Your sales team makes twenty calls a day. Three people pick up. One shows interest. And that one person should really have been called last week, when they visited your pricing page for the third time.
This is the reality for many B2B companies: you call at the wrong moment, the wrong person, or without the faintest idea whether there is any interest at all. The result? Low conversion rates, frustrated sales reps and missed opportunities.
There is a better way. By recognising buyer intent before you pick up the phone, you transform cold calling into a warm, relevant conversation. In this article, you will learn which signals on your website indicate purchase intent, how to determine the right moment to reach out, and how to translate this into a concrete sales process.
What is buyer intent, and why does it matter?
Buyer intent refers to the degree to which a potential customer signals readiness to make a purchase. In B2B, this is rarely a single moment. It is the sum of behaviours, interactions and signals that together paint a picture of where someone sits in the buying process.
The difference from traditional lead generation? With classic lead gen, you collect contact details and hope there is interest. With intent-driven sales, you reverse it: you observe behaviour first and then approach only those companies already showing active interest.
That distinction matters. Because the more often you call without context, the lower your success rate. And the lower your success rate, the faster your team loses motivation. Timing and relevance determine whether a conversation produces results, not the number of attempts.
Which website signals indicate genuine interest?
Your website reveals more than you might think. Every page a visitor views, every return visit and every interaction with your content forms a signal. The challenge is to separate noise from real buying signals. These are the five strongest indicators.
Repeated visits to commercial pages
A visitor who views your homepage once is curious. A visitor who returns three times within a week and consistently views your services pages, case studies or product information is making a comparison. Repeat visits to commercial pages (so not your blog or careers page) are one of the strongest signals that a company is seriously considering you.
Pay particular attention to combinations: does a visitor view your “How it works” page and your pricing? Then there is probably already an internal conversation about budget.
Visits to your pricing page or quote form
The pricing page is the clearest buying intent indicator there is. Anyone viewing your prices has moved past the orientation phase. This is someone who already has your solution on a shortlist and wants to know whether it fits the budget.
The same applies to quote forms, demo request pages or contact pages. Even if someone does not complete the form, the visit to that page says enough. There is active consideration.
High session duration and page depth
Superficial visits (one page, five seconds) are noise. But a four-minute session with three or more page views? That points to serious exploration. The visitor is taking time to understand your offering, comparing pages and reading on.
Specifically in B2B, session duration is an underrated metric. A marketing manager scrolling through your integration overview is probably already testing whether your solution fits their tech stack.
Interaction with comparison or case study content
When a visitor specifically views your comparison pages, customer stories or results, they are in the consideration phase. You do not view this type of content out of curiosity. You view it to build an internal business case or to validate your choice to colleagues.
Case studies and comparisons are decision-making content. Anyone reading them is further along in the process than you might assume.
Multiple people from the same company
This is a signal many B2B organisations overlook. If two or three different people from the same company visit your website within a single week, it points to an internal evaluation process. Your solution is being discussed, possibly in a DMU meeting (Decision Making Unit).
This is the moment when your sales process needs to move quickly. The longer you wait, the greater the chance a competitor has the conversation first.
When is the right moment to approach a prospect?
Recognising signals is step one. But when exactly do you call? Too early and you scare a prospect off. Too late and a competitor beats you to it.
The window of opportunity
Buying intent has a shelf life. A prospect actively exploring your website today may have a completely different priority in two weeks. In practice, the optimal contact moment falls between 24 and 72 hours after a strong intent signal. Within that window, the need is still current and your approach feels relevant.
Wait longer, and the chance of a conversation drops sharply. Intent data loses value over time, like a fresh newspaper that becomes old news after a week. Or as Daan from MakeWaves puts it: “Intent is not about certainty. It’s about probability.” The fresher the signal, the higher the chance of a valuable conversation.
The difference between warm, lukewarm and cold
Not every website visit is a buying signal. It is therefore wise to distinguish the degree of intent:
Cold: a single visit to a blog post or knowledge article. Informational intent, no direct buying need. Do not call; nurture instead.
Lukewarm: two to three visits to a mix of blog and product content. There is interest, but no active consideration yet. A good moment for a relevant email or LinkedIn connection.
Warm: repeated visits to commercial pages (pricing, demo, case studies), high session duration, possibly multiple people from the same company. This is your calling moment.
This classification prevents your team from wasting time on companies that are nowhere near ready to buy, whilst warm leads remain uncontacted.
Intent signals lose value over time
A key insight many B2B organisations miss: buying intent is not static. A visitor who was active last month but has not returned since has probably already started conversations elsewhere or parked the project.
Effective sales teams therefore work with a system where the urgency of a lead automatically declines when no new signals come in. This prevents your team from chasing cold trails that were once warm.
From signal to action: how to turn intent into conversations
Recognising signals only becomes valuable when you act on them. The difference between companies that use intent data successfully and those that achieve nothing with it almost always lies in the process behind it.
Step 1: Identify which companies visit your website
The first challenge is simple but fundamental: most B2B websites have no idea which companies visit them. Google Analytics shows traffic sources and page views, but not which company is behind that visit.
You can bridge that gap with website identification software that recognises anonymous business traffic at company level. Once you know which organisations visit your website, you can analyse their behaviour and assess intent. Tools such as Leadinfo make this possible by matching IP data to company profiles, entirely without cookies and fully GDPR-compliant.
Step 2: Link behaviour to an intent score
Not every visit is equal. Build a simple scoring model that weights commercial relevance more heavily:
Visit to a blog post: +1 point. Visit to a product page: +3 points. Visit to the pricing page: +5 points. Return visit within a week: score x1.5. Multiple people from the same company: score x2.
You do not need a complex system. A straightforward model with three levels (cold, lukewarm, warm) is sufficient for most B2B companies to bring focus to their sales process.
Step 3: Set up your workflow
Once a company scores above a certain threshold, something needs to happen. And that something only works if it is fast and structured. Successful teams set this up as a streamlined sales process: a notification via Slack or email to the right sales rep, containing the company, pages viewed and intent score. That way, your colleague knows exactly what the conversation can be about.
Compare it to the metaphor from Digital Leader: “It’s like placing the ball in front of the goal. Sales just needs to tap it in.”
Step 4: Personalise the first contact
This is where the real difference lies. Instead of a generic calling script, you open the conversation with context: “I noticed your organisation recently viewed our integration overviews and pricing page. I am calling to see if I can help with anything.”
That sounds different from: “Hello, I am calling on behalf of X and we offer solutions for Y.” The first approach feels relevant. The second feels like one of the dozens of cold calls your prospect already received that week.
Common mistakes when assessing buying intent
Intent-driven sales offers enormous advantages, but only when done well. These are the pitfalls you want to avoid.
Treating every website visit as a lead
The biggest pitfall: getting excited about every company that visits your website. A single visit to your homepage is not a buying signal. Recruiters, competitors, suppliers and students also visit your site. Filter on relevance and intent first before placing anyone on a call list.
Calling too quickly after a single signal
You see that an interesting company visits your site and you want to call immediately. Understandable, but hold off. One visit is a data point, not a pattern. Give it a day and see whether more signals follow. A return visit the next day confirms the intent. A single visit that never returns was probably noise.
Not distinguishing between informational and commercial intent
Someone reading your blog article about market trends has a very different intent from someone comparing your pricing. Do not treat them the same. Informational visitors are in the awareness phase and benefit from nurturing (relevant content, newsletters or thought leadership). Commercial visitors are in the decision phase and benefit from a personal conversation.
An intent-driven sales process in four steps
Want to structurally deploy buyer intent in your sales process? It helps to build this up step by step.
First step: make anonymous business traffic visible. Ensure you know which companies visit your website. Without that foundation, you cannot measure intent.
Second step: define your signals. Determine which pages and which behaviour are commercially relevant for your business. For a SaaS company, that is the pricing page; for a service provider, the case study page; for a manufacturing firm, the product catalogue.
Third step: categorise and prioritise. Divide visitors into cold, lukewarm and warm based on their behaviour. Ensure your team only follows up warm leads with a phone call or personal message.
Fourth step: measure and improve. Evaluate monthly which signals actually lead to conversations and deals. Adjust where needed. What does not work, you discard. What does work, you amplify.
The beauty of an intent-driven approach is that it makes your sales process more predictable. You no longer call on hope, but on the basis of concrete behaviour. That produces not only more conversations, but better conversations.
Frequently asked questions about buyer intent
How does buyer intent differ from a regular lead?
A lead is a contact detail. Buyer intent is a behavioural pattern. You can have a database full of leads that show no buying intent whatsoever, and simultaneously have companies on your website that are ready to buy but whose contact details you do not have. Intent bridges the gap between anonymous traffic and valuable sales conversations.
What tools do I need to measure intent?
Fundamentally, you need two things: website identification software that recognises companies (based on IP data, not cookies) and a CRM or notification system that alerts your sales team to warm signals. Many companies combine this with their existing CRM through integrations.
Is identifying website visitors privacy-compliant?
Website identification at company level works with business data, not personal data. Reliable solutions operate fully GDPR-compliant and with hosting within the EU.
