Leaving marketing and sales firing in every direction is no longer an option. With HubSpot's Buyer Intent, Research Intent and Intent Signals, you start talking to companies already active in your category, often before they fill in a form.
Why buying intent matters now
A large part of the buying journey happens anonymously, before anyone talks to sales (estimates put it at 50% to 70%, according to Emblaze). By the time a lead finally shows up in the CRM, they have often decided half of it: the problem, the options and sometimes the vendor.
If you work only with form leads, cold lists and the team's gut feeling, you are ignoring a large slice of the market that is already researching what you sell but has not raised its hand. This is where three layers come in:
- Buyer Intent: companies visiting your site and showing interest in your brand.
- Research Intent: companies, in or out of the CRM, researching topics related to what you sell.
- Intent Signals: external signals (funding, expansion, tech investment, hiring) captured by HubSpot and shown on the company timeline.
In short: you stop firing everywhere and start working only the accounts that are already warm, even if they have never interacted with you directly.
What HubSpot does with this data
HubSpot's tracking code identifies visits to your site and uses reverse-IP and data enrichment to tie that traffic to real companies. The Buyer Intent engine combines target markets, on-site behaviour, researched topics and external signals, and from there builds an account funnel: the addressable market, how many show intent, which are already in the CRM and which are not. In practice, you get a radar of warm accounts inside HubSpot, with lists, segments and intent-based workflow triggers.
Prerequisites
Before touching Buyer Intent, make sure of four things:
- Tracking code installed properly. Check under Marketing > Buyer Intent > Configuration > Check code installation.
- A well-defined ICP: industry, country, size (headcount/revenue) and tech stack, if relevant.
- Permissions: Data Enrichment and Buyer Intent editing.
- HubSpot credits: advanced filters and adding companies to the CRM from intent consume credits.
Without these, you waste time setting up something that then does not work.
Building the Buyer Intent engine
Target markets. Under Configuration > Markets, you define up to around 20 markets based on the ICP: location, industry, size and tech stack. Start with 3 to 5 obvious markets where you know you sell.
Visitor Intent criteria. Still under Configuration, you create up to 10 behaviour criteria. Examples: "Pricing intent" (two or more visits to the pricing page in 7 days), "Evaluation intent" (feature or comparison pages, time on page above 60 seconds, a case study download), "Migration intent" (CRM migration content). Each criterion scores intent for the company, so the CRM only lights up when there is a real chance of a project.
Research Intent. Under Configuration > Research Intent Topics, you look at topics companies research on the web that HubSpot maps (for example "HubSpot implementation partner", "HubSpot migration", "RevOps consulting", "HubSpot vs Salesforce"). You see how many companies research each topic, which are in the CRM and which can be added to segments or workflows.
Intent Signals. These are the extra layer of external events: funding, geographic expansion, tech investment, hiring. They appear on the company timeline and can be used as workflow triggers. An account opening an office in a region you target, receiving funding or hiring is an account with more pain and more budget.
Companies to track. Under Buyer Intent > Visitors, choose "Companies in a segment" and select your ICP outreach lists. Tracking, and above all adding companies to the CRM, consumes credits, so it pays to exclude the noise up front (ISPs, competitors, your own domain, irrelevant traffic).
Turning signals into pipeline: four playbooks
Setup is half the work. The other half, where almost everything fails, is what you do with the signals.
Sales. A workflow that fires when a company in the outreach segment shows pricing or evaluation intent, or researches a critical topic. Actions: a task for the SDR/AE with clear context ("Company X, 3 visits to pricing in 5 days, researching CRM migration"), enrolment of key contacts in a sequence and an internal alert. Goal: work a shortlist of accounts already in market, instead of cold lists.
Marketing. Dynamic segments by researched topic or visited page (for example "companies researching CRM migration in the last 30 days") that trigger targeted paid, specific nurtures and site personalisation. This cuts wasted budget and raises relevance.
Customer Success. Intent on current customers too. A customer starting to research alternatives or competitors is a churn risk; a customer with expansion signals is an upsell opportunity. Workflows alert the CSM at the right time, protecting recurring revenue.
Reporting. In the end, what matters is proving intent generates revenue: how many opportunities came from intent, the conversion rate versus normal leads and the impact on pipeline. A funnel of "accounts with intent > meetings > opportunities > closed won" justifies the investment in credits and setup.
Common mistakes
- Tracking everything that moves: it creates noise and burns credits.
- Marketing and sales with unaligned criteria: if one blog visit counts as "high intent" for one and not the other, war is guaranteed. Define together what intent means.
- Not excluding junk domains from the start.
- Set and forget: behaviour changes, so review markets, criteria and topics at least quarterly.
Where SmartLinks comes in
The technology is there. The impact comes from strategy, setup and governance: defining the markets that make sense, translating your real funnel into intent criteria, deciding which signals count as a raised hand and tying it all to the sales, CS and reporting process. That is what we do as a HubSpot Platinum Solutions Partner, within Demand Generation and Sales Engine: build the Buyer Intent engine so the signals do not just look good on a dashboard, they turn into pipeline.
If you already have HubSpot but Buyer Intent is unexplored, you are probably paying for data you do not use. The Diagnosis shows what to switch on.
