Meet The Buyer-Level Intent Platform ‘Revolutionizing’ The B2B Intent Landscape

June 14, 2023
Written by Kelly Lindenau
Published in Blog

B2B practitioners are always craving deeper insights into their target audiences: The more targeted they can make their campaigns, the better. To help deliver real-time insights into prospects actively expressing intent, NetLine, a content marketing and lead generation company, launched INTENTIVE, which the company claims is the only buyer-level intent platform able to deliver those insights.

INTENTIVE analyzes buyer-level behaviors enabled through first party-sourced, persona diversified and blended, online and offline event intent data to help provide buyer-level intent insights. The product’s real-time dashboard seeks to offer a consolidated view at the buyer level and account level, as well as visibility into buyer trends and confirmed projects. Additionally, customers can activate email notifications as well as a native Salesforce app for sellers.

The solution uses natural language processing and AI to power its scoring logic, content assignment topic taxonomy and associative buyer’s journey stage analysis algorithms. Sifting through hundreds of millions of data points, the product leverages these machine learning-powered resources in real-time to update both buyer and account scores with intent signals.

To learn more about the release, the team at Demand Gen Report sat down with David Fortino, Chief Strategy Officer of NetLine.

Demand Gen Report: What factors influenced the creation of INTENTIVE?

David Fortino: It started back in 2021, when NetLine was being acquired by Informa. The idea that NetLine should sit at the epicenter of first-party content, lead generation and buyer engagement was something that really crystallized in our minds, and we realized the existing content landscape was devoid of one thing: Buyer transparency. Everything’s focused on account-level transparency, and oftentimes buyer intent and account intent are used synonymously.

Realistically, buyer transparency highlights the actual individual who’s expressing intent and monitors what they’re doing, while account-level insights just show that a company’s in market and gauges their propensity for action. While that’s directionally helpful, it doesn’t provide sellers with any information beyond telling them to prioritize the account.

With those observations in-hand, we realized we can deliver a compelling, fully differentiated alternative intent network to the existing intent marketplace. INTENTIVE processes huge volumes of first-party data, which is essential to generating buyer-level transparency. Companies that are reliant on cookies, bidstream data or contributed data, which are some of the morally questionable tactics in the industry, can’t get those granular insights.

DGR: Walk us through the back end of the solution — what’s powering all that intelligence?

Fortino: This goes back to us being owned by Informa, because they have a massive portfolio of more than 500 offline events, so we can pull in about 100 million data points specific to people sitting in on sessions, covering every topic that you can think of. After our acquisition, we amassed about 700,000 gated asset registrations per month, which includes white papers, E-books, case studies, analyst reports and podcasts, and that behavior is still occurring. And you have all different types of publisher activity that’s occurring, which feeds that system.

There are hundreds of billions of first-party sourced data points all going into INTENTIVE that allows us to achieve the depth and breadth that’s required across the marketplace for demand gen teams and their companion sellers.

DGR: How do you see this solution revolutionizing the B2B intent marketplace?

Fortino: The revolutionary aspect is providing full buyer-level transparency into not only WHO the individual expressing intent is, but also their job function, area, seniority and their actions. If you look at account-level intent providers, they’re basically saying, “Select your topics, we’ll then tell you when a company is surging in intent for these topics.”

For us, topics are the basic element of buyer intent; we want to tell you if a Director of DevOps sat in a specific webinar for 48 minutes, registered for a white paper and visited 19 web pages, with insights into the titles of those pages. Even more uniquely, we can tell whether that developer flew to a specific offline event. We’re the only company aggregating both buyer-level data transparency, delivering transparency into buyer intent in their content consumption journey and then layering event intent into it, as well.

DGR: To take a more general view, how do you see the B2B data landscape evolving, and how is INTENTIVE going to fit into that?

Fortino: We’re super excited about the future, largely due to things that other vendors are fearful of: Bidstream is under government scrutiny across the world. While it’s primarily focused in the European Union, it will be coming to the U.S. There’s also a spotlight on third-party cookies, which Google plans to eliminate by 2024. When a user isn’t permission-based and providing real-time, first-party consent, the business model is highly jeopardized.

All these vendors know that they’re dancing around an uncertain landscape and realistically, they will exist moving forward — their accuracy will just become worse, because they won’t have the same level of data accessible to them. They’ll need to fall back on more generalized account and IP targeting, which they’re already doing, but they’re not going to be able to suck in bidstream data. Without that data, they’ll lose a ton of context around buyer intent.

You’re almost going back to Web 1.0, which is just contextually targeting to the best of your ability. But on our side, we process this data on a first-party basis, so we’ll be fine — it’s our competitive moat.