Market intelligence
Which companies are ready to buy from you right now?
Intent tools promise to tell you who is in-market. What the ten signals are, and why a radar that invents one is worse than no radar.
How MarketWar handles it
Exactly ten B2B buying-intent signal types — topic, search, hiring, funding, expansion, competitor, technology change, tender or procurement, news trigger and website change — and a signal you did not supply is NEVER invented to complete the picture. Every score is a labelled estimate and the radar is reproducible from its inputs, so the "why now" can be checked against the evidence that produced it.
Every B2B business eventually buys a list, works through it, and concludes that outbound does not work. Usually the list was fine. The timing was random.
A company that will happily buy your product in March is not interested in February, and nothing about the company record tells you which month you are in.
What a buying signal is
Something that changed. Ten types, and these are exactly the ten this engine reads:
- Topic — they are suddenly reading about your category
- Search — search behaviour around the problem you solve
- Hiring — a role that implies the work you do
- Funding — money that has to be spent on something
- Expansion — a new site, market or line
- Competitor — a rival of theirs moved, and they noticed
- Technology change — they are replacing part of the stack
- Tender or procurement — they have published that they are buying
- News trigger — something happened that creates the need
- Website change — their own site now says something new
Hiring is the most underrated of these for a small supplier. A firm advertising for someone to own a function has just admitted the function matters and is currently unowned. That is a conversation, not a cold call.
A published tender is the strongest and the most ignored, because it requires reading unglamorous places where buying intentions are legally required to be announced.
What a score can honestly mean
The radar returns a score, a "why now" and an offer angle. The score is a labelled estimate, and the thing worth checking is that the "why now" names the evidence underneath it.
That is the test to apply to any intent product: can you see what the score was computed from? If the answer is a number with no traceable evidence, you cannot tell a real signal from a model's enthusiasm, and you will spend your week on the enthusiasm.
The refusal that matters
A signal you did not supply is never invented.
This sounds obvious until you consider the commercial pressure on an intent product. A radar with two signals on it looks thin, and the fix that no customer can detect is to infer the other eight — a plausible hiring signal, a plausible technology change. The output looks like a complete picture of a company genuinely in-market.
Here, a company with two signals scores on two signals. The picture is visibly incomplete when it is incomplete, because the alternative is a confident dashboard sending you to businesses with no reason to answer.
It is also reproducible from its inputs, so the same evidence gives the same score. An intent score that drifts is not evidence of movement in the market.
Then what
Intent tells you when. You still need the right person and a lawful route to them — which is a separate problem with its own rules, and in the UK a corporate subscriber and an individual one are not the same question.
Pair it with competitive research that stays out of knocking copy, because the strongest moment to approach somebody is often just after a competitor of theirs has moved.
The question to ask any intent vendor
Show me the evidence behind one score, and tell me which parts were inferred.
A vendor who cannot separate those two is selling you a number they cannot defend either.
What this does not do
Intent is not a promise. A company hiring for a role adjacent to your product is a better moment to call than a random Tuesday, and that is the whole claim — it cannot tell you they have budget approved, and any vendor saying otherwise is selling you a feeling.
Common questions
What counts as a buying signal?
Ten types: a topic they are suddenly reading about, search behaviour, hiring, funding, expansion, a competitor move, a technology change, a tender or procurement notice, a news trigger, and a change to their own website.
Where does the data come from?
The signals you supply, plus public surfaces. This is the question to ask every intent vendor, because the honest answer is narrower than the marketing and the dishonest answer is a black box.
Will it invent a signal to fill the picture?
No. A signal you did not supply is never invented. A company with two signals scores on two signals, and the gap is visible rather than quietly filled.
How is this different from a lead list?
A list tells you who exists. This ranks when to approach them and gives you the sentence explaining why now — which is the difference between a cold call and a relevant one.
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