Dark social is traffic and influence that happens outside your tracking-copy-pasted URLs in Slack, forwarded emails, shared PDFs, WhatsApp messages, phone calls referencing your content. A sales rep shares a blog post with a prospect by email, they discuss it over lunch, and the prospect’s colleague tries to find it weeks later but can’t remember the URL. You lost attribution credit for a massive deal influence.
B2B retargeting is showing ads to companies (not just individuals) who have visited your website. When an employee from Acme Corp visits your site, their company gets added to a retargeting list, and ads follow across LinkedIn, Google, and display networks. By the time multiple people from Acme see your ads, momentum builds.
A buying committee is the group of people inside a customer organization who evaluate, approve, and execute a purchase. In B2B, it’s rarely one person. A typical mid-market SaaS deal involves a VP of Sales (champion), Director of Ops (evaluator), CFO (budget holder), IT Security (gatekeeper), and CRO (executive sponsor). Each has veto power.
Demand generation has fragmented into at least four distinct problems: identifying who to target, personalizing the experience when they engage, executing the campaigns and outreach, and measuring what actually drove pipeline. No single platform solves all four equally well.
The intent data market has consolidated around five core platforms: 6sense, Bombora, Demandbase, Clearbit, and Warmly. But each vertical has different buyer profiles, different buying triggers, and different research patterns. Healthcare buyers research compliance and EHR integration. Cybersecurity buyers react to threat events. Devtools buyers start with GitHub forks, not enterprise RFPs.
The most consequential shift in intent data strategy over the past few years is the maturation of first-party intent as a credible alternative to third-party intent data, particularly for companies with meaningful inbound traffic.
Both Bombora and 6sense are significant investments, typically in the $50K to $150K per year range depending on account volume and configuration. Choosing between them, or deciding which to buy first, requires understanding not just license pricing but total cost of ownership including implementation, training, and ongoing operations.
Sales tech buyers are under constant pressure. CROs and RevOps leaders are accountable for win rate, sales cycle length, and quota attainment. Every quarter brings new tools claiming to solve those problems. Buyers evaluate in parallel, often comparing Salesforce, Outreach, Apollo, Gong, and internal custom solutions simultaneously.
Fintech B2B sales is a category where many vendors are targeting the same accounts simultaneously. If your buyer is evaluating payment processors, compliance platforms, or fraud detection software, other vendors are working those same accounts in parallel.
HR tech buying has fragmented dramatically. A Chief Human Resources Officer can be evaluating tools across talent acquisition, payroll, compliance, benefits administration, and employee experience simultaneously, with each category involving different vendors, different buying signals, and different decision-makers.
Ecommerce tech buying follows a pattern that differs from most B2B categories. Merchants adopt point solutions for specific problems: Shopify for their storefront, Klaviyo for email, Gorgias for support, and so on. The result is a best-of-breed culture where tool evaluation is ongoing and switching costs are lower than in enterprise software.
Healthcare tech vendors operate under constraints that most B2B categories simply do not face. Regulatory requirements shape what tools can be used and how. Buying committees involve five to seven stakeholders with fundamentally different priorities. Cycles stretch to 6 to 12 months due to procurement review, compliance evaluation, and board-level approval for larger systems.