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Overview
Buying intent helps you engage with the right prospects from the right companies at the right time. With timely insights into the online intent-to-buy behaviors of your ideal customer profiles, buying intent allows you to easily identify the solutions and products that your target markets are actively researching online.
Once you have identified your ideal customer profiles in Apollo, you can use buying intent to visualize key online behavior, filter by the ideal companies with the highest intent scores for your selected topics, and prioritize your pipeline accordingly.
Your access to buying intent topics and search filters depends on your Apollo plan. Refer to Apollo's pricing page for more details.
The following sections details how Apollo calculates and sources buying intent, and the different intent topics available to you.
Understand Intent Signals
Apollo partners with buying intent data providers Bombora and LeadSift (a Foundry company) to provide buying intent signals. For more information about how these Apollo partners collect intent data, please refer to Bombora's intent data overview and Foundry'sintent data product information.
To utilize buying intent signals in Apollo, you must first select intent topics. These are the different keywords and competitors that you are targeting. When a company actively searches for 1 of your selected intent topics, this triggers an intent signal. Apollo captures and updates intent signals weekly. Based on the frequency, trend, and recency that these intent signals fire, Apollo calculates intent score for companies.
Intent Topics
Intent topics are products and services that prospects actively research online across social media, company websites, job boards, news sites, and other sources. It can be a keyword or even competitor names.
In Apollo, you can choose from over 14,000 intent topics from Bombora, and over 1,600 intent topics from LeadSift within 110 broader categories such as 3D software, sales, and financial services. Refer to Intent Topics for a complete list of available topics.
You can find powerful granularity when searching at the intent topic level in Apollo. This means that you can apply the specific intent topics that best fit your market, even if it is very niche.
For example, if you are in the development tools industry, you could apply something granular to your search such as "artificial neural network software," "cookie and website tracker scanning software," or "augmented reality SDK software," to name just a few of your available options.
Intent Scores
Apollo uses data from Bombora and LeadSift to calculate intent scores. This score indicates the strength of a company's buying intent. A higher intent score indicates a contact is more likely to engage with your company and convert into paying customers.
When Bombora provides an intent topic, Apollo utilizes the accompanying intent score that is placed in a range of 0-100. Apollo considers scores from 0-61 to be low, 62-75 to be mid, and 75-100 to be high.
When LeadSift provides an intent topics, Apollo's proprietary algorithm calculates intent scores based on the following components:
- Frequency: How often is a company searching for a particular topic with intent? For example, a company triggers 3 signals within the last 3 months.
- Trend: Has there been an upward or downward trend in the search for a particular intent topic over the last 30 days in comparison to the previous 30 days?
- Recency: When was the last time a company searched for the intent topic? For example, the intent score could be different if the most recent search was 1 week ago or 1 month ago.
Apollo considers each of these components when giving the company a score based on LeadSift's data, and then groups the scores into the following categories:
- High: A company triggers at least 4 intent signals in the last 90 days or demonstrates an upward trend with at least 2 intent signals in the last week.
- Medium: A company triggers at least 2 intent signals in the last 90 days and at least 1 intent signal in the last 2 weeks.
- Low: A company triggers at least 1 intent signal in the last 90 days.
If both Bombora and LeadSift provide data for an intent topic, Apollo chooses the higher score between the 2 sources.
Use Buying Intent
Ready to leverage buying intent? Refer to the steps in Use Buying Intent in Apollo to select your topic(s), access key buying intent data insights, and filter searches by buying intent.