How to Use Intent Data and Engagement Signals to Identify Customer Growth Opportunities

Your market evolves in real time. Your product shifts with every update, and your prospects' needs change daily. Yet, for many organizations, the go-to-market (GTM) playbook remains static—a relic of last quarter's strategy. To achieve sustainable customer growth, you need a dynamic approach grounded in real-time signals. This guide will show you how to leverage the two most powerful sources of customer insight—intent data and engagement signals—to build a GTM motion that adapts, personalizes, and wins.

What is Intent Data and Why Does it Matter for Customer Growth?

In today's competitive landscape, waiting for a prospect to fill out a contact form means you're already behind. True customer growth comes from proactive engagement, and the key to that is understanding buyer intent. Intent data is the set of behavioral signals that reveal which accounts are actively researching products or services like yours across the web. It offers a window into their challenges, interests, and needs, showing you not just who is in-market, but what they care about right now.

Leveraging this data transforms your GTM strategy from reactive to predictive. Instead of casting a wide, inefficient net, you can focus your resources on the most promising prospects—those already demonstrating purchase intent. This leads to a dramatically better return on investment (ROI) and ensures marketing efforts are concentrated on accounts with a higher likelihood of conversion. According to SalesIntel, businesses using their buyer intent data services have seen a 300% increase in conversion rates, a 50% reduction in sales cycle time, and a 36% improvement in customer retention. These are not just marginal gains; they represent a fundamental shift in GTM effectiveness.

By understanding what a prospect is researching, you gain the ability to tailor your marketing campaigns and messaging with incredible precision. This allows you to create a more effective and personalized customer experience that truly resonates with your target audience. Tapping into these signals early allows you to engage prospects before your competitors even know they exist, giving your sales team a crucial head start and a better chance of bringing the deal to a close.

At Octave, we believe that knowing this information is only the first step. Our Generative GTM platform is designed to help you act on these insights at scale. We help you operationalize your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and positioning, turning raw intent data into targeted, high-conversion outbound motions that drive real customer growth.

A Practical Framework: Tying Intent Data to the Buyer's Journey

To use intent data effectively, you need a framework. The most powerful approach is to map intent signals directly to the stages of your typical buyer’s journey. This journey-based tracking allows your teams to uncover not just who is interested, but where they are in their path to purchase, which issues they are most concerned with, and precisely what messaging will be most effective for engagement.

The Foundation: Journey-Based Topic and Keyword Selection

The selection of intent topics and keywords should never be arbitrary. It must be a strategic exercise based on how your customers think and act as they move from identifying a problem to selecting a solution. A well-defined, journey-based topic strategy becomes the foundation for everything that follows: it informs how you score and route leads, what content you create, and how your sales team approaches conversations. It allows you to meet buyers where they are with a message that is relevant, timely, and helpful.

Stage 1: Identifying the Problem

In the earliest stage, prospective customers are not yet looking for specific products; they are trying to understand and define a problem they are experiencing. The intent signals here are related to the pain points your product solves. Your topic and keyword selection should be broad and educational.

For example, if you sell recruiting software, relevant Stage 1 topics would be general terms like "Guide to recruiting," "Recruiting strategy," or "Recruiting talent." For keywords, you might track more specific but still high-level phrases like "Talent acquisition strategy," "Talent recruiting tactics," or "Recruiting better applicants." Surges in research around these terms indicate an account is beginning its journey and is open to educational content that helps them frame their challenge.

Stage 2: Discovering Solutions

Once a prospect has a clear handle on their problem, they begin searching for potential solutions. At this stage, your topics and keywords should shift to reflect the categories of solutions your organization offers. The language becomes more specific as the searcher's understanding matures.

Continuing the recruiting software example, Stage 2 topics and keywords would include terms like "Applicant tracking system," "Recruiting automation," and "Recruiting technology." If certain sub-categories aren't available as topics, you can track them as keywords, such as "Talent acquisition software" or "Recruiting analytics." An account showing interest in these terms is actively evaluating different approaches to solving their problem and is ready for content that introduces your type of solution.

Stage 3: Researching Products and Services

This is the final stage before a purchase decision, where prospects are evaluating specific vendors. The intent signals here are the most valuable, as they indicate high commercial intent. Your topics and keywords must become highly specific, focusing on your company’s brand name, your unique product names, and, crucially, the brand and product names of your direct competitors.

When an account starts researching your brand or a competitor's, they are deep in their evaluation process. Tracking these signals is non-negotiable for any serious GTM team. If these specific names aren't available as intent topics, they should be tracked as keywords. This data provides a clear trigger that an account is ready for a direct sales conversation, a product demo, or competitive comparison content.

Connecting Intent to Action with Octave

Understanding this journey is powerful, but the real challenge is activating these insights in real time. Manually tracking signals and tailoring outreach for each stage across hundreds of accounts is an impossible task. This is where a generative GTM platform becomes essential.

Octave’s AI Agents and Playbooks are designed to consume these precise intent signals and translate them into action. When our platform detects an account is in Stage 3 and researching a competitor, it can automatically trigger a workflow to deploy a competitive takedown playbook, arming your BDRs with the perfect messaging and battle cards. For prospects in earlier stages, Octave can automate hyper-personalized outbound sequences that nurture them with the right educational content, seamlessly guiding them to the next stage of their journey.

Beyond Intent: Decoding Engagement Signals from Your Customer Base

While intent data gives you a view of an account's activity across the external web, engagement signals provide a rich, internal view of how prospects and customers interact directly with your brand. This customer behavior data, sourced from your own channels, is an indispensable tool for finding sales opportunities, particularly for upsell, cross-sell, and retention.

Combining external intent with internal engagement allows you to build a complete, 360-degree picture of a customer’s digital footprint, revealing their priorities, interests, and overall sentiment.

Key Sources of Engagement Signals

A wealth of engagement data already exists within your GTM stack. The key is to consolidate and interpret it. Here are the primary sources to monitor:

• Email Marketing: Open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates from your automated email campaigns are direct indicators of interest in a particular topic or offer.
• Web and Transaction History: Tracking which pages a customer visits, how long they spend there, and their purchase history tells you where they prioritize their time and what solutions they already have.
• Website Forms: Landing page submissions and preference center updates show that a customer is interested enough in a topic to willingly share their information.
• Social Media: Brand mentions on social platforms are a valuable source for understanding real-time customer sentiment, both positive and negative.
• Online Community & Support Portals: Customer conversations, resource downloads, and support ticket themes are powerful signals. They can reveal specific challenges, product interests, and overall customer sentiment.
• Product Feedback: Suggestions or feedback submitted directly to a product team indicate a customer who is invested and engaged with your solution.
• Customer Success Data: Health scores, Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys, and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) data provide a quantifiable measure of customer happiness and loyalty.
• CRM Records: Your CRM holds the history of an account, including past sales opportunities and previous upsell attempts, which provides crucial context for future outreach.
• Learning Management System (LMS): A customer's willingness to self-educate about your products in an LMS is a strong buying signal, indicating they are happy with their experience and want to invest further.

How to Interpret These Signals for Growth Opportunities

These signals are more than just data points; they are clues to future customer growth. A customer actively participating in your online community to discuss a specific issue might be a perfect candidate for a product add-on that solves that exact problem. A user who completes several advanced courses in your LMS is likely ready for a conversation about upgrading their subscription.

Conversely, these signals can also be a warning. A customer with recent negative support experiences or multiple open tickets should be excluded from any upsell outreach until their issues are fully resolved. Listening to these signals allows you to act with intelligence and empathy, strengthening the customer relationship rather than damaging it with a poorly timed sales pitch.

Creating a Unified View: Scoring and Prioritizing Opportunities

With a flood of intent and engagement signals coming from various sources, the next challenge is to make sense of it all. How do you decide which accounts to focus on? The answer lies in a unified lead scoring system that assigns a quantifiable value to customer actions, allowing you to rank and prioritize opportunities systematically.

Building a Lead Scoring Model

A scoring model works by assigning point values to different interactions based on how strongly they indicate commercial intent. The goal is to create a system where a customer's score accurately reflects their readiness to buy. This requires going back to your data sources and assigning a weight to each action.

For example, a simple model might look like this:

Interaction Points Opens an email 1 Clicks a link in an email 2 Visits your website 5 Posts or replies in your online community 10 Asks about pricing or availability 25

The key is to include engagement points from across all your communication channels—email, web, social media, community, support, CRM, and LMS. The more engagement points a customer accumulates, the more interested they are, and the higher they should be ranked for outreach. This data-driven approach ensures your sales team spends its time on the most qualified opportunities, dramatically increasing efficiency and success rates.

How Octave Streamlines Scoring and Prioritization

While a manual scoring system is a good start, it can be difficult to build and maintain, especially as your data sources and signal volume grow. This is where modern AI platforms provide a significant advantage. Octave connects directly to your GTM stack, automatically ingesting signals from your CRM, marketing automation, and other tools.

Our platform uses AI to analyze these combined signals, helping you qualify and prioritize the right buyers without the manual overhead. Octave's agents can enrich this data with additional real-time research, creating a dynamic list of the most qualified accounts for nurturing. This allows you to move beyond static scoring and embrace a system that continuously learns and adapts to new signals.

From Insight to Action: Activating Signals for Tangible Customer Growth

Collecting and scoring data is meaningless without a clear plan to act on it. The final step is to build repeatable strategies that turn these insights into measurable customer growth. This involves personalizing content, empowering sales teams, and proactively managing the entire customer lifecycle.

Strategy 1: Hyper-Personalized Messaging and Content

Intent and engagement data are the fuel for true personalization. Knowing which challenges, brands, or products an account cares about enables you to segment them into like-minded groups and deliver messaging that resonates. You can use these signals to dictate which accounts your publishers target in content syndication strategies, or to segment leads into various email nurture tracks based on their shared research activities.

Furthermore, knowing a prospect's buyer's journey stage helps you select the right content assets. If signals show their research is focused on competitor brands, you can serve them content that highlights your product's unique benefits, such as product comparison sheets or targeted case studies. You can even tailor your landing pages based on the specific product categories an account is researching.

This level of personalization at scale is precisely what Octave is built for. Our platform helps you run hyper-segmented campaigns by creating audience-specific content that aligns perfectly with their needs and interests. The result is a customer experience that feels uniquely tailored and builds trust from the very first touchpoint.

Strategy 2: Empowering Sales and BDR Teams

Your sales and BDR teams are on the front lines, and they need to be armed with the best intelligence. When you know a prioritized account has been researching a competitor, you can provide your team with everything they need to win. This includes tailored talk tracks, competitive battle cards, targeted sales decks, and persuasive case studies that directly address the comparison.

The SugarCRM team, for example, leveraged intent data to arm their SDRs with the right content and insights, all in one place. Their reps start their day with emails from G2 and Bombora showing which accounts are most active, allowing them to determine the best medium and content for outreach in minutes. This targeted approach helped them uncover close to $2 million in pipeline.

Octave is designed to align your entire GTM team around what works. By creating a single source of truth for your messaging, positioning, and competitive intelligence, we ensure that every sales rep has the context and content they need to have impactful conversations and close more deals.

Strategy 3: Identifying Upsell and Retention Opportunities

Customer growth isn't just about acquiring new logos; it's also about expanding and retaining your existing customer base. Intent and engagement signals are critical for both.

To identify customer churn risk, you should constantly track your current customers' research around competitor brand and product names. If an account starts heavily researching an alternative, it's a major red flag. This signal should trigger an immediate workflow to arm your customer success teams with the appropriate content—like user guides or specialized talk tracks—to proactively address their issues and reinforce your value.

For upsell opportunities, you should monitor your customers' research behaviors around products or services that you offer but which they haven't yet purchased. Tracking Stage 1 and 2 topics relevant to that offering (e.g., "employee development" or "improve productivity") signals a nascent need. By getting the right content in front of them at this moment, you can spark a conversation about expanding their investment with you.

Octave can continuously monitor your customer base for both risk and opportunity signals. Our platform helps you find and engage your best buyers for expansion revenue while also providing the early warnings needed to protect your existing revenue base.

The Future of GTM is Generative and Signal-Driven

The days of static, one-size-fits-all outbound playbooks are over. To achieve consistent customer growth in a dynamic market, your GTM motion must be as agile and informed as your buyers. By systematically harnessing external intent data and internal engagement signals, you can build a deep understanding of your customers' needs, preferences, and position in the buying process.

This signal-driven approach allows you to prioritize outreach effectively, personalize every interaction, and provide timely content that builds trust and loyalty. It results in more qualified accounts, shorter sales cycles, and, ultimately, more closed deals. This isn't just a theory; it's a practical, data-driven framework for sustainable growth.

Stop winging it. Your market evolves in real time; your approach should too. Octave provides the GTM messaging brain to turn these disparate signals into cohesive, winning outbound motions that scale.

Ready to transform your GTM strategy? Try Octave today.