Intent Data Providers For B2B

The most consequential finding in Forrester's current evaluation of this market has nothing to do with vendor rankings.

Non-English intent capture typically accounts for less than twenty percent of total signal volume, even after most providers added interpretation across six to ten languages and the strongest began using AI-based translation to extend well beyond that.

For anyone running demand generation outside North America, that number determines whether this category works at all. An intent platform monitoring a Dutch manufacturer researching in Dutch, a German buying committee reading German trade press, or a French procurement team on French vendor sites is seeing a fraction of what it would see if the same company operated in English.

The signal is not absent. It is thin, and thin signal fed into a surge model produces confident scores built on very little.

What intent data actually is

Two mechanisms sit under the category label and they behave differently.

First-party intent is behaviour on your own properties: pages visited, content downloaded, pricing viewed, return visits. You own it, it is unambiguous, and it only covers accounts already engaging with you.

Third-party intent is behaviour elsewhere. A publisher co-operative pools consumption data across thousands of business media sites and reports that accounts are reading unusually heavily about a topic. Bidstream data infers interest from advertising requests. Review platforms report comparison activity. Some providers operate their own media networks and observe consumption directly.

Almost every serious deployment layers both, plus partnerships. 6sense's positioning is explicit about this, describing native intent capability complemented by partnerships with Bombora, TechTarget, TrustRadius, and G2.

That layering matters commercially. If four vendors resell overlapping co-operative datasets, the raw signal is not the differentiator. The modelling, the identity resolution, the enrichment, and what happens after the score are.

Inside The Forrester Wave: Intent Data Providers For B2B, Q1 2025

Published on 27 February 2025, the evaluation scored fifteen providers against twenty one criteria. Its predecessor, The Forrester Wave: B2B Intent Data Providers, Q2 2023, scored fourteen against twenty six.

Intentsify placed as a Leader with the highest overall current offering score and maximum marks in twelve of the twenty one criteria. Forrester credited its Orbit identity graph, introduced in 2024, as among the most significant innovations in the space over the preceding two years, driving persona-based analysis and improved buying group prediction.

6sense placed as a Leader, described by Forrester as remaining among the most innovative players in the market, with intent tracked across more than forty languages.

ZoomInfo placed as a Leader, holding that position alongside its placement in Forrester's separate marketing and sales data providers evaluation.

Demandbase also placed as a Leader.

Anteriad placed as a Strong Performer with maximum scores in future-proofing data collection, data integration and delivery, and data security and compliance. Forrester noted reference customers describing its execution as highly targeted and praising its transparency and affordability.

Two observations about that result set.

A smaller specialist taking the highest current offering score over three considerably larger platforms suggests the depth of the intent capability and the breadth of the surrounding platform are being scored separately. That distinction is useful if you are buying intent rather than buying a go-to-market suite.

And the criteria contraction from twenty six to twenty one indicates capabilities that stopped discriminating. Topic taxonomies, account matching, and basic surge detection are now table stakes.

The problem Forrester's clients raised

The current report reflects client feedback about the importance of driving intent adoption in order to maximise their investments.

That is a polite way of saying customers bought intent data and did not use it well enough to justify the spend.

The pattern is familiar. Intent lands in the platform, an integration pushes surging accounts into the CRM, sales development is told to prioritise them, and within two quarters the field has quietly returned to working its own list. The data was correct and nothing changed.

Three reasons recur.

The signal arrives without a reason to act. An account surging on a topic is not a person with a problem. A rep receiving notice that an account is showing intent on data governance has no opening line, no contact, and no context, and the second time it produces nothing they stop opening the alerts.

The threshold is set for volume rather than precision. A configuration surfacing four hundred surging accounts a week produces a list nobody can work, which functions as noise regardless of accuracy.

And nobody owns the handoff. Marketing buys the data, operations integrates it, sales is expected to use it. Three functions, no accountable owner for whether the signal produces a conversation.

The organisations that get value treat intent as a routing input rather than a lead source. It decides which accounts get campaign spend, which get an SDR sequence, and which get left alone this quarter. That is a resource allocation decision made in marketing operations, and it does not depend on a rep believing the score.

Prioritisation, not prediction

The honest framing of what this data supports is narrower than the marketing and more useful.

Intent data tells you that people at an account have been consuming content about a topic above baseline. It does not tell you who, whether they are in a buying process, whether they have budget, whether they are evaluating you, or whether they are a student, a competitor, or a consultant researching for someone else.

Account-level aggregation is the structural limitation. Signal is attributed to a company, usually through IP or device graph resolution, and the individuals producing it are typically not identified. A surging account might be a genuine buying committee, or three engineers reading trade press out of interest.

There is also a base rate problem that gets glossed over. If a small percentage of accounts in your addressable market are in an active buying cycle in a given quarter, a surge model will surface many accounts that are not, however good the signal, because most accounts are not buying.

That does not make the data useless. It makes it a prioritisation instrument. Working a hundred surging accounts beats working a hundred random ones, and that improvement compounds across a year of allocation decisions. It is not prediction, and treating it as prediction is how teams end up disappointed by data that was working as designed.

Intentsify's Orbit graph and the general movement toward persona-level and buying-group analysis are the industry's response to exactly this. Knowing the surge comes from three people whose roles match your buying committee model is a meaningfully different signal from knowing a domain is warm.

What the buying group shift changes

If persona-level resolution genuinely works, it changes what you can do with intent rather than merely improving the score.

Account-level intent supports account-level actions: advertising, account-based campaigns, deciding which accounts an SDR team works.

Buying-group-level intent supports contact-level actions. Knowing the technical evaluator is researching architecture while the economic buyer has not engaged tells you which content to put in front of whom, and that the deal has a gap rather than momentum.

It also raises the privacy stakes, which is the part European operators have to solve first.

The European problem

Intent data in Europe sits under GDPR, and the analysis differs genuinely from the American position rather than being the same thing with more paperwork.

Where signal resolves to an identifiable individual, it is personal data and requires a lawful basis. Legitimate interest is available and must be assessed and documented rather than assumed, with a balancing test considering whether the person would reasonably expect their behaviour to be tracked and shared for this purpose.

Where signal resolves only to a company, the position is more comfortable, though IP-based resolution can identify individuals at small organisations and sole traders, and account-level data can become personal data in combination with other information.

The practical consequences are specific. Diligence on where a provider's data originates matters, because a co-operative built on consent mechanisms designed for one jurisdiction may not satisfy another. Data processing agreements need to reflect what is actually happening rather than a template. And the move toward person-level resolution, which improves the product, moves it further into personal data territory.

Anteriad's maximum score in data security and compliance is worth noting in that light, and it is a reasonable criterion to weight heavily if your programme runs primarily in EMEA.

Combine the compliance position with the sub-twenty-percent non-English signal volume and a European buyer is evaluating a different product from an American one, on materially different economics.

Where this leaves it

Intent data is one of the more genuinely useful things to arrive in B2B marketing in the last decade, and it has been consistently oversold in a way that produces predictable disappointment.

It works as an allocation instrument. It tells you where to spend attention you were previously spending evenly, and it beats the alternatives, which were firmographic fit and whoever the rep remembered.

It does not tell you who is going to buy. The vendors know this, the criteria increasingly reflect it, and the movement toward buying-group resolution is an honest attempt to close the gap between what the data says and what a seller needs.

The practical test for any programme is whether a specific person did something differently because of a signal, and whether that action can be traced. If surging accounts get more advertising weight, that is a real and defensible use. If the answer is that a dashboard exists, the investment is producing reporting rather than pipeline.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.