Here’s what struck me in listening to this gathering of the B2B community throughout the day: teams are doing great strategic work aligning stakeholders, ideal customer profile and market-framing, designing campaign treatments and investing in smart platforms. The planning and collaboration is there, but then execution often stalls, or worse, creates friction between marketing and sales rather than momentum.
Getting adoption right means your strategy actually compounds. Every campaign layer builds on the last. Every signal gets interpreted correctly. Every team member knows what to do when. In ABM, for example, this is when programs make that leap from “promising pilot” to “business-critical engine.”
And one of the biggest adoption breakdowns I heard in a few settings throughout the day? How teams are using intent data. The good news: there’s a roadmap for using intent the right way, that unlocks all that strategic value.
Overheard at B2B Marketing Live
During a Q&A, an ABM lead shared: “We’ve been sharing intent data with sales, they’re increasing outreach and not seeing the benefit when talking to their contacts.”
The room nodded. What I hear there isn’t that intent data is failing that team. It’s the framing of it that’s off. Fix that and everything else clicks into place.
Think: what are intent insights really showing us?
Intent doesn’t always signal buying readiness. It serves as a trend-detector for research, often as far as a year out from purchase. Someone downloading product comparisons or browsing pricing pages isn’t raising their hand for a sales call. They’re exploring, comparing, and building their understanding of the space.
And that’s brilliant news.
Because now you know exactly what you’re working with:
- Research signals tell you WHAT problems are active in your accounts
- They show you WHERE attention is flowing in your market
- They give you TIMING and context for engagement
Buying propensity? That’s created by your program: how your content addresses their research, how your campaigns build conviction, whether you’re there with the right message at the right time.
You’re not reacting to signals. You’re architecting progression.
The strategic questions intent unlocks
Demandbase provides three core intent signals that are useful in thinking about the different types of value intent can offer:
Standard Intent – shows you awareness & research behaviour: passive exploration of problems and landscapes.
Geo-Intent – adds geographic context to those patterns.
Trending Intent – reveals recent spikes; active evaluation behaviour.
Realising value isn’t just understanding the signals. It’s building the response system:
- What campaign architecture supports each stage?
- How do you coordinate marketing and sales action without creating friction?
- What does “right message, right stage” actually mean for your business?
- How do you avoid mistaking research activity for buying readiness?
Make 2026 the year to crack adoption
To have the system that turns strategy into consistent execution, go-to-market teams answer these questions:
- How do we translate intent into coordinated action? Not just reports to sales, but orchestrated programs that meet buyers where they are.
- What workflows keep teams aligned? Clear language about what signals mean, when to engage, how to support rather than overwhelm.
- How do we build for consistency? Systems that respond to signals the same way, week after week, regardless of who’s executing.
- How do we know it’s working? Measurement frameworks and optimisations that refine your approach based on what actually converts.
This is where strategy becomes execution. This is what separates programs that scale from those that plateau after the pilot.
The team here at Modern regularly attend industry-leading events to bring the latest insights and learnings to our customers. Hear more from our Group Account Director, Rohanne Strange on a recent trip to Gartner Symposium: Colorado.
