Intent Data: Improve Forecast Accuracy With Market Signals

TLDR: Only a small fraction of ICP-fit accounts are ever in-market, leaving most pipelines full of low-opportunity prospects. Surfe’s Market Signal Pages find accounts showing real buying signals, so reps spend time where it counts and leaders gain a pipeline they can forecast with confidence.

Just 5-10% of accounts are ready to buy at any given time, meaning 90-95% of your ICP-based targeting represents opportunity cost rather than revenue.

To avoid draining SDR effort and inflating pipeline churn, you need to align outreach to in-market signals rather than purely firmographic data.

And that need is exactly why we built Surfe Market Signals: a free resource that gives your team daily-refreshed prospecting lists. Each list is built using Surfe’s powerful filters and highlights buying intent signals, so reps can align outreach directly with your go-to-market strategy.

The next step is learning which intent signals actually predict revenue – so you can act on them quickly. Let’s take a look.

Types of Intent Data 

There are three types of intent data:

• First-party intent data: collected within your own assets, like marketing team analytics or website clicks.

• Second-party intent data: first-party data collected from a provider like G2 or Capterra.

• Third-party intent data: specific changes at a business- or people-level that signal an opportunity or higher intent to purchase.

Surfe Market Signals is built to help find third-party data, which could look like:

• Rapid hiring
• A new funding round
• Leadership changes
• Compliance changes

If your product is relevant to these changes (perhaps you support with compliance in a specific country, for example) third-party data is a valuable tool that shows you when to reach out, and what to say.

Why ICP Alone Won’t Build Pipeline

Traditional prospecting revolves around the ICP. This usually looks like building a list based on:

• Industry
• Employee count
• Revenue
• Tech stack

Doing so is a great start, but a good percentage of that list won’t want your product at all. For others, they might want it, but not right now.

An even smaller percentage will want your product and it will be the right time. Third-party intent data is your tool to zero in on them. Once you know what these accounts are, the more personalized you can make your outreach and the better timing you will have.

How Surfe Helps

Finding third-party data manually can be time-consuming and, depending on your rep’s source, unreliable, which is exactly the problem that Surfe Market Signals solves.

Using its database of over 350M company profiles, Surfe’s Market Signals delivers curated prospecting lists built on third-party intent data. Instead of combing through news feeds or third-party dashboards, reps get ready-made lists of companies that match their ICP and are showing clear buying signals. SDRs spend less time on research, which can be directed into starting relevant conversations. For leadership, it means a tighter pipeline and forecasts built on accounts with a real chance of moving forward.

Example use case: if your tool is best-suited to startups, you could view the list built off VivaTech’s “Top Rising European Startups”. If you target enterprise companies, you could use the list of Top Companies Using Salesforce.

How To Prospect With Intent Data: Step-by-Step Walkthrough

For leaders, the real value of intent data is in execution: seeing how it translates into cleaner pipeline and higher ROI. This section walks through how Surfe makes that link seamless.

Step 1: Choose Your Prospecting List 

Filter the Market Signals page by:

• Fresh Insights
• Most Viewed
• Trending Now
• Editor’s Picks
• Top by Industry
• Tech Installs

Or by a keyword of choice. For example, if your product’s built for solution engineers, searching that title would deliver ‘Companies Employing Solution Engineers’.

Step 2: Check Intent Signals

Once you find a company you like the look of within your list, scroll to the intent columns: funding, company growth, hiring status, or tech stack. This should give a good idea of whether the company is ready to buy or not.

Step 3: Company Research

Click each entry, and it will pull up a sidebar with:

• Company Overview: AI-generated analysis, company description, industry, location, revenue, hiring status, growth trends, management growth trends, and tech stack.

• Leads: headcount and departments, plus role names, email addresses, and phone numbers.

• Also in: additional Market Signal lists for further research. 

Step 4: Find and Export Contact Data

At this stage, the rep simply clicks “Add to CRM”.

This can be done for a single company or an entire list, and Surfe automatically enriches the records with verified emails, phone numbers, and intent data before pushing them into the CRM.

This enriched data is delivered at a 93% data accuracy rate – well above the industry benchmark of 60–70%. This is achieved through its waterfall enrichment process, which runs each request through more than 15 trusted data providers until a match is found. Every email is validated with ZeroBounce and cross-checked against multiple sources to maximize deliverability and make sure reps are working with information they can rely on.

Surfe integrates seamlessly with Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Copper, while data can also be accessed via CSV export or API if preferred.

Because it pulls from a wide network of providers, Surfe also guarantees comprehensive global coverage, spanning industries and regions. This reach is a key differentiator, as many competitors perform strongly in one geography but lack depth elsewhere.

Finally, Surfe will log entries in a standardized, CRM-ready format. Sync happens within seconds, giving reps immediate access to enriched, high-intent contacts and eliminating the manual effort and uncertainty that usually comes with prospecting.

Note: want to build your own list, rather than relying on Market Signals? The Surfe App lets you do that too, with over 50 powerful filters for targeted prospecting.

Turn Intent Into Pipeline

The power of Surfe Market Signals is what happens when outreach is built on intent. Reps no longer waste time chasing ICP-fit accounts that aren’t buying. They can prioritize sequences around companies showing growth, funding, or hiring activity and open conversations with context that resonates.

For leadership, that translates into predictable pipeline growth and higher return on every SDR hour.

Prospecting with Intent Data: Final Thoughts

Intent data can separate a shaky pipeline from a predictable one. With Surfe’s Market Signal Pages, reps don’t waste time chasing companies that tick the right boxes but have no appetite to buy. They start with signals that matter – growth, funding, hiring – and move faster on accounts that are ready to engage.

The sooner you bring intent data into prospecting, the sooner you can build a pipeline that delivers.