Sales and marketing teams face a common challenge: prospects often engage in extensive research well before they ever raise a hand to express formal interest. By the time a prospect fills out a contact form, they've likely been visiting your website and evaluating your offerings for weeks—or even months—without your knowledge. This silent phase of prospect research can feel invisible, leaving sales teams reacting late rather than proactively shaping conversations.
But what if you could surface those hidden signals much earlier? That's exactly where HubSpot's Buyer Intent tool comes into play. Buyer Intent provides visibility into which companies—not just individuals—are actively engaging with your most critical website content, even before they submit any forms. For sales, marketing, and RevOps teams, this means the opportunity to identify and act on prospects' interests at the earliest possible moment, transforming passive visits into actionable insights.
In this post, we'll break down exactly what Buyer Intent is (and isn't), explain why it's particularly impactful for SMB-to-mid-market organizations, and provide a clear roadmap for integrating it effectively into your daily workflow. By leveraging these early signals, you'll position your team to act faster, align closer, and ultimately drive higher conversions and revenue growth.
Buyer Intent is a tool within HubSpot’s Marketing Hub designed to help you identify which companies are visiting your website—even when those visitors don’t fill out any forms. It provides insight into company-level web activity, highlighting when potential customers are researching key pages on your site, such as pricing, product features, or demos.
However, it's crucial to understand its limitations clearly. Buyer Intent does not identify specific individuals within a company or provide contact information. Rather, it aggregates visit data at the organizational level. This distinction means Buyer Intent tends to be most actionable for SMB-to-mid-market accounts, where it's easier to narrow down likely decision-makers based on role or function. Conversely, it might be less practical for very large enterprises, where visits could be spread across thousands of employees, making targeted outreach more challenging.
By clearly recognizing these capabilities and boundaries, your teams can effectively harness Buyer Intent signals to boost engagement with prospects at the perfect moment.
To help bring these concepts to life, we’ve put together a quick video walkthrough of Buyer Intent in HubSpot. In just a couple of minutes, you’ll see exactly how the tool surfaces key signals and why it’s changing the game for sales and marketing teams.
As you can see, Buyer Intent makes it possible to identify and prioritize companies actively evaluating your solutions—even if they haven’t filled out a form. In the next sections, we’ll break down why these early signals matter, and how you can use Buyer Intent for smarter outreach and better alignment across sales, marketing, and RevOps.
We’re in a period of major transition in digital marketing. The days of easy audience targeting—thanks to third-party cookies and pixel tracking—are quickly disappearing. Platforms like Google Chrome are actively phasing out third-party cookies, while privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA are raising the bar on data consent. Meta and Apple have made sweeping changes to tracking transparency, dramatically limiting the data marketers can access for ad targeting and personalization.
For sales and marketing teams, this means less flexibility, less visibility, and fewer signals from traditional digital channels. As targeting capabilities shrink, it’s become more difficult to “see” who’s actually interested in your solution until they finally convert.
That’s why Buyer Intent is so valuable right now. It gives your BDRs and Account Managers an early-signal advantage by highlighting real companies engaging with your site—long before they fill out a form. Marketers can validate whether ad campaigns are truly reaching their ideal customer profiles (ICPs) by comparing intent data to paid traffic, even before conversions start to roll in.
In short: Buyer Intent fills a critical gap in today’s privacy-first marketing landscape, helping your team spot and engage with high-potential accounts at the very moment intent is shown, not just when a form is submitted.
While HubSpot’s Buyer Intent tool offers several configuration options, we recommend focusing on two areas that deliver the most immediate impact: Intent Pages and Markets. Dialing these in will ensure you’re surfacing truly meaningful signals and not getting lost in the noise.
First and foremost, configure your Intent Pages. These are the specific pages on your website that indicate genuine buying interest. Think of pages like demo requests, pricing, detailed feature breakdowns, or case studies—places that a decision-maker is likely to visit when seriously evaluating your solution.
The key is to be selective: intent pages should be ones that rarely show up in the engagement history of casual browsers. In other words, if someone lands on these pages, they’re demonstrating intent to take the next step in the buying process. This makes intent page visits a far stronger signal than general content consumption or blog traffic. HubSpot may recommend certain pages automatically, but use your own sales data and closed-won analysis to identify which pages actually correlate with deals moving forward.
By focusing your configuration here, you’ll avoid false positives and give your team a clean list of prospects who are sending genuine buying signals.
Once your intent pages are set, the next crucial step is configuring your Markets. Think of this as dialing in your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) within the Buyer Intent tool. Not every company that visits your high-intent pages will be a great fit for your business, so Markets help you filter out noise and zero in on those that actually align with your sales and revenue goals.
Markets allow you to segment intent data by factors like region, industry, company size, or any other criteria that define your ICP. For example, you might want to focus on tech companies in North America with 50–500 employees, or manufacturers in a certain revenue range. By setting these parameters, you can quickly filter out partners, vendors, competitors, or out-of-scope companies—ensuring your team spends time on the visitors that matter most.
Getting this right means you’re not just reacting to any signal—you’re acting on signals from companies that are both interested and qualified. The result: more efficient prospecting and better alignment with your overall go-to-market strategy.
At Vaulted, we believe that a quick daily check of Buyer Intent is more than just a best practice—it’s essential for uncovering opportunities you’d otherwise miss. Today’s B2B buying journeys are unpredictable, with prospects visiting key pages, comparing vendors, and gathering intel well before they show up in your pipeline. By building Buyer Intent review into your team’s morning rhythm, you make sure no warm lead falls through the cracks.
Each morning, spend five minutes on the Buyer Intent dashboard. Look for companies that have shown multiple visits, spent significant time on your high-intent pages, or appeared for the first time. These signals can be early indicators that an account is moving from research to consideration—even if you’ve never spoken to them before.
Don’t treat all visits equally. Use your Markets and Intent Pages filters to focus only on accounts that actually fit your ICP and are sending strong buying signals. Prioritize companies that are trending upward in engagement: multiple return visits, exploring pricing or demo content, or repeated sessions over several days. Take the time to check company details—industry, size, and existing CRM data—to ensure they truly match your ideal customer profile before passing them on to sales or adding to a nurture track.
Once you’ve identified the best-fit companies, add them directly to your CRM, flagging them for targeted follow-up. The first outreach is critical—reference the specific pages they viewed, the problems those pages address, or even industry-relevant trends. This tailored messaging immediately sets your team apart from generic cold calls and emails. Personalization, grounded in real engagement data, increases your odds of breaking through and earning a response.
Pro Tip:
Repetition builds muscle memory. Teams that make Buyer Intent review a daily habit consistently spot more opportunities, reach prospects earlier, and speed up sales cycles. As you get comfortable with this workflow, you can start automating parts of the process with HubSpot workflows—but hands-on daily review ensures you’re interpreting the signals right before scaling up.
Once you’ve built muscle memory around your daily Buyer Intent workflow, it’s time to take things to the next level. HubSpot’s automation tools make it possible to scale your outreach, keep your pipeline clean, and ensure no hot account slips through the cracks—all with less manual effort.
With your Intent Pages and Market filters dialed in, leverage HubSpot workflows to automatically add qualified companies to your CRM. Set criteria like “three or more visits to high-intent pages in a week” or “ten pageviews within a specific time frame” to trigger automations. The system can instantly create company records, assign owners, and notify reps—ensuring no opportunity slips through the cracks, even on your team’s busiest days.
Go beyond simple notifications by linking intent workflows to your sales sequences and task queues. As soon as a company matches your qualification criteria, HubSpot can enroll them in a targeted outreach sequence or add them to a rep’s daily task list. This automation keeps follow-up prompt and consistent, allowing your sales team to engage prospects at just the right moment with messaging tailored to their recent activity.
Sync your intent-based company lists directly with advertising platforms for highly targeted account-based marketing. Use these lists to trigger retargeting ads, promote specific offers, or serve relevant content to organizations that have already demonstrated real interest.
This lets you keep your brand and message in front of the right eyes, moving interested accounts further down the funnel before your competitors even know they’re in play.
Ensure your automation stays focused by continually refining your filters to exclude partners, vendors, and internal users. This keeps your lists clean and prevents wasted sales effort, so your team can spend time on the accounts that actually matter.
Pro Tip
Combining targeted automation with regular hands-on review keeps your outreach sharp and your pipeline clean. Automate what works, watch for new patterns, and stay agile as you scale—this is where Buyer Intent delivers its biggest ROI.
Setting up Buyer Intent is only half the equation—measuring its impact is what unlocks continuous improvement and real ROI. Tracking the right KPIs helps your sales, marketing, and RevOps teams understand what’s working and where to optimize.
Key Metrics to Track:
Conversion Rate of Intent-Identified Companies
Monitor how often companies flagged by Buyer Intent progress to the next stage, such as submitting a form, booking a meeting, or entering the sales pipeline. This reveals how effective your team is at engaging high-intent accounts.
Velocity from First Visit to Meeting
Track how quickly intent-identified companies move from their initial visit to their first meaningful engagement. Faster velocity signals that you’re catching prospects earlier and accelerating their journey.
Influenced Pipeline and Revenue
Measure how much of your pipeline and closed-won revenue originated from Buyer Intent signals. Are these accounts closing at a higher rate, or with larger deal sizes, compared to your average?
By consistently reviewing these metrics, you’ll be able to demonstrate the value of Buyer Intent and make data-driven decisions to refine your workflow. The result: a more predictable pipeline and stronger sales outcomes.
Buyer Intent is no longer just a “nice to have”—it’s an essential part of any modern revenue strategy. By surfacing signals you’d otherwise miss, aligning your team around the right accounts, and tracking clear KPIs, you’ll be able to move faster and drive better results in a world where digital marketing is only getting more complex.
Ready to see what Buyer Intent could unlock for your business?
Start by auditing your current Buyer Intent configuration—are your intent pages and markets really dialed in, or could they use a refresh? If you’re unsure where to start, or want a second opinion on your setup, we’re here to help.