A Behind the Scenes Look at Real-Time Intent

If you’re up-to-date on your Demandbase news, you’ve probably heard about our latest announcement, Real-Time Intent, which is the latest capability in our ABM offering. Real-Time Intent gives B2B marketers the ability to identify online activities of accounts and buying committees to capture their first moment of interest.

But as any engineer will tell you, writing the press release is the easy part. Actually creating game-changing technology is the really, really hard part. To get the full story, we sat down with the chief architect behind Real-Time Intent—our SVP of Technology, Aman Naimat. Aman gave us his take on the ideation and execution of Real-Time Intent, the technology that makes it tick and why he’s so excited about the future of B2B marketing. Here’s the summary of our conversation:

Why Real-Time Intent?

When big data first arrived on the scene a few decades ago, B2B marketers were lining up to harness the possibilities it presented. However, much of the data they had access to wasn’t useful or precise. While there was a lot of data—from website activity to social media—it was always delivered in spreadsheets, bulky systems with logins, and when marketing finally got their hands on it, a) there was too much data to make sense of and b) the information was already stale.

This lack of actionability was the driving force behind Real-Time Intent. We wanted to give B2B marketers the ability to not only ingest and understand this data—without the help of a data scientist— but to take the insights generated and use them to automate important actions, from triggering advertising campaigns and website personalization at the first sign of intent to informing sales activity in real-time.

What Goes Into Real-Time Intent?

Beginning in 2014, we’ve working on Artificial Intelligence-based applications. And since 2016, we’ve been incorporating the technology into all areas of our platform. Real-Time Intent is the latest step in this mission. It leverages a combination of AI and machine learning to synthesize massive amounts of data, drawing from 600 billion B2B interactions across the web, 4 billion IP addresses, 4 billion Terabytes of behavioral data and 36B site visits.

If that sounds like a lot of data to you, you won’t be surprised to hear that during this process we spun up so many servers, we crashed Amazon Web Services (resulting in a migration to Google). If you’d like to learn more about the technology behind Real-Time Intent or are interested in meeting our Engineering and Product teams, you can send us a note @Demandbase.

What does Real-Time Intent Mean for B2B marketers?

Real-Time Intent opens new doors for marketers: they can now understand prospect intent at the first sign of interest, automate marketing actions early in the buying cycle and work closely with Sales to deliver valuable insights. What’s more, this gives them an edge when it comes to staying ahead of their competition: they can identify which prospects are interested in their space, well before their competitors do.

Beyond identifying interest early on, we’re increasing visibility across the board for marketers. They can now paint a complete picture of their buyer’s behavior, on and off their B2B websites. For the marketers who’ve spent a majority of their careers reacting to “interesting moments”—emailing people who filled out a form, advertising to companies who’ve visited their websites and responding to demo requests—they can finally be proactive and reach buyers early on, well before they even visit their website, with relevant, engaging messages.

By introducing Real-Time Intent, we’ve taken a giant leap to help B2B marketers become more data-driven and effective, and it’s only just the beginning. In the coming months, we’ll continue to release new innovation to optimize every single touch point of the buyer’s journey.