Demandbase Adds 'Real-Time Intent' to Its Account-Based Marketing Platform

Demandbase today enhanced its account-based marketing (ABM) platform with the addition of what it calls Real-Time Intent, a technology that uses artificial intelligence to help B2B sales organizations identify interested prospects during the early stages of their buying cycles.

It’s fairly well understood among B2B companies that their customers are becoming increasingly self-sufficient when researching new products and services. Citing data from Gartner-owned firm CEB, Demandbase points out that enterprise buyers have completed nearly 60 percent of their path toward a purchase decision before reaching out to a vendor via its website. But while prospects may not reveal much directly to sales reps, they do tend to reveal their interests through the behavior they exhibit online, whether it’s through the articles they are reading or the terms they are searching for.

This is where Real-Time Intent comes in; it aims to help sales reps understand what products and services their target accounts are likely interested in during those initial research stages and set up a series of automatically triggered sales and marketing motions throughout their funnels, across channels. Leveraging AI and machine learning capabilities, Demandbase’s technology can analyze the billions of interactions it tracks every month. The platform combines the company’s proprietary IP-based data and patented identification technology with data from its ad networks and exchanges, as well as third-party firmographic data and publicly available online data (from press releases, articles, social media posts, and SEC data, among other sources), to map out in real time what each account is interested in.  

The amount of signals Demandbase can access via its network is significant. Collectively, the vendor’s customers log more than 400 million B2B visitors per month—three times the number of LinkedIn’s monthly active users, according to Demandbase. And these visits produce more than 60 billion monthly interactions the vendor can track to identify signals that can then be acted on across sales and marketing funnels. For instance, using the technology, organizations can appeal to their top prospects with more precise ads and allow them to personalize the content on their websites to align with the needs of a particular prospect at a scalable level.

"Our scale of business audience reach across the entire web paired with our AI capabilities results in an unparalleled ability to understand business interests in real-time," Chris Golec, CEO of Demandbase, said in a statement. "This technology will give our customers greater reach and superior precision and timing than previously possible." And, Golec pointed out, Real-Time Intent will be available as part of a suite of products consisting of targeting, engagement, and conversion solutions, thus enabling end users to take immediate actions on the insights they gain.

According to Golec, Demandbase has previewed the Real-Time Intent function with several customers through its Early Adopter program. "The feedback has been extremely positive,” he says via email. "Customers are excited that they can now identify and track much earlier in the buying process, and then automatically act on that information."

In a statement, Steven Shapiro, vice president of digital and buyer’s journey at Informatica, said that “Real-Time Intent is an exciting step forward that will help us deliver the right message at the right time by both extending intent data with more context and determining the Next Best Action to accelerate the buyer’s journey."

"B2B marketers have been using intent data for a couple years, but are now looking for new possibilities that make this data more actionable and integrate it better with their existing technology stack," Eric Wittlake, senior analyst in the marketing practice at TOPO, a research and advisory firm, noted in a statement. "AI will make it possible for data to become more actionable and valuable in marketing programs."

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