Lead Management: Using Intent Data to Accelerate Your Sales Pipeline

Sales is a numbers game, and seeing momentum build up in our sales pipeline can make us all go 🤑

But this doesn’t happen overnight. A lot goes into keeping your sales engine running efficiently—effort, strategy, good management, and a little bit of luck.

You need to optimize your sales processes for better outcomes to keep driving results. One way to do that is by managing your leads effectively. In 2025, managing your leads without using intent data is (there’s no other way to say it) inefficient.

In this post, we will discuss how intent data can help you better manage your leads and fuel your sales pipeline.

But before that, what’s intent data, and how can it change your lead management tactics?

What is Intent Data?

Intent data can be defined as a prospect’s or organization’s likelihood to purchase a product or service. An entity's intent can be inferred by examining and evaluating behavior such as webpage visits, media consumption, requests, collateral downloads, event participation, and form completions.

Believe it or not:

According to Forrester, a prospect is already 67 percent of the way through the purchase journey before they contact you.

Do you know what this means?

You have to work for the remaining 33 percent. This 33 percent is where intent data could be a differentiator between you and your rival. It’s all about utilizing intent data to flesh out your pipeline with high-value leads.

Before we dive into how intent data can help manage your sales pipeline and leads, let’s briefly look at the types of intent data.

Intent data can be further broken down into:

1. Active Intent Data
2. Passive Intent Data

Active Intent Data

When users look outwardly for a product or service, their intent signals are categorized as active intent data. These data sources can be:

• Informational intent: During this stage, the buyer would be interested in reading your blog and guides, downloading eBooks, and more from your business’s website. Check UI design trends to make your website look more attractive.
• Navigational intent: Navigational signals indicate that the customer is actively ready to take action. For example, signing up for a trial for your product is a navigational intent.
• Transactional intent: Transactional intent involves acting in a way that indicates the possible chance of purchase. Some examples include visiting the pricing page, searching for a specific use case, or adding the product to their cart.

Passive Intent Data

Passive intent is defined as the unrealized need for a product that people possess. At times, buyers with passive intent don’t even realize they have a problem that a product or service can solve.

Passive intent requires the right nurturing to be realized and turned into active intent. As a result, marketing and sales teams must focus on nurturing their prospects to tap into these hidden opportunities.

Passive buying intent data is the hidden gold mine that could uncover valuable leads for your sales pipeline. This is because these leads aren’t actively looking for a solution when you check in with them, so you can decide the entire narrative.

There are various datasets that we can leverage to gauge if a prospect has a passive intent, and these are:

• Technographic data: Technographics is the profiling of organizations based on their current software stack, technology usage behavior, and software adoption/rejection. Technographic data gives you information about the software and tools used by your target accounts. This information allows you to infer insights around which accounts are most likely to convert into your customers based on the knowledge of their current technology stack, past technology stack, and software usage.
• Demographic data: Demographic data includes attributes like age, gender, income, occupation, and other information about people that can help you profile and segment them into discrete groups.
• Firmographic data: Firmographics refers to attributes such as company size, funding information, industries served, total revenue, market share, and other information that can help you profile companies.

Active and passive intent can be further classified into:

• First-party data: Data collected from your digital real estate. These include interfaces you control, like your website, CRM, and chatbots.
• Second-party data: This is information explicitly collected as a business function. It usually includes data collected with the consent of a visiting user, such as cookie data and reviews on websites and forums. G2, Capterra, etc., are a few examples of businesses that collect intent data as a business model.
• Third-party data: Third-party data is the intent data available from every nook and corner of the internet. I know all data eventually is valuable, but this type of data exists beyond your website and other technology you don’t own or control. Think of big data encompassing everything on social media, public forums, source codes, and other areas across the internet that might have such data available.

So, now that we have a clear picture of intent data, let’s look at why it could be the missing piece for a super-efficient sales pipeline.

How to Use Intent Data for Lead Management and Pipeline Acceleration

1. Prioritize Prospects and Accounts

Usually, sales rely on the marketing team to bring in leads. These leads are scored based on a given set of criteria. Once they satisfy the requirements, they are passed on to the sales team as MQL (marketing-qualified leads).

That’s the usual approach and probably an ineffective tactic in this day and age.

In contrast, when marketing uses high-quality intent data to prioritize specific accounts and prospects, sales can focus on leads with higher purchasing propensity.

For example, a sales rep can benefit from intent data such as:

• Technographic data: Technographic data helps you gauge if the product fits into a prospective company’s current stack, whether they have the buying power, how easy the integration of the product being sold is with their stack, and more.
• Navigational data: Did the customer sign up for a trial account, check a page with a relevant use case to their business, etc.? These signals will help the rep create a better pitch for the prospect.
• Firmographic data: If the company has recently raised funding, bolstered its revenue, or been wildly successful in recent months, it might be able to afford the new product.

Want to convert leads like a pro? Dive into our expert guide on MQL vs. SQL.

2. Enrich Your First-Party Lead Management Platforms

One of the most valuable qualities of intent data is that it gives your first-party data sources a lot more context for more efficient lead prioritization.

Intent data can be used to collect data about your prospect and enrich your data sources, such as your CRM, lead management platforms, ESP, and marketing platforms.

Next time, your reps will not have to go hunting on LinkedIn before calling prospects who registered the day before. Intent data platforms like Slintel enable sales teams to integrate intent data directly into the world’s most popular CRMs, ESPs, and marketing platforms.

3. Segment Your Leads

With precise intent data collection in place, you will be able to identify which prospects need to be tended to immediately and which, say, need to be nurtured.

For example, a prospect who has signed up for a trial, checked your competitor’s reviews, and has been recently funded is probably a prospect you should speak to immediately.

With intent data, these prospects can be automatically segmented as qualified leads.

4. Overcome Objections and Threats

Losing your leads through pipeline filters is a natural process. There is nothing wrong with it.

However, losing leads due to irrelevant and unpersonalized nurture campaigns and interactions or a lack of insights can be frustrating.

Intent data helps marketing and sales teams gain valuable insights, such as thematic analysis, key use cases, and feature requirements.

The additional data lets you alter your sales process to counter objections or threats with factual data and personalized pitches.

5. Accelerate Sales Outreach

With precise buying signals, intent data will help you craft the best outreach strategy. This deployment can vary based on the journey stages, buyer persona, and qualification scores.

With the correct information, you can create personalized outreach campaigns with relevant battle cards, product pitches, product decks, and more.

Suppose, for example, you identify a high-value lead in your sales pipeline, and your intent data tells you that the prospect is already using a competitor. In that case, you can cleverly reach out to the prospect where your sales pitch substantiates how your product is better than the competitor based on their movements and personalized insights.

Rather than just doing cold outreach, you now have the ability to know your prospects inside out and what they exactly need!

6. Use Content as a Sales Pipeline Acceleration Tool

Content is everything. As a content marketer, I am sick of hearing this. But it is true! Content is one of the pillars of sales and marketing. And intent data might just be the newest way to reinvigorate your content strategy.

Intent data are signals that tell you what your audience is thinking, what their most common queries are, what pages they are visiting, and what objections they are posing.

Intent data spotlights customer queries. That’s the juicy bit.

Now that you know the queries, go ahead and create the right content to answer them. Creating content relevant to your intent signals reduces the effort a customer has to put into researching solutions and gaining trust in them.

Intent Data Helps with Better Lead and Sales Pipeline Management

When you focus on your prospects’ activities and interests, you are in your customers’ shoes and, therefore, can create highly focused sales and marketing plans and campaigns.

Intent data is beneficial from the start (ensuring your content catches the attention of your leads early on during the discovery phase) to closing a deal (being ready for their competitor-based objections) because you already know what they might throw at you from the beginning.

Most importantly, intent data enables your sales team to focus on leads that matter and who are more likely to convert and impact your revenue. Becoming an early adopter of intent data is one of the best investments you can make right now.