What Buyer Intent Is
Any signal that a company is looking at what you sell. It tells you who to contact first and when. Your message and speed decide the result.
The Kinds of Intent
Eight signals, each with how far I'd trust it.
First-Party Website Visits
A company views your pricing, case study or demo pages, or comes back.
Reliability HighContent Engagement
Someone reads your blog, downloads a guide or joins a webinar.
Reliability MediumThird-Party Research
A data provider flags a company reading up on a topic across the web.
Reliability Low to mediumHiring Signals
A company posts roles in your area, such as a first outbound hire.
Reliability MediumFunding and Leadership Changes
A new funding round, or a new leader likely to review the tools in place.
Reliability MediumTechnology Changes
A company adopts, drops or swaps a tool next to yours in the stack.
Reliability Medium to highSocial Engagement
People like, comment on or share your LinkedIn posts.
Reliability Low to mediumReview-Site Activity
A company compares products in your category on a review site.
Reliability HighWhy Website Visits Are the Strongest First-Party Signal
Most of the buyers you want are already on your website, and very few fill in a form.
- They chose to come. The visit is about your product and price.
- It's happening now. A visit can be minutes old.
- The page shows how serious it is. 8 seconds on the homepage is noise. The pricing page twice in a week is a signal.
- They're comparing. A buyer on your site is probably on a couple of others too.
The catch is coverage: no tool identifies every visit, because home broadband, mobile networks and VPNs mostly resolve to the internet provider. More in the visitor identification playbook.
Website Visit Intent
What Contaktly Does
I co-founded Contaktly, so I have a stake. It puts a small script on your website and shows which companies visit, what they looked at and whether they came back.
- Identify Companies. Who visited and what they viewed.
- Find Decision-Makers. Who to contact at each.
- Convert on Autopilot and the Inbound Agent. Shown on contaktly.com.
We use it ourselves. When a company we'd want lands on a pricing, case study or demo page, we get the company, pages and likely person within minutes and aim for a call that day. Warm companies get a short email sequence.
One clip from my Smartlead talk on 15 October 2026: 75 companies, six meetings, week one. It's one example, so treat it as that.
Our own identification rate goes on the visitor identification benchmark from November 2026, as a range.
How to Act on It
- Be fast. In the talk I put it as: drop everything, pick up the phone.
- Reach the right person. Whoever owns the problem.
- Open with something relevant. Skip "I saw you on our website", because it creeps people out.
- Call the hot ones. I once opened with "this will be a weird call", and it booked a demo.
- Email the warm ones. A short sequence for companies that fit but missed a high-intent page.
Step by step in the website visitor identification playbook, with the clips on the talks page.
What We Learned From Our Own Numbers
The two campaigns we ran that told people we'd seen them on our site got 1 positive reply from 2,166 people and no meetings logged (January 2025 to October 2026, a small sample). A visit tells you when to get in touch. The message and your speed still do the work.