What is buyer intent?
Buyer intent is revealed through the context a company is in. When a company hires aggressively, raises a funding round, launches a new product, or moves offices, that context tells you something precise about the problems they’re facing right now and, by extension, the solutions they’re open to hearing about.
That’s different from a transactional trigger. It’s not the event alone that matters. It’s what the event reveals about where the company sits. A hiring spike for five or more salespeople in thirty days tells you something a static firmographic profile never could.
Why intent-based prospecting works
Traditional B2B prospecting runs on broad targeting: industry, company size, job title. The result is thousands of outbound messages sent to companies with no immediate need for what you’re selling. Reply rates are low, follow-up sequences pile up, and the whole thing feels like shouting into a hallway.
Intent-based prospecting changes the timing, not just the targeting. The canonical question Rodz trains sales teams to ask is: “I want to contact a company WHEN [signal].” When it registers, when it appoints a new sales director, when it posts five open sales roles in a month. That single shift in framing cuts the noise considerably. According to Rodz, reply rates inside a 48-hour signal window run 4x cold-outbound levels, and meetings sourced from intent signals close at a 74% higher rate than meetings sourced from cold prospecting.
The mechanism matters too. One signal, one message. No follow-up sequence. Cold outbound depends on four to seven follow-ups to compensate for missing context. Signal-driven outreach sends one message at the right moment, then waits for the next signal on the same contact. On average, a single contact crosses about four intent signals per year, which means four fresh reasons to reach out, none of them a follow-up.
What you’ll find on this blog
This blog covers the practical side of intent-signal prospecting: how to identify which signals fit your business, how to turn them into qualified meetings, how signal stacking works when you want to prioritize accounts, and what real outbound workflows look like when they’re built around context rather than volume.
More articles are coming. Worth bookmarking.