First-party data is information customers knowingly share with you: email signups, form fills, CRM records, website behavior, purchase history, support tickets. It’s your data, not third-party vendors’. Zero-party data (explicit preference sharing) is the premium version.
Firmographic data describes a company’s foundational business characteristics: annual revenue, employee headcount, industry, geography, funding stage, and legal structure. It’s the demographic equivalent for B2B-the baseline facts you use to identify which companies even belong in your target account list.
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.
Intent signals are the behavioral indicators that a company or individual buyer is actively researching, evaluating, or considering a purchase in your category. They answer one of B2B marketing’s most persistent questions: who is actually in market right now?
Third-party cookies are going away. Privacy regulations are tightening. Ad targeting is becoming less effective. B2B marketers increasingly rely on data they own directly: first-party and zero-party data.
A typical B2B deal involves seven interactions across three channels before close.
You have 500 target accounts. Your team can realistically work 50.
One of the biggest barriers to ABM for Canadian SaaS is CASL compliance. You cannot email prospects without consent. But identifying and reaching prospects with consent is slow. It requires lead magnets, webinars, and landing page forms that build consent over weeks.
Intent data is one of the most powerful demand-generation tools available. A prospect who’s actively researching your category is 10-15x more likely to convert than a random contact. But for UK B2B teams, intent data comes with a GDPR question: Is it legal to buy and use intent-data vendors under GDPR?
Technographic data is information about the technologies and software a company uses in their operations, from marketing automation platforms to cloud infrastructure to security tools. It tells you what tech stack a prospect already owns-and critically, what gaps exist where your solution fits.
Lead scoring is a system that assigns points or ranks to prospects based on their likelihood to buy. Each interaction-email opens, content downloads, website visits, job title-adds points. When a prospect crosses a threshold (50 points, for example), they’re handed to sales as a “sales-qualified lead” (SQL).
First-party data is information customers knowingly share with you: email signups, form fills, CRM records, website behavior, purchase history, support tickets. It’s your data, not third-party vendors’. Zero-party data (explicit preference sharing) is the premium version.