Last updated on March 8th, 2018 at 08:18 am

An enterprise IT marketing consulting company called Chief Nation whose customers include  Microsoft, IBM and Intel says it will be able to boost account-based marketing results and generate more sales leads by integrating B2B intent data from Bombora.

Chief Nation, which is based in the U.K., said the partnership will involving layering Bombora’s intent data — which is gathered via a collective of publishers who contribute information about audience behaviors — over its own database and looking at opportunities. That means any e-mail messages or other attempts to content technology decision-makers are likely to reach them at the right moment in the buying cycle, the company said.

If an executive at financial services firm HSBC was looking at an article about cloud computing, for instance, that might be tracked via Bombora Company Surge service, which then would make them better qualified if they were among the targets in an account-based marketing (ABM) program, said Craig McCartney, marketing and sales director at Chief Nation.

“Their APIs, their relationship with publishers and the overall network was appealing,” he told B2B News Network, referring to Bombora. “We felt that reach was important. That account-level intent and breadth of topics that they offer allowed us to be quite flexible in how we help clients, and smarter, too.”

Intent data is becoming a bigger topic among B2B marketers. In Demand Gen Report’s annual ABM Benchmark Survey Report, for instance, only 25 per cent of B2B companies said they use intent data and monitoring tools today, but 35 per cent said they plan to use intent insight within the next year.

While all B2B decision-makers get a lot of outreach from sales teams, the customers of major tech companies tend to get particularly bombarded, McCartney said. That’s why ABM makes a lot of sense for firms selling things like servers, IoT systems and other high-end enterprise IT products.

“It just allows you to stop wasting time with accounts that are not relevant,” he said. “Most of your time will find if you have 100 accounts, only 10-15 per cent are interested in your content.”

In a statement, Bombora director of EMA partnerships Sarah Nicholls, said Chief Nation represents one of the firm’s first alliances in the U.K., though it has offices around the world.

“Marketers have to go beyond merely identifying target accounts,” she said. “Our intent data dovetails perfectly with their ABM model.”

Besides Chief Nation, Bombora this week said it had also formed a partnership with Marketo whereby its intent data would be available directly through the latter’s Engagement Platform to score leads and prioritize ABM target accounts.