Technology Market Intelligence vendor HG Insights announced the global availability of Contextual Intent, a “solution designed for companies seeking to leverage the power of customer buying patterns.”   Contextual Intent is available through HG Universe data subscriptions and the Snowflake Data Marketplace.  It is currently in “late-stage” beta on the HG Insights Platform, with a scheduled December launch.

Contextual Intent combines firmographics, technographics, contract intelligence (via their 2018 Pivotal IQ acquisition), and bidstream data to deliver “buyer intent data, without all the noise.”  It employs web users’ behavior and content consumption to determine which firms are researching, evaluating, or buying technology products or services.  In addition, Contextual Intent identifies in-market companies for new technology and potential churn candidates, helping prioritize outreach.

HG Insights ingests two billion intent records each week and matches them against 120 million verified technology installations for 14,000 products, solutions, and services.  The HG Insights scoring model measures the frequency of defined topics mined from locations, with observed activity tracked for nine million companies.

“Contextual Intent is the first intent solution to contextualize data with a company’s technographic profile. Our proven, data-driven methodologies now include the use of intent data—providing our customers with what they need to accelerate growth and gain a competitive edge through contextualized buying signals. Our new solution is designed specifically for Go-To-Market teams to remove the noise from intent data and make it actionable. Context matters, and we are able to provide insights that support hyper-targeting for growth and competitive advantage.”

HG Insights CTO Rob Fox

HG Insights cited January 2021 research from Ascend2 that asked sales and marketing professionals about intent data obstacles.  Half said that data quality was an issue, and 40% stated that it was challenging to make intent data actionable.

Revenue teams can select twenty to over 100 intent topics from HG Insights’ taxonomy which spans over 4,000 technology-based topics.

HG Insights employs a scoring model based on the frequency of defined topics being researched across the web for each company.  It factors in the number of locations demonstrating the activity and baselines intent over time to determine the “increases and trajectories” of research.

Like intent models from other vendors, the Intent Score is measured as the deviation from a company’s baseline and normalized from 1-100.  It is updated weekly and incorporates past and present activity.  However, interpretation of the scores differs between vendors.  Concerning HG Insights, the signal strength is deemed high when the topical intent score exceeds 84 and medium when it falls between 60 and 84.

HG Insights provides intent location, a feature that is available from only a few vendors.  Knowing the research location helps identify the potential nexus of the demand unit (or at least the individuals performing initial research).

Contextual Intent supports multiple use cases, including whitespace scenarios (researching a new category of technology for the firm), expansion (current customer is researching additional products), displacement (potential customer take away), and churn.  Contextual Insights is tagging Whitespace, Expansion, and Displacement scenarios in its data feed, with Vendor Threat, Upgrade, and Migration tags in development.

“We provide insights surrounding the buyer’s journey about when the buyer is more likely to make a purchase decision. We can provide the context of when a customer indicates moving to an evaluating phase, further into a late stage buying cycle. We provide this context as researching or evaluating. We use NLP to determine when enough activity is detected that indicates a potential buying motion, where specific vendors or products are being considered.

Darcy Moss, HG Insights Product Marketing Director

The current offering employs bidstream data, which is potentially problematic as a long-term source of data gathering.  Congress has raised questions about the practice and tying online activity to individuals without consent is a violation of GDPR (Contextual Intent is tied to locations and accounts, not individuals).

“We are always evaluating additive intent supply to diversify our signals,” explained HG Insights Product Marketing Director Darcy Moss to GZ Consulting.  “We are sourcing from bid-stream as we develop and refine other techniques and methods.  Should any regulatory matters influence existing processes for us and the industry overall, we are confident that we will have a compliant and high-quality source and methodology to continue to provide Contextual Intent to our customers.”

For the direct data subscription product, customers have access to all topics regardless of their signal strength score.  Pricing for the data subscription is additive for the Contextual Intent offering.