Intent Based Selling: You Bought a Score, Not a Person (2026)
Quick answer: Intent based selling means timing your outreach to buying behavior instead of to your calendar. The catch is that most intent data is anonymous and account-level. It tells you someone at a company is researching your category. It does not tell you who. For a one-person sales motion, person-level engagement beats an account score, because it arrives with a name already attached.
I built LeadBase after months of doing this the manual way. I was scrolling LinkedIn, writing down who commented on the posts my ideal coaching clients were reading, and messaging those people while the thread was still warm. Nobody sold me a score. The signal was public and it already had a name on it.
That is why I think most of the intent data category is sold to the wrong buyer.
What intent based selling actually buys you
Strip the marketing off and an intent product gives you one thing: a ranked list of companies that are probably in-market right now. The ranking comes from research behavior. Category page views, competitor comparisons, content downloads, pricing page visits, all aggregated across a publisher network or a review marketplace.
That is genuinely useful information. Knowing that forty accounts on your target list moved from cold to researching this month changes what a team of five does on Monday morning.
It just is not a list of people.
The anonymity gap nobody prices in
G2 is the cleanest example, because they document it plainly. G2 Buyer Intent shows you which companies are viewing your product page, comparing you against a competitor, or browsing your category. Their own documentation states that “all data is collected at the organization level.” The individual buyers behind the signal stay anonymous, reduced to a count of unique visitors and a geolocation.
Bombora’s Company Surge works the same way, reporting research behavior at the company level rather than naming the researcher. Different mechanics across the category, same shape. Research behavior in, account score out.
LinkedIn’s version sits slightly closer to the human. Sales Navigator’s Buyer Intent score rolls a large set of signals into a per-account rating, and the account page narrows it to which contact or group of contacts inside that account is showing intent. Closer. Still not “this named person raised their hand,” and it sits behind the Advanced tier.
So every intent program has the same second step, and nobody sells it to you: work out who at this account you are actually going to message, and why they would care. That is the same gap I wrote about in signal-based selling. The detection half is the product. The response half is your problem.
Account-level intent works with a team. It breaks when you are one person
The reason enterprise teams buy account scores anyway is that they have the headcount to close the gap. An SDR gets handed a surging account, pulls four contacts out of the CRM, checks who owns the budget, and runs a sequence. The score was never meant to be actionable on its own. It was meant to tell a research team where to point.
You do not have a research team. You have an hour.
Run the same motion solo and the cost lands entirely on you: pick the account, guess the buyer, guess the trigger, write something that sounds like you know why you are reaching out when you genuinely do not. That last part is what makes intent-sourced outreach read exactly like cold outreach, because functionally it is. You know a company is shopping. The person opening your message does not know that you know, and has no reason to believe the timing is anything but luck.
The version of intent based selling a solo seller can run
Flip the unit. Instead of buying accounts that are researching, watch people who are publicly engaging.
Someone commenting on a post about the exact problem you solve is doing something an account score cannot give you. They are showing intent, in public, attached to a name, a title, a company, and a specific sentence you can quote back to them. It is a smaller pool than a publisher network. It is also free, and every entry in it is immediately messageable.
Three things make this work in practice:
- Pick sources, not keywords. Follow the eight to twelve people your buyers actually read. Their comment sections are a standing list of your market thinking out loud.
- Move inside forty-eight hours. Engagement decays fast. The reference to what they said is the whole reason the message does not read as cold.
- Quote the thing they did. Not “I saw you’re interested in X.” Say what they said. That is the proof you were paying attention, and it is the part no intent score can generate for you.
That is the same sequencing problem covered in how to find warm leads, and it is why the ordering matters more than the volume.
What I learned doing this by hand
Two things surprised me while I was running this manually for my own coaching pipeline.
The first is that the bottleneck was never finding signals. LinkedIn produces more public engagement in a day than one person can act on in a week. The bottleneck was remembering. I would spot a good comment on a Tuesday, get pulled into client calls, and rediscover it the following Monday when the moment had gone.
The second is that the messages that worked did not mention buying at all. They referenced the specific thing the person said and asked one question about it. The intent was mine to act on, not theirs to confirm. Liking three of someone’s posts first does very little on its own, which is what I found testing LinkedIn lead warming as a standalone tactic.
I built the product to fix the remembering. The judgment about what to say stayed with me, and it still should.
Three questions before you buy intent data
- Can I name the buyer from this signal? If the answer is no, budget for the research step, because it does not come with the data.
- How many accounts can I actually work per week? If it is under twenty, a ranked list of four hundred surging accounts is not a shortlist. It is a longer version of the problem you already have.
- What does the signal let me say? A score lets you say nothing specific. A public comment hands you your first line. Buy for the second one.
FAQ
What is intent based selling? It is prioritizing outreach based on behavior that suggests someone is actively evaluating a solution, rather than on a static list or a call quota. The behavior can be third-party research data, first-party website activity, or public engagement on a platform like LinkedIn.
Is intent data worth it for a small team? Usually not at the account level. Account-level intent assumes you have capacity to research each surging account and identify a buyer inside it. Under about five sellers, that research step eats the time advantage the data was supposed to give you.
What is the difference between intent data and buying signals? Intent data is typically aggregated and anonymized at the company level. A buying signal is usually a single observable action by a named person. The signal is smaller and far more actionable, which is why solo sellers get more out of it.
How fast do intent signals go stale? Faster than most sequences assume. Public engagement signals are worth acting on within a couple of days, because the reference that makes your message feel relevant is the thing the person did, and they stop remembering doing it.
Can I do intent based selling without buying any tools? Yes. Pick ten accounts you want, follow the people your buyers read, and check the comment sections daily. The only thing a tool adds is that it stops you from forgetting what you saw.
What to do next
Curious what watching signals at the person level looks like in practice? See how it works.
Want the taxonomy first? Read LinkedIn buying signals for which signals actually predict a reply and which ones just feel productive.
When the remembering becomes the bottleneck rather than the finding, start a free trial of LeadBase and let it hold the list for you.
