ZoomInfo Intent Signals & High-Intent Lead Identification

Overview

ZoomInfo's Intent Signals feature identifies companies actively researching topics relevant to your business — before they've made contact. By filtering on Signal Score and Audience Strength, you can prioritize outreach toward leads with the highest likelihood of engagement, rather than cold-prospecting from scratch.

This is one of two primary ZoomInfo prospecting inputs; the other is ^[1], which shows companies that have visited your site but cannot identify the specific individual.

Key Concepts

Intent Topics

ZoomInfo tracks a configurable set of topics (Asymmetric currently has 12 intent topics defined, e.g., Pricing Strategy, Local Marketing, Marketing Automation). Each week, ZoomInfo surfaces companies whose employees have been actively researching content related to those topics across the web.

Signal Score

• What it measures: ZoomInfo's confidence that the company is genuinely researching that topic.
• Range: 0–100
• Target: 100 (or as high as possible)
• Practical use: Filter to Signal Score ≥ 80 to eliminate low-confidence noise.

Audience Strength

• What it measures: The likelihood that the company's contacts will engage with outreach (based on historical email behavior and AI modeling).
• Range: 1–5
• Target: 5 (ideal)
• Practical use: Combine with Signal Score to rank leads. A company with Score 100 / Strength 5 is a top-priority target.

Spikes

A spike indicates a sudden increase in research activity on a topic within a short window (e.g., 3 spikes in the last day). Higher spike counts suggest urgency or an active internal initiative.

How to Work the Intent Feed

1. Navigate to Intent: In ZoomInfo, go to Signals → Intent.
2. Select topics: Check the intent topics most relevant to your current outreach focus (e.g., Pricing Strategy).
3. Apply filters:
   - Signal Score minimum (e.g., ≥ 80)
   - Audience Strength minimum (e.g., ≥ 3)
   - Spike count threshold
   - Company size / headcount range
   - Geography if relevant
4. Sort results by Signal Score or Audience Strength descending to surface the best leads first.
5. Evaluate each company: Review employee contacts listed, their titles, and engagement likelihood indicators.
6. Select a contact who plausibly owns the topic (e.g., for Pricing Strategy, look for Director of Marketing, VP of Revenue, or equivalent).
7. Export to HubSpot and continue the workflow in ^[2].

⚠️ Before exporting: Ensure ZoomInfo fields are mapped to HubSpot fields to prevent data loss. See ^[3].

Worked Example

Scenario: Lowe's Foods appears in the Pricing Strategy intent feed with Signal Score 100 and Audience Strength 5.

• A contact, Jennifer Santiago (Director of Marketing Communications), is listed with a high engagement likelihood.
• She is exported to HubSpot with a note: "Intent: Pricing Strategy — high signal/audience score."
• Her LinkedIn profile URL is added to the HubSpot contact record via Sales Navigator.
• Initial outreach is sent via LinkedIn message (not a connection request) sharing the Asymmetric Pricing topic page, which aggregates all related articles.

The outreach does not reference the intent data directly — it simply positions the resource as relevant. This avoids the "creepy" perception of surveillance while still leveraging the signal. See ^[4] for messaging guidance.

Recommended Cadence

• Frequency: Review the intent feed once or twice per week (the feed updates weekly).
• Time budget: ~60–90 minutes per session to review signals, select leads, export to HubSpot, find LinkedIn profiles, and queue outreach.
• Volume: Prioritize quality over quantity — a few high-signal leads worked properly outperform bulk low-confidence exports.

Filtering Reference

Related Articles

• ^[2]
• ^[5]
• ^[3]
• ^[4]