Getting Real Value from Intent Data: 6sense, Demandbase, Clay, and What Nobody Tells You
If AI can now execute most marketing tasks, what stops everything from becoming commoditised?
We’ll open by challenging the idea that AI is just an efficiency gain, and explore what actually creates differentiation when everyone has access to the same tools.
In this episode of B2B Marketing Futures, B2B marketing leaders explore how organisations can get genuine value from intent data, moving beyond vendor promises and focusing on how buying signals can actually influence pipeline and revenue.
The conversation examines what makes an intent signal genuinely useful, where platforms such as 6sense, Demandbase, ZoomInfo, Bombora, and Clay add value, and where they fall short. The discussion also explores how teams can combine intent with ICP fit, first-party data, and other signals to identify accounts that are truly in-market.
Guests
Linda Pfaff, B2B Marketing Leader at Rackspace
Nima Asrar Haghighi, VP of Demand Generation at Navan
Transcript
Joaquin (00:00)
welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing Futures. Today we are getting into intent data, specifically what happens after the sales speech and the dashboard demo. Platforms like SixSense, Demand Base, ZoomInfo, Bombora, G2, and now Clay promise to help marketers understand which accounts are in market. But the harder question is whether those signals actually tell you who is likely to buy.
and whether teams are equipped to do anything useful with them. So today I want to separate the signal from the noise. We'll look at what good intent data actually looks like, where the major platforms add value, how intent should interact with fit and first party data, and ultimately whether any of this is producing pipeline. Today we have a great panel.
Linda, Nima and Dave, welcome. before we get into the conversation, could you each give a quick introduction on yourselves? Linda, would you like to start
Linda Pfaff (01:00)
Sure. Thanks, Yoyikima. It's great to be here today. I'm Linda Paf. I've been in IT services marketing for over twenty years, most recently with Rackspace, and excited to participate in this because it's one of the key questions facing our market right now.
Joaquin (01:16)
Welcome, Linda. Nima, welcome.
Nima (01:18)
Thank for having me. my name is Nima and I head up the demand generation team for Navan, which is a travel and expense solution company. Been in the marketing world for twenty six years. In the last probably twenty something years of it has been in the B to B the world.
Joaquin (01:35)
Welcome Nima. Thanks so much for being here. And Dave, welcome.
Dave (01:39)
Hey, thanks. Yeah, I'm Dave. I've recently joined the team here at Ad Zact and I've been in sort of tech for eighteen years or so and I'm really excited to join this call and to learn as well.
Joaquin (01:47)
Thank
you so much, Dave. Welcome. Welcome to the team as well. Okay, so one thing I want to establish before we start comparing platforms is what we actually mean by intent. Okay. Someone reading three articles about a topic is technically showing behavior, but doesn't necessarily mean their company is about to buy anything, right? Linda, you raised a particularly interesting point in our briefing call around
Who is generating the signal? Is it the budget holder, somebody on the buying committee, or three junior employees doing research? So where do each of you draw the line between an interesting piece of behavior and a signal you would generally act on?
Linda Pfaff (02:31)
Well, I'll jump in. this is one of the common problems because so much account intent data is at the account level. But if you cannot combine intent with fit, buying stage context, validate it with first party behavior and tie it to your next best action, it just turns into noise. So it's an important signal.
But it's evidence, it's not truth. and so it's our jobs to tease out what to do with that signal.
Nima (02:55)
It's definitely interesting because also that's very challenging to know who's actually doing the research as well, right? and then also depending on the size of the company, the answer might be a bit different. If you're a small company, you probably could
guess who in the company is having those research and that person might have more decision-making power. Versus, for example, if it's a large account that's a saying it's a 30,000 employee account, if you find that that three people are doing the research, where does that really sit? It's a big question. And then also is the research is more kind of a personal education or is it actually business signal? So that's another element into it as well.
but then also the way you wanna think about it is also understanding the limitations. How could you use that one as a signal for you to potentially think about account research in terms of the the way you wanna add one to that account and use it as a kind of a data point to build a point of view about the account before you start kind of having the communication and don't necessarily
Take it as a gospel that somebody read this article, and that means that actually they are buying something. But there could be if there's a smoke, there's probably fire somewhere in the account as well. And so doing that research, understanding why they might be looking for this topic and whether or not there is a correlation here, and try to make the decisions that way.
Joaquin (04:16)
Yeah,
I think it would be great to understand like your experience with different go to market motions and how intent fits in that GTM structure. Because it's very easy to think like, yes, I just run a campaign, I wait for intent, and then I contact people. But it's totally different if you are running an ABM motion, for example, where you are really focused on accounts.
how do you see fit in the GTM motions.
Linda Pfaff (04:43)
and you kind of start with a different stack and it is a stack, it's not a single tool, right?
Can your sellers, because we can have all the signal, we can add the data, but then are you able to activate it? Can your sellers reach out with a meaningful message in a meaningful time frame?
And so if you're taking a stack that is very much about that short account list and making sure you have SDR signals going to the market is different than if you're trying to generate demand in marketing and qualify that and have sales trust that you're sending them valid leads to pursue.
Nima (05:18)
account segments are also a big part of this conversation. if you're a enterprise account executive, then you're probably at best have, twenty accounts. And it's very different versus if you're a commercial account executive who has five hundred accounts.
so the value of the signal becomes more important for the commercial because they have to sift through all these leads or all these accounts who know where to focus on. Versus on the enterprise, you just have a small set of accounts that on a quarterly basis you're focusing on. So the value also is a bit different. But going back to your original question around the different go-to-market motions,
It kind of helps us kind of to start us actually stepping back and thinking about what is the actual strategy of the company, what you are trying to accomplish, rather than starting with a tool and system conversation. Because the answer could be very different.
Versus when you go on the enterprise side, the audience size get shrinks, the data set gets smaller. you need to kind of think about what are the business problems that I want to solve for and what are the potential use cases that I could go for.
And then in those kind of scenarios, the way you want to think about it is that what is the right way of signaling these people to your sales organization or your account management teams that this changes has happened and making sure that you have the playbooks on how they could handle it.
And sometimes once somebody comes in as a new role, especially the decision maker, they want to analyze everything and move forward.
Linda Pfaff (06:46)
Yeah, I completely agree with that. not every signal deserves the same response. and it doesn't mean there's no response. for example, you've got fit and you have an account surging on a topic. maybe that goes to advertising or nurture. But to Nima's example, maybe you're seeing champions move. And so a it's a different motion, some of which require SDR reach out and some of them that don't.
Nima (07:09)
Yeah. To add to that another scenario is that you might get the signal, right? but the signal is no more
irrelevant to you, it might be just waste of time and noise as well, right? so there are other elements
that you have to look into, which is what Linda originally mentioned around the ICP, right? So whether or not this is the signal from the right account and also whether or not it's the signal from the right persona.
Joaquin (07:35)
Yeah, and I love one of the things that you mentioned and something that that stick with me was like what do you do after you receive the signal and that alignment between sales and marketing is so important in that context, right? It's not the same like an SDR picking up the phone because a champion was interacting with a piece of content or the buyer and you need to have those
agreement on how to act with with your marketing campaigns. Otherwise you yeah,
Nima (08:00)
Yeah, I think.
Joaquin (08:02)
you can waste a lot of money, right?
Linda Pfaff (08:03)
And
Well I was just gonna say I think that is the hardest part is having that alignment between sales and marketing because intense signals expire very quickly. you can have a great tech stack, but at the end of the day, if you're sending signals to sales and they're not acting on them, you're wasting money. And so that is so paramount to this whole process.
Nima (08:24)
Yeah, time to action is super important, as Linda mentioned, but also having the right playbooks. So all these kind of the use cases that might happen, what should be your playbook based on each of these ones, and then what are the sequence of actions that you need to take on, and whether or not you need to equip yourself with additional education to get into the call or conversation in a more educated manner as well.
Linda Pfaff (08:48)
Well said.
Joaquin (08:49)
Yeah.
Okay, so I think we set a very good context and once we started questioning the signal itself, I think it becomes much easier to have a more useful conversation about the platforms, right? Because Sixense, Demand Base, Suminfo, you've mentioned many, clay, can all show activity in different ways. but it's interesting like how vendors ultimately
draw from overlapping sources. So perhaps the difference isn't simply who has the best data, it's what you can actually do with it. So I'd be interested in getting past the future comparisons here, having implemented or working with these platforms. What did you only discover after you started using them?
Nima (09:33)
So I think the challenges that each of these tools have is that availability of the data, right? And then the whole data space.
is getting to a place that everybody is basically using the same source of data to some extent. You don't see a major difference between the two. So for example, I've used Demand Base, I've used Sixth Sense, and all of them kind of provide very similar match rates and information. so it's really hard to kind of differentiate their kind of data and be able to prove it. Sometimes you might get a better one depending on which industry you are with one.
versus the others. So there are some nuances, but it's not a massive difference because at the end of the day they are all kind of sourcing that data very similarly from very similar
data sources and there's a lot of acquisition across all these data providers which basically converts this whole industry in my opinion to kind of a more of a commodity which makes it very different. So it's not necessarily a matter of what the data is, it's a matter of what you do with the data and how you could leverage it and how you could
stitch the data across multiple data points to build your own data layer. Of course the best source of data is always kind of a first party data because you have more confidence on it and you it's more deterministic. Versus when you use the third party tools is more probabilistic and it's something that you're able to kind of
rely on it, but it also has the danger if it has false positives, you lose the confidence of the sales organization on it as well. So you need to kind of find the right balance there. Of course, on the other side, the first party data is just the first party data and it's not telling the dark
kind of a web that happening on the social, what's happening on the web, on the other side of the world. So if you're just focusing on the first party data, you're also missing on really good insights. So I think building a data layer that is basically combining the first party data and all these signals from the third party data, it becomes a crucial part of it.
but the challenge is that making sure that data is actually available. for example, back in the day at one of the companies I mean they were using trem terminus, they moved to let's say roleworks
The challenge was that the data was a little bit different, the infrastructure was different, the level of signals that they were using was a little bit different. So the salespeople that's okay, I see all these signals, but I don't know who it is, just some random person in a certain company of thirty thousand people.
Who should I reach out to? It's not good enough. It's not actionable enough for me to take the next steps on it. It's more about kind of then how to package the information for the GTM team as well becomes a crucial part of it.
Linda Pfaff (12:20)
Yeah, I one thousand percent agree that having a multi-source waterfall is critical to your success. and I too have used many of these tools, I am a strong advocate for two things. First of all, whatever tool you choose, do a controlled comparison of no intent data versus if let's say you're doing ABM accounts with and without
You need to validate that the stack is paying for itself. we're in marketing. Heck, we do A-B tests all the time. I did a controlled comparison last year between two of these providers and was stunned at the difference in because of the nuanced lists that we were working where one provider dominated the other. and so, to Nima's point, market segments, they have different strengths.
and I've used both of those providers with great success at different times. do your own testing, make sure you know that you know. And again, that first-party data is so critical to supplement, okay, great, they're talking about a topic in the market. Are they interested in you for that topic? is one of the important things to enrich the signal with.
Nima (13:19)
Yeah. And you could actually help yourself as well by
Producing the content that helps you getting more signals as well. What I mean by that is that.
I could produce a lot of content that is very generic, very top of the funnel, and that's gonna get a lot of readership and all of that. And it's a little bit harder to put your finger on it that there it was just an interesting, amazing article that my content team produced, or is it actually providing a little signal? So by producing content that is kind of lower funnel.
for example, creating calculators, creating templates for RFPs and things like that. Now you're getting into a place where you're actually seeding the kind of the way of identifying people who are actually in the decision-making mode versus people who
are just in the educational mode. So you're able to help yourself by thinking about your content strategy on how you want to produce the content that helps you identify your signals better as well.
Joaquin (14:21)
And that's the beauty of marketing at the end of the day. You need to be creative, right? You need to be creative to identify if someone is interacting with your content. Probably you can put some rules and you can understand, yeah, this might be an influencer, or this might be a decision maker, or this one could be at the bottom of the funnel, or this one could be at the top of the funnel, depending on the content that you put out there and the system. and I love
what you mentioned all the time that is the decisions that you need to take with data and what you do after you see the signals. And I think it goes back to sales and marketing alignment all the time, that if you don't have collaboration on your teams, it's very hard to get something good out of just analysing data. You need to know what to do after. I think that's something
Re really important that you've mentioned.
Linda Pfaff (15:11)
and I think it's obvious but I can't overstate this enough. One of the mistakes I've seen marketers make early years ago was sending too much to sales, every signal. And we all know what sending bad leads to sales does. they start to ignore you very quickly. so I would just warn our listeners to
Just be intentional about what you send to what channel for what reason. It's so important.
Joaquin (15:32)
I
want to change gears a little bit and talk about something I think it's fundamental when we talk about fit and intent because if we think about like the proportion of people who are actively researching for something, some people say that's like five percent of the market who is actively buying for your product versus ninety-five percent of the market.
Who is not actively searching and typically all these platforms, these intent platforms, what they are showing to you is that 5%, right? So what do you do to reach out to the 95% of your total addressable market who is not even aware that they have a problem, maybe, and you need to start educating them? I don't know. How how do you see that?
Fit versus intent and positioning as well. how do you balance that?
Nima (16:19)
Happy to go first. it becomes the question of demand generation versus demand capture, right?
so identifying that five percent and caching that data is super important because that's how you're gonna grow your business really fast and you're able to have faster sales cycles and all of that. But the reality of the situation is that not everybody is ready to buy. some people they haven't thought about they have a problem. Some people know the problem, but they already have a vendor, they just think that their vendor is the best.
And they might not know that there is a better solution out there. So you want to identify what are the kind of the use cases that you want to go after, and then to think about how to have a full funnel marketing campaign and that focuses on both on the demand generation as well as the demand capture, and then use the different tactics, tactics needed, of course.
Demand generation is much more expensive and much more time consuming than demand capture because
Once the demand is there, you're just doing optimizations to identify them and go after them. Whereas to create that awareness, you need to probably do a lot of content marketing, a lot of exposure into your content, a lot of education in the market.
and then think about then to do that, then you start on start thinking about jobs to be done, right? What is your jobs to be done for your personas and based on each of those ones identify what are the solutions that you could provide for each of those pain points that people have and then now to tell the narrative around why people should care.
they might have a pain that they haven't been actually thinking about it because that's what they have been just doing for a long time. And then now that you have created that awareness, now you're trying to kind of create the hooks to provide them with the next step to get them move through the funnel and eventually get them ready for the decision making and consideration kind of a phases of the funnel as well.
Linda Pfaff (18:16)
I agree with that so much. And what I would add is especially in today's market with so much AI generated content. I mean, there's just people are completely overwhelmed with content. and as we're talking about intent signals, yes, we wanna zero in on the demand capture, but in the B to B world, brand equity is becoming more and more important to overcome
So people know who you are and you can cut through all of this content. And so I'm okay with influencing influencers. For many years, I was that junior researcher helping my boss make decisions around what tools to invest in. And so I think we just have to remember that there is an awareness play that needs to go side by side with the demand play to keep you relevant in the market for your buyers. Because
The products and services that we sell are, months and years in the making. And so it's very relational. And so it is important to have that full funnel content. I love the examples Nima gave around, decision-making tools, qualifiers, that sort of thing. It's so important to build those into your website and into your outbound content so that you can capture demand at all levels of the funnel.
Joaquin (19:23)
And
it would be great to hear stories of how you prove that demand creation and demand capture with your CFO. So if you are sitting in front of a CFO trying to justify the renewal of one of these platforms or investing more on top of the final content, what evidence would you want to have?
Linda Pfaff (19:45)
Well, I'll tell you what it's not. It's not signal volume and it's not engagement, right? this is why I advocate for that controlled comparison. do your flight accounts outperform your non intend accounts in pipeline conversion, velocity, win rate. That's at the end of the day what matters. are you making a difference to the bottom line? Is the stack paying for itself?
Nima (20:05)
Yeah, that's true. and also the answer could be also very different depending on the stage of the company where you are. Are you trying to focus on the growth or are you trying to focus on efficiency? And the answer might be a little different. And the type of CFO you have to talk to might be also different as a result, right? but in general, what Nina mentioned is the best approach to having kind of a
maybe running tests around maybe hold up markets, thinking about
control test, A-B testing on the technology, and showing the lift and both on the conversion rate, deal size and all of those ones. Velocity is a tricky one, especially when you have a data smaller data cent because sometimes the hardest accounts to sell you need to do the most marketing and then if you just go with the velocity that might become a little bit challenge to show the value but definitely
you are able to kind of show the deal size. And then thinking about the
Total lifetime value of the customer is another element that you could think about it if you're able to touch those versus that's super helpful. And then the other part is also thinking through incrementality testing, right? And be able to kind of show for every additional dollar that you're spending what is the incremental impact that you have.
Because from one side, based on the research or analysis or campaigns that you run, you might come to a conclusion that you might need to have three to four at least active channel at any given time to be able to actually change the perception in the market.
But then also the question is that where you're hitting the diminishing return and be able to identify where that point is and how much you could push the envelope, be able to drive the deal sizes, accelerate the business while now you're hitting the diminishing return at that point. So finding that balance is of course an important part of it. And then
working with that team, with the finance team, with the revenue operations teams to be able to kind of build the case together. It's another part of it, rather than just going with the point of view, just collaboratively building that model is gonna be a big selling point as well.
Linda Pfaff (22:12)
I just want to make two other comments here. One, so much of this is dependent on the quality of your CRM data. and many of us have been in companies where that is a real challenge. and so I for those of you out there with that challenge, you're not alone. and second of all, one of the things I think is important is to track sourced versus influenced through these types of activities.
Did marketing source through in the tent single or did you help influence an existing account through it is also an interesting measure when having these conversations with ops and finance.
Nima (22:42)
Yeah, that's definitely helpful, but it's also a tricky one as well, right? Because depending on how sensitive your counterpart is, like prove me that you saw sourced it, right? for example
I never forget some of the conversation I had back in the day with some of my sales counterparts. I say okay, this was obviously somebody clicked on our ads and came to our website filled out a requested demo. So it's considered probably a source of marketing sets. No, this was actually happened because I was having a drink in a bar with the guy and then he heard about it and then he went and searched for it, right? And there there could be a truth to it as well. So it's very very challenging and it goes back to the point of
The reality is that in a B2P environment where you sell to multiple people and you have a long sales cycle, you are bound to touch the same people multiple times across the board. And that's a good thing. And we should celebrate that, that it's actually kind of a team sort. And I think that's one of the things that I'm currently enjoying at Navan is that.
we have that spirit of okay, we are in it in as a team. It's not like marketing source or sales source. It's just the goal to market team. Work together to source that opportunity. And since we have built that kind of a
thinking it has helped us just grow so dramatically because we are not wasting our time trying to say okay I source it you source it but building that culture and relationship between the teams and both understanding that has been a really important part of the growing the business.
Linda Pfaff (24:13)
Show.
Joaquin (24:13)
That's
great. well I I just want to mention something that we are building here at at SACT about person level intent, something that is quite new and we have been implementing this for our clients with great success. And the thing is we help them identify the accounts, okay, that are a good fit to their
ideal customer profile. And after we find the accounts, we find the right people, the right job titles working for these accounts. After we find the people, we identify their devices. So their phones, their laptops, their tablets. And because we know their devices, we can show ads on many different channels. Like typically is LinkedIn, where you can be very precise on who you are you you want to target. But we can't have that precision on meta
on Google, on Reddit, on the open web. And because we know their devices, we know person level intent. We know when they are watching your ads. We know when they are clicking your ads before they submit a form. And that allows your sales team to be way more aligned with marketing. Because you know who is watching, you know who's clicking before they submit a form. They can do very clever things. They can
I'll invite them to dinners or they can do whatever they want. So those are the the kind of things that we are building here at at SAGT and yeah, we'll we'll love to show you that one day
Linda Pfaff (25:38)
Sally.
Joaquin (25:38)
if you want.
Nima (25:39)
Yeah, absolutely. Like getting that kind of a fingerprint and be able to kind of find the people while we're maintaining their privacy is gonna be that kind of a holy grade for marketing, right? So
Linda Pfaff (25:50)
Yeah, it's very compelling.
Joaquin (25:52)
Thank you so much.
we've covered everything from whether an intent signal can actually be trusted to the platforms behind the data and how fit a first party
Behavior change the picture and the operational work required to turn a signal into pipeline. Perhaps the biggest takeaway is the intent data itself isn't the strategy, the value comes from understanding who is showing the intent signal, whether that account is generally a fit and what you do next. Linda, Nima, and Dave, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your perspectives.
Until next time.
