If you care about selling more to fewer people, which is the whole point of ABM, then intent data is the difference between guesswork and precision. The old playbook (spray leads, hope a few stick) still works sometimes, but not reliably and not efficiently.
Demandbase has spent the last decade turning intent into something you can operate against: Account-level signals, real-time activation and a growing set of integrations that let marketing and sales act in unison. In plain terms: Demandbase helps you see which accounts are actually shopping, then pushes that signal into your systems so humans and machines can respond quickly.
Why intent matters now
Intent data is basically behavioural intelligence at scale. It’s not a single click or a form fill; it’s a pattern - multiple signals across web activity, keyword consumption and content engagement that, when stitched together, indicate an account is researching your category or ready to buy. That matters because buying in B2B is rarely a one-person, one-form event. Decisions are made by committees and over weeks (or months), and intent lets you detect those buying committees earlier and with more confidence.
Demandbase packages those signals into account-level intent profiles. That’s important: it turns noisy, individual-level signals into a clean, account-centred lens you can use for routing, ad targeting, personalisation and sales outreach. The practical effect is that you stop chasing the loudest lead and start pursuing the best-timed opportunity.
What Demandbase brings to the table
There are three practical things Demandbase changes about how B2B GTM teams work.
First, it makes account-level intent operational. Platforms that surface interest by cookie or isolated clicks are useful, but they don’t solve the core ABM problem: Matching signals to accounts and to the buying committee. Demandbase’s intent product is explicitly built to map keywords and content consumption to companies and to surface those accounts with confidence, so teams can prioritise outreach using a single pane of glass.
Second, it makes intent actionable in real time. Detecting intent is only valuable if you can act quickly. Demandbase has pushed hard on integrations and automations that let you trigger ads, alerts and workflow actions the moment an account shows meaningful activity. Those triggers are most powerful when they fire into your CRM, your routing engine or your marketing automation platform so people and systems can react without manual fuss.
Third, Demandbase is building an ecosystem around implementation and operational support. They surface and certify service partners and agencies in a marketplace so companies can find skilled implementers rather than trying to stitch everything together internally. That matters because the technology alone doesn’t produce results... the right setup, mappings and playbooks do.
How the rules change for Marketing Ops and Sales
Before intent, prioritisation often meant sorting by lead score or recency. With robust account intent, prioritisation becomes choreography. You’ll be deciding who to target and when based on demonstrated account interest: What topics an account is consuming, whether those behaviours are sustained or fleeting, and whether the account fits your ICP. Sales gets contextual plays (here’s what they’ve been reading; here’s the likely committee), and marketing gets to spend ad dollars where they’ll actually move pipeline.
That choreography depends on clean data and reliable syncs. Demandbase’s integrations with CRMs and MA platforms, including a bidirectional HubSpot integration, mean intent fields can live inside your CRM records and trigger workflows. The initial sync can take time, so plan for it and baseline your systems first so you don’t break attribution or routing when the data starts flowing.
What actually works: An intent-first approach that keeps humans in the loop
We’ve seen three playbooks work repeatedly when intent is used well. The first is intent-triggered outbound: A clear spike in account-level activity should be treated like a raised hand. That doesn’t mean blasting every contact at that company; it means a coordinated sequence: SDR outreach informed by the exact topics the account consumed, matched display ads to the buying committee and, if the account is high-value, an AE alert with talking points. The most expensive mistakes come from pretending intent is perfect, use it as a prioritisation signal, not a hard rule.
The second is account nurture and personalisation. Demandbase gives you the ability to change the experience for an account while it’s browsing your site or seeing your ads. Swap hero messaging, surface relevant case studies, and move accounts into tailored nurture sequences in HubSpot or your MA platform. Those micro-personalisations scale when they’re automated off intent segments rather than manual one-offs.
The third is routing and assignment. High-confidence intent surges should change ownership and urgency. Integrations that push intent signals into routing engines let you automate re-assignment and create follow-up tasks the instant an account becomes hot. That reduces time-to-contact and ensures opportunities don’t slip through because someone assumed another team was handling them. Recent product updates have made these routed flows more deterministic and reliable.
The engineering you’ll wish you’d done first
Intent is only as useful as the data model you build around it. That means canonical account keys (so Demandbase matches to the same company records in your CRM), consistent field mappings for intent score, topics and last-activity timestamps, and TTL (time-to-live) rules so old intent doesn’t keep resurfacing. You’ll also want a reconciliation job that compares Demandbase signals against CRM activity so you can tune thresholds and reduce false positives.
If you use HubSpot, use the official Demandbase integration and treat it like infrastructure: Document what fields map where, how often they update, and who owns the fields. The first sync to HubSpot or any CRM can take days depending on volume; plan for that window and communicate it to sales so they don’t panic when new fields appear.
A practical scoring model you can copy
A pragmatic scoring model blends fit and intent. Start with ICP fit (industry, revenue band, technographic match), then layer on recent behaviour (visits to pricing, product pages, comparison content), then weight Demandbase topic relevance and cross-channel engagement. Set clear thresholds so the system flows cleanly: High-confidence accounts trigger AE alerts, medium accounts go to SDR sequences and lower accounts feed nurture and content personalisation. The exact weights will vary by business, but the hybrid approach guards against single-signal bias and makes intent easier to trust.
Why Consultancy firms matter
You can buy Demandbase in an afternoon. Doing it thoughtfully so it moves pipeline requires experience. Consultancies - especially those certified by Demandbase - bring operational blueprints: Field mapping templates, a 90-day pilot plan, SDR playbooks, creative for ABM display and personalisation templates for CMS. Demandbase’s partner marketplace exists because they know implementation and GTM alignment are where the value is realised. If you don’t already have internal MarTech bandwidth, working with a specialist reduces time-to-impact and avoids expensive mistakes.
How Sojourn Solutions helps
At Sojourn Solutions we position ourselves as the strategic integrator between Demandbase and the rest of a company’s GTM stack. We help define the ICP, implement the Demandbase ↔ MAP ↔ CRM syncs, build the scoring model and create the sales and SDR plays that convert signals into meetings and pipeline. We don’t sell the tech as a silver bullet... we sell the experiments, the wiring diagrams and the handoffs that make intent data a reliable source of revenue.
A 90-day pilot that proves the concept
If you need a short roadmap:
Week 0 is alignment: Agree ICP, pick 20–50 pilot accounts and baseline engagement metrics.
Weeks 1 – 4 are connection and mapping: Get Demandbase talking to your MAP and your CRM and test the initial sync.
Weeks 5 – 8 are activation: Run intent-triggered outreach, matched display for buying committees and personalised landing experiences.
Weeks 9 – 12 are measurement and scale: Refine thresholds, expand to a larger cohort and produce a simple ABM ROI deck showing influenced pipeline and time-to-opportunity improvements.
That cadence keeps the pilot focused on measurable outcomes rather than endless configuration.
Common traps (so you don’t waste budget)
Teams often make the same mistakes: They treat intent as a guarantee rather than a signal; they rush integration without documenting mappings and ownership; or they fail to give sales clear, usable context when they route an account.
The fix is simple but non-negotiable: Treat intent as part of a system, data + playbooks + enablement. If you automate without enabling, you’ll create more noise than value.
Closing: Act fast, design for clarity
Intent changes the rules because it lets you act earlier and with more confidence.
Demandbase provides a mature set of intent signals and an expanding integration surface that turns those signals into action. But platform alone isn’t enough. The real winners are teams who build the plumbing, write the plays and measure the outcomes.
If you want help turning intent into pipeline, Sojourn Solutions can design and run pilots, implement integrations with your MAP and CRM, build the scoring and routing logic, and hand over the dashboards and playbooks your teams will actually use.
