Intent Data Tools in LLMs era

Let's push the slogans aside and talk about hard work, data, and how to actually help your sales team close more deals. Your reps are out there calling and emailing people who have never even heard of your company. It is time to improve their odds.

Most B2B companies operate in a gray zone. Between 95% and 98% of your website visitors browse your pricing, read your case studies, and compare you to competitors before leaving without a trace. You know nothing about them, and they quickly forget you. That is a pure waste of resources.

How do you change this? You need to invest in intent data. This means building or buying tools that show you more than just what users are doing on your site. You need to know exactly who they are. Specifically, you need to identify which companies are visiting your pages and what they are looking for.

What follows is a practical breakdown of intent data tools that make this process possible. We will look at what works, where the flaws are, what to watch out for, and how to turn this information into revenue.

Table of Contents:

1. The 84% Problem: Why your sales team finds out about clients too late.
2. Technical tool overview: just the facts
3. Snitcher: Identifying companies and syncing with your CRM.
4. HubSpot: When you want data and execution in one place.
5. Dealfront: The best option for Europe (and why that matters).
6. Albacross: How to close the funnel using LinkedIn.
7. Apollo: 275 million records and the issue of data quality. 
8. The SMU Methodology: From anonymous visits to paid invoices (BANT and Persistence). 
9. Q&A: Law, money, and common sense.
10. Data table: Statistics you can verify.

The 84% Problem: Why is your sales rep finding out about the lead too late?

Recent studies from 6Sense, backed by consistent year-over-year data from Gartner, Forrester, and McKinsey, show that 81% of B2B buyers define their requirements before they even consider speaking to your sales team. On top of that, 84% of inquiries coming through website forms are sent solely to get a secondary quote for a deal where the supplier has already been chosen.

84% of B2B Deals Are Decided Before Marketers Even Know About Them

This means that by the time a potential client calls or writes to you, they already have a set list of demands and have finished talking to several competitors. You aren't actually fighting for a contract. Instead, you are wasting time on a deal that is already lost, or you end up cutting your margins so thin just to win that the project becomes unprofitable.

The average B2B sales cycle dropped from 11.3 months in 2024 to 10.1 months in 2025. If you don't engage with the customer while they are doing their initial research, known as the Solution Exploration stage, you simply won't make the shortlist. The statistics are clear: the company that holds the top spot on a buyer's preference list before any direct contact is made wins the deal 80% of the time.

Intent Data is essentially a signal that a company has stopped just looking around and started searching for a real solution. It is your final warning to reach out before the buying window closes for good.

A technical review of the tools: just the facts

Snitcher: Identifying companies and syncing with your CRM

Snitcher doesn't try to be everything to everyone. It is a tool designed to identify the highest number of business entities worldwide.

• How it works: You install a script that identifies companies and, more importantly, pushes that data to HubSpot in real time.
• The result: One Snitcher client saw a 28.6x ROI in the first six weeks by catching up-selling opportunities they didn't even know existed.
• The catch: Snitcher only identifies the company. If ten people from Microsoft visit your site, Snitcher tells you Microsoft was there. It won't tell you if it was an intern or the purchasing director. Identifying the right contact person is still a necessary part of the process when working with intent data.

HubSpot: Data and execution in one place

HubSpot has a built-in "Prospects" tool. Its main advantage is that your entire sales and marketing process already lives there.

• The upside: After a year of using the full ecosystem, clients report an average of 129% more leads. The system can automatically link a website visit to an existing contact in your CRM if that person has ever filled out one of your forms.
• The downside: It is expensive and complex. If all you need is identification, paying for the full Enterprise tier is a waste of money. Crucially, HubSpot works well for sales opportunities already identified in your CRM, but it is only mediocre at handling the rest of the traffic hitting your site.

Dealfront: European data and compliance

For companies operating in Poland, Germany, or Scandinavia, this is often the only choice that makes sense.

• Here is why: Dealfront, created from the merger of Echobot and Leadfeeder, has the largest database of IP addresses assigned to European companies. While Apollo or ZoomInfo work great in the US, their effectiveness in Europe drops by dozens of percentage points.
• Results: The company Actito reports that thanks to Dealfront, 61% of identified visits convert into open sales opportunities. This is not magic. It is simply a matter of calling people while they are actively reading about you.
• The downsides: In head-to-head tests, it performs worse than Snitcher, and it is also significantly more expensive.

Albacross: Retargeting and automation

Albacross goes a step further by letting you automatically create LinkedIn audiences from the companies that visited your website.

• How it is used: If you see that 50 logistics companies visited your site this week, Albacross automatically adds them to your LinkedIn ad campaign.
• The benefits: Spendesk increased their conversion rate by 33% using this solution. Albacross is estimated to be 1.7x more effective at identification than standard trackers thanks to their proprietary IP-to-company database.
• The downsides: Their identification database is the smallest among the providers I have worked with.

Apollo: A database of 275 million records (and its traps)

Apollo is currently the largest prospecting engine on the market.

The potential: 275 million contacts and over 65 filters, including intent data from Bombora.

• The reality: The database accuracy is around 65%. This means every third email might bounce, and every third phone number could be out of date. In Europe, effectiveness is often even lower. This is a tool for those who prioritize scale over precision.
• The benefits: Once a company is identified, you get immediate access to data on the people who potentially visited your site, along with a CRM and sales system that offers massive automation capabilities.
• The downsides: Very poor performance when it comes to identifying traffic from outside the US.

The SalesMeUp Methodology: How to make money from this?

At SalesMeUp, we don’t believe in the "sell right now" approach. Only 2% of the market is ready to buy at any given second. The rest requires groundwork.

We follow the BANT framework (Budget, Authority, Need, Time) and segment leads accordingly:

• Prospect: Anyone who visited the site and was identified. We don't pester them.
• Lead: Someone who has engaged in a dialogue, even if they said "not right now."
• Opportunity: Someone with a real problem to solve within a specific timeframe.

Our longest conversion took 2 years and 7 months. If we had given up after the first "no," that deal never would have happened. Success in B2B belongs to the persistent, not the "fast and furious."

Q&A: Common Sense

1. Q: Is this GDPR compliant?   A: Yes, as long as you are identifying companies via IP addresses (B2B) and not collecting private data from individuals without their consent. Companies like Dealfront and Albacross build their entire business models around full compliance with European law.
2. Q: How much does it cost?    A: Anywhere from $59 to $1,000 per month for the tools alone. On top of that, you have to factor in the cost of labor for data verification. External agencies that handle this professionally charge from around 40,800 PLN net per year.
3. Q: Is this data 100% accurate?    A: No. No tool is 100% effective. Treat this as an indicator, not the absolute truth.

Data Table: our sources

P.S. If your sales reps are still wasting time calling people who were "just looking," let’s talk. We can show you how to turn anonymous visits into actual revenue.