B2B buyers have completed 57 - 70% of their research before contacting sales.* And buyers who research your partners in that time usually don't mention it in the sales process. Which is why partner teams often find themselves frustrated at the inability to track how partners influence sales rates.
What if you could see the data on which buyers are doing research on your partners? You'd have a key avenue to track partner-influenced deals.
Well, now you can — with marketplace buyer intent!
We’ve officially launched buyer intent (beta) for your partner marketplace. For the first time, you can get proactive insights on potential customers from your marketplace, rather than having to wait for them to take an action that you can react to.
This is huge for partnership teams for a few reasons:
- Partner-influenced deal attribution just got a lot better. You "know" that your partner program and marketplace are contributing to more deals than everyone thinks. Now you can prove it to executives.
- You can squeeze out more juice for sales & marketing. When you see a buyer shopping a listing on your site, you can give this information to sales or even check your account mapping tool to see if they're a customer of your partner (and ask for a warm intro).
- It's a hands-off way to offer more data to your partners. Visitor identification is available in the partner portal too! Your partners can check who's looking at their listing on your marketplace with no work from you. Plus, you can offer warm intros.
This marketplace intent data is available whether or not the buyer has submitted their information on your site. Which is amazing, since it gives you visibility into prospects early on in the buying process, who are still just doing research.
This is a huge win, not only for partnerships, but company-wide from sales to marketing to CSM to executives. Let’s dive into it further.
What is buyer intent?
Buyer intent refers to the collection and analysis of actions a prospect has taken with your company and category. In other words, trying to determine whether someone is thinking about buying your product, based on things they do like browsing your site and reviews online and reaching out to ask questions.
Traditionally, buyer intent has been used by marketers and sales teams to identify people in the funnel and take actions to capture them and/or move them along. In 2024, the savviest companies are collecting data from every valuable source and using analysis tools like Demandbase or 6Sense to provide insights at scale.
What you get access to with marketplace buyer intent (beta) – visitor identification data
So let’s dive into what marketplace buyer intent currently looks like in Partner Fleet.
When you have buyer intent enabled, you can access a list of companies that have visited your marketplace since you started collecting data.
The data includes:
- Date of most recent action
- Company name and logo
- Industry
- The number of marketplace pages they’ve viewed
- The number of your partner listings they’ve viewed
This alone gives you fantastic insight into the companies that are browsing your marketplace. You can also filter the screen by company name, partner listings they’ve viewed, date, or do a search.
Want more information about a specific visitor and what they looked at? Click the arrow next to the company to expand and you’ll see further details about their interactions with your marketplace:
Get further information about the buyer including domain, address, year founded, and industry breakdowns. Plus, you can see in a snapshot the partners they are looking at and a timeline of exactly what they viewed and clicked on.
Actions you can take with visitor identification
Although this data isn’t yet available in your other partner tech tools or CRM, it’s still very actionable. Here are a few things you can do now with this data:
- Track partner-influenced and marketplace-influenced revenue. Did someone who browsed the marketplace end up closing? There aren’t a ton of ways to track how partners indirectly influence revenue – but this is one of them! Each month, pull a list of prospects researching the marketplace and compare it to close-won deals. Then tell your executive team!
- Give high-quality leads to your sales team manually. Glance at this page daily and identify companies that are very likely to buy. Send these indicators to your sales team manually via Slack or email. Believe us, they’ll be happy for the lead quality and context.
- Ask for an introduction from your partners. Is a potential buyer spending a lot of time on a particular partner listing? Reach out to the partner team from that company. If they’re a current customer of your partner, get an introduction. You can approach the customer with a better-together story.
- Offer an introduction to your partners. This is even easier than asking for an introduction from your partners. And it can create good will and a stronger relationship with partners and help customers more easily find the exact solutions they need from your marketplace.
As we continue to develop our buyer intent offering, you’ll find that it better integrates into your existing systems and action-items will be faster, easier, and scalable.
Now let's dive deeper into the value this data can drive to your partner program.
Use buyer intent to track partner-influenced deals
Partnership leaders have an ongoing issue — tracking the influence partners have on deals. Research shows that integrations are a top three factor for B2B technology buyers, but most partner teams struggle to prove this internally.
But with buyer intent, you now have a way to directly associate close-won deals with actions the customer took on your partner marketplace.
Grab the list of visitors to your partner marketplace and compare it to your monthly, quarterly, and yearly sales. As a partner team, you can start to track how often buyers visited the marketplace before entering the sales process. Plus, you can track tons of other valuable metrics like:
- Close-rates on deals where partners visited your marketplace
- LTV for customers who visited your marketplace in the buying process
- Integration time-to-installation and usage rates for those customers
You can also gather general data to help with buyer and partner research. Are you missing a key vertical due to lack of a certain integration? Could you be going up-market if you had the right SI partners?
This buyer intent data is going to be a key factor for partner teams looking to prove the value of their program. The ones who jump on this data early will be more likely to expand budgets and teams, and find more success overall.
Leverage trust from partners to get intros instead of cold outreach
If a marketer sees a prospect navigating their site, they can get that information to sales… but then what? The sales team is still forced to do cold outreach to the company, often looking for the right person to talk to. It’s a better system, but still not foolproof.
If a marketer or partnerships pro sees a prospect looking at certain pages on their partner marketplace, they can involve partners.
For example, if you sell CRM software and you see someone looking at your Marketo integration, you could ask your connection at Marketo for a warm introduction to that buyer (after verifying they’re a customer via account mapping insights). Then, you can approach the prospect from someone they already know, and offer the complete solution they’re already searching for: CRM + Marketing Automation.
The same works for implementation and service partners. If you see a prospect on your service provider’s marketplace page, you can ask that partner if they’re already connected. Then get a warm intro or even bring the partner into the deal process.
Offer visitor identification data to your partners
In most cases offering intent data to your partners requires manual data pulls and back-and-forth emails every month. Which is why most companies don’t offer any buyer information to their partners.
But now, you can give your partners buyer identification data with no extra work at all! When your partners sign into their partner portal, they can check out the companies visiting their marketplace listing and the categories they’re in.
Talk about reciprocity!
This data is valuable to integration partners, as they can send the same data to their sales teams.
But it’s even more valuable to your service partners. Customers of yours are most likely to be searching for solutions on your marketplace. The “go-getter” partners of yours can jump on the opportunity and reach out to them quickly.
Why did we add buyer intent to Partner Fleet?
Our CEO, Kenny Browne, was an early employee at G2 and one of the engineers on the first version of G2’s buyer intent product. He watched the company turn from a listing product into a data product and saw the immense value that data offered G2 customers.
G2 watched how companies were using the buyer intent data and began to build products around it. Kenny led a lot of those projects. As a result, he learned when intent data is valuable, and when it’s not.
With this experience in hand, we knew that intent would be huge for partnership teams – and Kenny knows how to deliver what’s actually valuable.
We’re excited to see how marketplace buyer intent can change, not only the partner teams using it, but partnerships as a whole! Imagine a world where partnerships are affecting every deal and being tracked much closer.
Who else is offering this?
No other out-of-the-box marketplace solutions are offering buyer intent signals. In order to get buyer intent from your marketplace, you’ll have to build a custom solution. Or you can use Partner Fleet!
Learn more from Kenny Browne
He chats about his thoughts for the way buyer intent on a marketplace can help partnerships in general. Plus, tune in to hear whats coming in the future of this product.
How to get V1 buyer intent on your marketplace
If you have a Partner Fleet marketplace, reach out to our support team to set up a demo of buyer intent V1 and learn about what’s coming down the pike.
Are you interested in a (new) marketplace on your website and/or embedded in your application? Book a demo with our team to learn more about how to get started. We’ll include a buyer intent demo in the discussion.
