Buyer intent: did you know you have a powerful weapon in your CRM?

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Practical Guide to Using Buyer Intent

Purpose of this guide

This document is structured to provide marketing professionals with an additional pathway and option for driving customer acquisition for your company. This guide is designed to be highly practical and chronological. Therefore, follow the steps to correctly configure your Buyer Intent:

  • the official step-by-step guide from HubSpot;
  • market best practices for B2B sales and marketing operations;
  • practical governance recommendations to avoid credit waste, low signal quality, and premature automations.

What does this tool actually do?

This tool helps you find potential customers who are at the right moment in their search for a product or service you sell, regardless of whether the companies are already in your CRM or not.

And this is where it gets exciting: within this tool, HubSpot automatically finds companies in this search phase, creates them in your CRM on its own, and even monitors signals that are important for your sales process, indicating exactly when we should reach out. Use the prospecting agent to further boost these results. If you don’t know how to do this, mention it in the comments of this post, and I will create the second part of this content for you!

Overview of the correct implementation order

The recommendation is to configure the features in this sequence:

  1. Validate access, permissions, and credit prerequisites
  2. Prepare the strategic base: ICP, target accounts, high-intent pages, and exclusions
  3. Configure Buyer Intent
  4. Validate captured data and adjust criteria
  5. Create automation rules and sales handoff
  6. Run a controlled pilot
  7. Continuously optimize based on conversion and response

Best practice: Do not automate a large volume of companies in the first few days. Start with a small pilot, validate the quality of the signals, and only then scale. This consumes credits, and we want to consume credits only with companies that make sense.

Part 1 — Prerequisites before any configuration

1. Confirm access, permissions, and availability

Before starting, verify that your user has the following:

  • whether the portal has access to Buyer Intent features;
  • whether there are available HubSpot Credits for use;
  • whether you or the person responsible for configuration have adequate permissions.

What to validate specifically

For Buyer Intent:

Best practice: Designate a Marketing/RevOps owner responsible for signal quality and project monitoring.

2. Prepare the strategic base

Before touching the tool, align on four definitions with the client.

2.1 ICP and priority markets

It is important that you have your ICP and persona well defined. Based on this, create and document these assets for your company, as they will be extremely relevant from here on out.

I will help you with some links to create personas and ICPs in case your company does not have them yet:

Once this information is defined, it is time to work on the settings within HubSpot.

Define a market segment to focus on:

  • segment/industry
  • company size
  • region/country
  • business maturity
  • disqualification signals

Here, you can build a Market Segment to group companies that are relevant to your strategy. Learn how to create a market segment within HubSpot here.

Best practice

Start with more restricted markets. Then, expand as evidence of conversion emerges.

2.2 High-intent pages

List the website pages that indicate genuine purchase interest, for example:

  • pricing;
  • demo;
  • solution comparison;
  • product;
  • integration;
  • case studies;
  • commercial contact page.

2.3 Pages to exclude

List pages that tend to pollute the signal:

  • careers;
  • very top-of-funnel blog;
  • support;
  • generic technical documentation;
  • low-commercial-value institutional pages;
  • top-of-funnel blog.

2.4 Commercial response criteria

Define in advance:

  • what will be done when a company meets expectations;
  • If it goes to sales:
    • who receives the lead
    • how quickly they must respond
    • what approach will be used
    • when the lead enters qualification instead of direct commercial outreach - this is important, and you can combine the lead scoring tool for this.

Best practice: Without a defined goal for post-configuration of Buyer Intent, you will only waste credits. Define marketing metrics and sales SLA if the intention is to send leads to the sales team.

Part 2 — Buyer Intent Configuration

3. Access the tool

The path is Marketing > Buyer Intent.

Then, go to the settings tab for the feature - it is the last tab from left to right.

4. Validate website tracking

HubSpot recommends that the feature only works correctly with the tracking code installed. Again, below are the links for validating the HubSpot tracking code on your site. If you don’t have it, I leave here the article to configure the HubSpot tracking code on your site:

What to do

  1. Confirm if the code is installed on the site.
  2. Validate if it is receiving events.
  3. Ensure that the correct domains are being tracked.
  4. Check cookie consent, if applicable.

Best practice

  • track only relevant domains;
  • avoid letting irrelevant subdomains contaminate the signal;
  • validate strategic pages such as pricing, demo, and product.

5. Create visitor intent criteria

This is the central configuration of the feature.

HubSpot allows creating criteria based on:

  • page path
  • minimum number of visits
  • minimum number of unique visitors
  • time window of up to 90 days
  • country

Recommended implementation structure

Create the criteria in layers.

Criterion 1 — High intent

Use pages such as:

  • /pricing
  • /demo
  • /contact-sales
  • /compare

Recommended configuration for start:

  • minimum of 2 to 3 visits
  • at least 1 to 2 visitors
  • short window, such as 7 to 14 days

Criterion 2 — Moderate intent

Use pages such as:

  • product pages
  • integrations
  • case studies

Recommended configuration for start:

  • minimum of 2 visits
  • 1 visitor
  • window of 14 to 30 days

Criterion 3 — Education signal with commercial potential

Use with caution:

  • bottom/middle-of-funnel content
  • comparative materials
  • technical pages related to the solution

Best practice: Do not treat generic blog as purchase intent. Prioritize pages close to decision-making or with terms that are important for your acquisition strategy.

7. Configure exclusions

HubSpot also allows excluding page paths to clean up the signal.

Recommended exclusion examples

  • /careers
  • /blog
  • /support
  • /help
  • /privacy
  • /about-us

Best practice

Set exclusions right at the beginning. This reduces false positives and improves the sales team’s confidence in the feature.

7. Configure the intent property

HubSpot documentation recommends creating or reviewing the property used to record intent.

Why this matters

This property allows:

  • creating active lists;
  • triggering automations;
  • segmenting companies with strong signals;
  • monitoring program evolution.

Practical recommendation

Standardize the property name with something easy to operate, for example:

  • Buyer Intent
  • Intent Level
  • Identified Intent Criterion

8. Review intent recommendations

HubSpot may suggest pages with a higher propensity for conversion based on pages viewed before reaching a target stage.

How to use this well

Define:

  • target stage that represents real advancement
  • relevant conversion window

Then, review the suggestions based on:

  • conversion rate
  • recommendation confidence
  • alignment with ICP

Best practice

Do not automatically accept all recommendations. Validate if the suggested pages truly represent commercial intent.

09. Configure addition and monitoring automations

HubSpot allows using saved views to:

  • add companies to the CRM;
  • add companies to static segments;
  • enroll companies in workflows;
  • monitor intent signals.

Implementation recommendation

Start with one saved view per priority, for example:

  • Companies with high intent and not in CRM
  • Companies with high intent already in CRM
  • Companies with moderate intent for nurturing

Best practice

In the beginning:

  • activate automation only for the highest confidence tier;
  • keep the rest in manual review;
  • avoid sending everything directly to sales.

10. Configure credit limits

Since some actions consume credits, it is important to define a monthly limit.

Recommendation

Configure a consumption cap for:

  • addition of new companies
  • signal tracking

Best practice

In the pilot, work with a conservative limit. Adjust after understanding:

  • volume of companies generated
  • commercial acceptance rate
  • real impact on pipeline

11. Configure email summaries

HubSpot allows daily, weekly, or monthly digests of saved views.

Practical recommendation

For initial implementation:

  • weekly for leadership and RevOps
  • daily only for active operation, if there is response capacity

Who should receive

  • marketing manager
  • project leader
  • sales manager
  • RevOps
  • marketing responsible for demand generation

12. Configure company exclusion by domain

If there are domains that should never enter the process, exclude them from the start.

Examples

  • competitors
  • partners
  • current clients
  • agencies
  • suppliers
  • internal group companies

Best practice

This prevents:

  • unnecessary credit consumption;
  • irrelevant alerts;
  • inappropriate commercial outreach.

Part 3 — Operational Validation of Buyer Intent

13. Run a calibration period

Before plugging this into more aggressive cadences, operate for 2 to 4 weeks in validation mode.

What to observe

  • do detected companies make sense?
  • do configured pages really indicate purchase?
  • is there too much top-of-funnel noise?
  • does the sales team consider the signals useful?
  • which criteria turned into meetings or opportunities?

Best practice

Create a bi-weekly review routine between Marketing, RevOps, and Sales.

Done, now your Buyer Intent strategy is organized, defined, and ready to be updated with each new learning.

If you still have doubts about how to work with this tool, leave your question in the comments of this post. I will be happy to help you and get this tool running for your company!

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