.

So unfortunately,

Anna (31:37)

Yeah.

Francesca Rinni (31:38)

even within the same company, upselling and cross-selling, it's so hard.

Anna (31:43)

Yeah, exactly. We've had that too when we've acquired companies and we've added new solutions into our mix. And that's exactly what the situation in those cases are. So it's completely different ICP, different department, different people and buying groups that we would need to attract and really build that credibility on those new solutions too.

Amber Madsen (32:07)

Yeah, and we've got examples where we've done cross-sell webinars, essentially, right? Where we've gotten a couple of different divisions together to do a webinar with customer groups that we think would be congruent. But even that, you have to be really, really careful around consent data, because if they've consented to, you

receive marketing information from one group, but not another, or in a lot of cases, we actually have to change our legal information or the verbiage that's placed to make sure that they understand that you are consenting to receive information from Shell and its affiliates, which includes these other businesses. It's incredibly complex.

Joaquin Dominguez (32:51)

thank you. Thanks so much for sharing those insights. We've covered a lot today from understanding difference between fit and intent to where intent data works, how to define high fit accounts and how to balance short term and long term strategy.

Before we wrap up, I'd to hear one final thought from each of you if you had to give one piece of advice to marketers trying to improve their targeting strategy today. Especially

Amber Madsen (33:17)

Thank you.

Joaquin Dominguez (33:18)

in the context of fit vs intent, what would it be?

Kaynan Kaplan (33:21)

I think everybody touched on it a little bit in different ways, but use all of the expertise and data you have in-house. So like not just the business data, but nobody's going to understand your

Amber Madsen (33:32)

.

Kaynan Kaplan (33:34)

product and how people buy better than the people that already work for your company. So just talk to them and then talk to the customers and do that actual like legwork to get the data. Cause

Joaquin Dominguez (33:45)

Hmm.

Kaynan Kaplan (33:46)

otherwise you just kind of guess it.

Francesca Rinni (33:48)

Yeah.

Amber Madsen (33:48)

Yeah,

on that note, I would say that most attribution disagreements aren't data problems though. They're maturity mismatches. So until buyer readiness and marketing capability are aligned, intent will always look more reliable than it actually is.

Francesca Rinni (34:03)

Yeah, for my side,

Anna (34:03)

Yeah.

Francesca Rinni (34:04)

it's always put yourself in your customer shoes. So sometimes we forget that the customer is the key. I mean, we are so focused in proposing ourself that sometimes we forget how the customers are searching, what is the customer journey, how they are looking, which kind of information they are looking for. So always put yourself in your customer shoes.

Anna (34:29)

Yeah, I would agree 100 % on that. So I would really invest time into understanding the buyer, buyer use case, buyer groups, buyer behavior and really understand how they make decisions, who make decisions and what do they need to hear from you and really how they would ideally want to be spoken to regardless of the channel or program.

And so I think that's really the core.

Joaquin Dominguez (34:57)

thank you so much for sharing your insights. This has been a great, great conversation. If there is one takeaway in my opinion is that the future of between marketing isn't about choosing between fit or intent, but how it's about understanding how they work together and building strategies that align both with real business outcomes and really understanding your customer. think that's the key of everything.

Thank you everyone for listening and we'll see you in the next episode of B2B Marketing Futures.