Introduction to Prospecting with Intent Data
Finding warm prospects who are ready to buy has never been easier - if you have the right tools.
When Google built cookies and other tracking pixels into “search,” only a few people understood that one day, we could log into a platform like Convex and see who needs our products and services - but that’s what the best sales intelligence tools allow us to do today.
The key to targeting high-intent leads is choosing the right data provider. Some rely on just one or two sources, while others pull from a dozen sources, utilize powerful tools, and track hundreds of data points to reveal a prospect’s level of purchase interest (also known as “signal”).
In this guide for commercial services sales teams, we’re going to cover top providers that identify buyers who are actively searching for your products or services using buyer intent signals. These signals will help you refine marketing strategies, focus on the warmest prospects, and boost sales efficiency.
Key Takeaways
"Purchase intent" data is key to understanding a potential customer's behavior, helping businesses get in front of high-intent leads and enhancing engagement during sales conversations.
Selecting the right data provider is the core factor in generating an ROI (return on investment). Primary factors such as the accuracy of the data, integration capabilities with current sales tools, and ethical sourcing (how that data was obtained) significantly impact marketing effectiveness.
Leveraging purchase intent data leads to improved lead scoring, personalized marketing strategies, and predictive analytics, ultimately resulting in higher ROI and shorter sales cycles.
What is Purchase Intent Data?
Let’s go a little deeper into something we touched on earlier: buyer intent data. This type of data gives you a window into what potential customers are actively researching - products, services, or solutions like yours. It’s the digital trail people leave behind when they’re in the market to solve a problem and are looking for answers. If you know how to read those signals (or have a platform that can do it for you), you can use them to drive your sales strategy forward.
Here’s how it works.
There are three main types of buyer intent data: they are known as "first," "second," and "third-party."
First-party intent data comes from your own digital channels—think email opens, form submissions, visits to high-intent pages on your website, or engagement with your posts on social media platforms.
Second-party data is when someone else has first-party data and shares it with you.
Third-party intent data, on the other hand, is collected across the broader web. External providers monitor search behavior, content consumption, and other online behaviors that signal purchase intent, even before a prospect ever hits your website.
When used together, these data sources give your sales team and marketing team a more complete picture of where a potential lead is in the buying process.
Why does this matter? In B2B sales, time and attention are in short supply. If you can spot intent signals early (“intent-to-purchase” actions like when someone starts researching a solution or downloads a whitepaper or case study from your site), you can prioritize sales prospects and reach out with more timely, relevant messaging.
The result? Warmer outreach, better lead generation, higher engagement rates, and a shorter sales cycle.
Even better, when your team uses tools built specifically for B2B buyer intent, you’re not just guessing what your prospect’s interests are - you’re seeing data that’s directly related to their needs. This data allows you to see who’s indicated “buying interest” and personalize your outreach to speak directly to a qualified lead’s pain points.
This approach not only increases your ROI, but it creates a repeatable, scalable sales prospecting process that shows you the best leads with accuracy and consistency. And in today’s competitive market, knowing exactly when and how to engage a buyer is the competitive edge that helps you close more deals.
Top Data Providers for Revealing Purchase Interest
High ROI sales teams don’t just chase leads—they track intent.
But not all buyer intent data is created equal, and the data provider you choose can make or break your sales strategy. The best ones don’t just offer data. They give you access to high-intent leads (warm selling opportunities), pinpoint your target accounts, and plug seamlessly into your current sales systems.
One name that consistently comes up in this space? Bombora.
Bombora is a leader in B2B purchase intent data, monitoring activity across 5,000+ websites to track real buying signals. About 70% of their data is exclusive, which means the insights you get from Bombora generally aren’t available anywhere else. That gives you a serious edge in identifying qualified leads before your competitors even know they’re in the market.
Even better, Bombora was built with privacy and transparency in mind. Their data collection practices are ethical, and their platform is designed to integrate directly into your CRM and marketing automation tools - making it easy for your sales team to act fast on real purchase intent.
But often, Bombora data is too costly for small to medium-sized companies to purchase, and even if your company has access to it, how do you put it into a usable platform that scales with your team’s lead generation needs?
That’s why you’ll also find Bombora’s data behind several of the tools you might already be familiar with:
Cognism
Seamless.AI
Apollo.io
These "Bombora-powered Partners" take complex data sets and build them into searchable databases by industry, title, location, and more. This helps sales professionals find high-intent leads. These leads come with firmographic and contact data. This makes it easier to prioritize accounts and start conversations with decision-makers.
Tools like the three mentioned have their strengths, but for commercial services sales teams, there’s a massive piece of the puzzle missing - context (we’ll return to this in a moment).
But even with strong intent data, sales professionals selling services to owners and managers of commercial buildings need context. That’s where Convex takes it a step further.
We combine intent data and online research behavior (like Bombora) with signals from social media platforms (like LinkedIn) and property intelligence data that no one else offers. That includes things like:
Square footage, equipment, and property details
Facility manager, owner, and director contact information
Aerial imagery and map-based territory views
Instead of having data from many platforms and making guesses, your sales team can see who is searching. They can also see what building needs they have and who to talk to, all in one place.
The result? A complete, warm selling environment.
Your representatives will spend less time guessing and more time engaging in conversations, scheduling meetings, and closing deals. And because you’re reaching out with insights that actually matter to your prospect’s business, you build trust from the very first touch.
Mechanical Services Case Study
At Mechanical Services and Design (MSD), everything starts and ends with relationships. Based in Ohio, MSD’s sales team, led by VP of Business Development Nick Davis, used to rely on traditional methods like cold calling, driving for dollars, and researching county databases and permitting sources at local libraries to find leads - prospecting efforts that often hit dead ends at the gatekeeper. But with the pressure mounting to meet aggressive growth targets, Nick realized the team needed a better way to prospect.
Everything changed once MSD adopted Atlas, Convex’s data-driven lead generation platform. The team now uses property intelligence to filter opportunities by attributes like square footage and owner-occupancy, identify decision-makers (on-site) by job title, and visualize properties on a map - making it easier to prioritize prospects who were a good fit for their services.
In Nick’s words, “Atlas transformed our business development efforts.” The results speak for themselves: over $42 million in sourced pipeline in just 18 months and a sales team that now operates with more focus, clarity, and confidence.
How to Choose the Right Data Provider for Better Sales Results
If your team wants to have more conversations with decision-makers, finding the right intent data provider is one of the most strategic moves you can make.
Why? Because purchase intent data shows you who’s in the market and ready to buy. It’s how your team stops guessing and starts prioritizing the leads that matter most.
That said, not all intent data is created equal, and choosing the wrong provider can leave your sales reps chasing cold accounts or stuck with noisy signals that never convert.
Here’s what to look for:
Precision: Does the data actually reflect buyer intention, or is it just noise? The best intent data gives you signal clarity - not false positives.
Ethical sourcing: Consent-based data matters more than ever. Providers like Bombora and Convex lead the charge here, gathering intent signals through a cooperative of many content-rich B2B sites.
System integration: Your intent data shouldn’t live in a silo. Look for platforms that plug directly into your CRM, marketing automation tools, or sales workflows so your team can take action fast. Tools that integrate with Hubspot, Salesforce, and other sales and marketing tools will drive faster results.
First- and third-party data blend: Strong strategies use both. First-party data (like website activity or email opens) paired with third-party behavior (searches, content consumption, etc.) gives your team a more complete view of the buyer journey.
Scalability and flexibility: Platforms like Convex aggregate intent data from multiple sources, letting you mix and match best-in-class data with the needs of your business - i.e., based on your market, ICP, region, or go-to-market model.
The right intent data platform does more than surface leads—it strengthens lead scoring, improves personalization, and aligns your sales and marketing teams on which accounts are actually worth your time.
Do a little upfront homework. Look at the signal sources. Check integration capabilities. And make sure the platform fits your sales goals, not just your budget. Because the more precisely you can align buying signals with outreach, the faster you’ll move deals through the funnel
Benefits of Using Purchase Intent Data
The real power of purchase intent data is how it helps you focus your time where it matters most.
Instead of chasing cold leads, your team can prioritize prospects who are showing actual signs of buying behavior, like visiting your pricing page, downloading a case study, or comparing vendors.
This leads to sharper lead scoring, faster outreach, and more relevant sales conversations.
One company that started personalizing outreach based on buyer intent saw a 60% increase in engagement. Why? Because the messages matched what the prospect actually cared about.
And when you’re focused on the accounts that are actively researching or evaluating similar products, you’re not just increasing conversions—you’re shortening the sales cycle and lifting your ROI.
This is especially powerful for Account-Based Marketing (ABM), where timing and targeting make or break a campaign.
Bottom line: intent data gives you the signals you need to act with confidence and precision.
Leveraging Purchase Intent Data in Commercial Services Sales and Marketing
For commercial services teams - especially in HVAC, roofing, janitorial, and energy - the real challenge isn’t just finding leads. It’s knowing which ones are ready to talk.
That’s where buyer intent signals help both marketing and sales align.
By monitoring behavior over time, like repeat visits to solution pages or engagement with specific content, you get a sense of which accounts are warming up. And with that insight, your messaging, outreach, and timing all get stronger.
When intent data is paired with property intelligence or firmographics, you can match sales conversations to actual business needs, making every touchpoint feel more relevant and less like a cold pitch.
Let’s break down three specific ways commercial services companies are using intent data today:
1. Enhancing Lead Scoring
Not every lead should be treated the same.
With intent data, you can apply real-time (or regularly updated) behavioral insights to your lead scoring models. This lets your team identify accounts that are actually in-market, rather than relying on assumptions based on industry or job title alone.
Tools like Atlas can help automate this process with built-in tracking and scoring models based on building data, firmographics, technographics, engagement history, and buyer intent. Your reps spend less time researching and more time closing.
Prioritized lead lists. Better targeting. Less wasted effort.
2. Personalized Content Delivery and Messaging
Relevance wins. Period.
Intent data shows you what a buyer cares about—whether it’s reducing energy costs, managing a retrofit, or preparing for seasonal maintenance. You can use those signals to tailor your messaging and content strategy to what actually resonates.
That could be personalized email sequences, follow-ups based on job role, or dynamic website content based on what the account is researching.
When content speaks directly to the pain points of your ideal customer, engagement goes up, and so do conversion rates.
Automation tools help you scale this, but it’s the insights behind the automation that make it effective.
3. Predictive Analytics
Pair purchase intent signals with predictive analytics, and you’re not just reacting—you’re forecasting.
Modern sales and marketing teams use predictive models to anticipate buying behavior before a form is ever filled out. These models identify accounts most likely to convert, forecast deal velocity, and help your team adjust strategy in real-time.
When machine learning is layered into this mix, your scoring models get smarter over time, continually refining who’s most likely to engage and when. This leads to shorter cycles, larger deal sizes, and fewer missed opportunities.
Case Studies: Success Stories with Purchase Intent Data
Johnson Controls, a global leader in building technologies, faced a challenge common to many large commercial services providers: they were great at expanding existing customer relationships but struggling to break into new high-intent markets. Traditional tools didn’t offer the property-level granularity or timely insights they needed. Their sales teams were bogged down by manual prospecting efforts and siloed data sources.
That changed when they deployed Convex’s Atlas, a property intelligence and prospecting platform that uses purchase intent signals and enriched data to streamline outreach.
“What most excites me about the Convex Intelligence Engine is the ease of accessing information for sales prospecting. The enhancement of enriched leads creates a faster turn-around time in the sales cycle and helps to drive our pipeline growth.”
— Emilie Gorzoch, Fire Services Portfolio Leader, Johnson Controls
With Atlas, reps could:
Pinpoint buildings that matched their ideal profile
See contact info, decision-maker roles, and recent permit history
Quickly prioritize accounts likely to be in-market
Cut weekly planning time from a full day to under two hours
Get better “at-bats” by contacting the right people at the right time
The shift was more than tactical—it transformed their sales motion. Instead of relying on brute-force outreach, reps now build smarter, faster, intent-driven campaigns.
“They just couldn’t believe the data that they could access… They were having more conversations, better conversations, and that uplift translated directly to pipeline.”
— Gorzoch
In just eight months, Johnson Controls saw:
$1.4M in new revenue
30% uplift in opportunities for reps using Atlas
High rep engagement, increased CRM utilization, and better territory planning
The result? A modern sales team backed by actionable intelligence, outperforming those relying on legacy methods. If you'd like to read more of this case study, click here to see the full article.
Common Challenges with Using Intent Data and How to Solve Them
Let’s be real: purchase intent data is powerful, but it’s not perfect. Like any tool, its impact depends on how you use it—and whether you know what to watch out for.
Here are a few common issues we see (and how smart teams solve them):
1. Data Quality and Accuracy
Not all intent data is high-quality. Some providers still rely on IP-based identification, which might tell you the company—but not the person behind the search. That makes it hard to reach actual decision-makers, especially in large organizations.
What to do: Look for vendors that combine IP data with behavioral signals and verified contact information. Better yet, use platforms (like Convex) that overlay property intelligence, contact-level data, and lead scoring—so you know who to reach, when to reach them, and what to say.
2. Shared Signals = Overloaded Buyers
Intent data isn’t exclusive. If your team sees a spike in interest, your competitors might be seeing it too, which means your prospect could be flooded with emails, calls, and pitches.
What to do: Don’t just be first. Be relevant. Lean into personalization that actually resonates with their current business needs. Timing matters, but context closes deals!
3. Workflow Fragmentation
Intent data is only useful if it reaches your reps at the right time and place. If your data doesn’t sync with your CRM, marketing automation, or outreach tools, it’s just sitting in a dashboard—unseen and unused.
What to do: Choose intent data solutions that integrate directly with your team’s workflow. Ideally, it should plug into your sales pipeline (Salesforce, Hubspot), inform scoring and messaging (track signals in the platform), and drive automation that simplifies—not complicates—your process (like Convex’s Generative AI for outreach).
Summary: Turn Signals Into Sales
Purchase intent data isn’t just a new data source—it’s a smarter way to sell.
By identifying which prospects are already in-market, aligning your outreach with their interests, and prioritizing high-fit accounts, your sales and marketing teams can move faster, close more deals, and increase ROI.
Here’s what matters most:
Choose a data provider that aligns with your systems, budget, and team goals
Leverage both first-party and third-party buyer intent signals
Combine intent with property data, verified contact info, and smart workflows
Use lead scoring and predictive analytics to prioritize accounts and personalize your message
Filter out low-interest leads with negative scoring and signal thresholds
Most importantly, you should act on insights in real-time before your competitors do
Whether you’re selling HVAC, solar, janitorial, roofing, or other commercial services, intent data helps your reps start smarter and sell faster.
Ready to Put Purchase Intent to Work?
If you’re still relying on “windshield time” (driving for dollars), cold calling, lead lists, and generic outreach, you’re missing the best deals in your territory.
Convex helps commercial services teams turn buyer intent into booked meetings and closed deals by combining property intelligence, decision-maker contact data, and real-time buying signals in one platform.
Ready to find your next warm lead in under five minutes?
Schedule a free Demo to see how Convex can help your team win more deals with less guesswork.
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