Intent data is not a list
Why most intent programmes produce the same accounts as everyone else's, and how to tune one to your own history so it stops.
Buy an intent feed, filter for your category's topics, and you will get a list of accounts that are researching your category. So will your competitors, from the same vendor, on the same day. The feed is a commodity. The advantage is what you do to it.
What intent actually tells you
Third-party intent is a probability, not a fact: an account has consumed content on a topic more than usual. It says nothing about fit, budget, timing or whether the person reading is the buyer or an intern. Used alone, it produces a large list of accounts you will chase and mostly lose.
Tuning to your own history
The fix is to weight signals by how they correlated with your closed-won deals. For one client, funding rounds mattered far more than content consumption; for another, a specific job posting predicted a deal better than anything in the intent feed. This is a small modelling exercise on your CRM data, and it is the difference between a feed and a forecast.
Adding what vendors cannot see
Public triggers, such as leadership changes, hiring, tech migrations, regulatory filings and conference talks, are visible to anyone who looks. Almost nobody looks systematically. Combined with fit and tuned intent, they produce the ranked weekly list that our clients' reps actually work from.
A list tells you who exists. An intelligence feed tells you who to call this week and what to say. Only one of those is worth paying for.
Open-source intelligence started in security and journalism. Applied to accounts, it is the most under-used advantage in B2B sales.
An honest hour-by-hour account of a production agent working a B2B pipeline, including the parts where it asks a human.