The Forrester Wave for B2B Intent Data Providers, published in February 2025, evaluated 15 vendors across 21 criteria and named a Leaders category that included 6sense, Intentsify, Demandbase, ZoomInfo, and Bombora. Every one of those vendors will tell you, in a 30-minute demo, that their intent signals will help your team find accounts actively researching your category before your competitors do. That's accurate as far as it goes, but it leaves out the parts that determine whether the $25,000 to $100,000 annual cost produces any return.
What a "company surge" signal actually tells you
Third-party intent data works like this: a provider like Bombora monitors content consumption across a co-op network of business websites. When contacts at a given company consume significantly more content than usual about a topic cluster (for example, "marketing attribution software" or "account-based marketing platforms"), their system registers a surge score for that company on that topic. Bombora tracks over 13,000 B2B topic categories across a co-op of roughly 5,000 business websites.
The signal tells you that someone at Acme Corp is researching your category. It does not tell you who that person is, whether they have budget, how serious they are, or whether they've ever heard of your company. You get a company name, a topic, and a score indicating how much their research activity has increased above baseline: the signal is company-level, topic-level, and threshold-based.
The case for it rests on a real problem. A 2025 Gartner survey found that 61% of B2B buyers prefer to complete a purchase without talking to a sales rep, with the majority of their research happening anonymously across digital channels before any contact with a vendor. Intent data exists to surface which companies are in an active research phase before they ever fill out a form, so you can prioritize outbound and ad spend against those accounts rather than spreading resources evenly.
| Intent signal tells you | Intent signal does NOT tell you |
|---|---|
| A company is researching your category | Who specifically is doing the research |
| Research activity is above baseline | Whether they have budget or authority |
| Which topic clusters they're consuming | How serious or how far along they are |
| Which accounts to prioritize for outbound | Whether they've heard of your company |
| Relative surge score vs. baseline | Why they're researching (evaluating vs. learning) |
What G2 reviewers actually report
- Positive reviews are specific. Bombora's Company Surge holds a 4.2 out of 5 on G2. Teams running ABM programs against defined target account lists report that surge scores improve sequencing decisions and help reps prioritize which accounts to work now versus next quarter. That pattern holds consistently across the review data.
- Negative reviews cite an expectation gap, not a technical failure. The most frequently cited limitation is that a surge score tells you a company is researching your topic — but not who in that company is doing the research. You still need enrichment work downstream: finding the right contacts, identifying the buying committee, and personalizing outreach based on a signal that tells you which building to call on but not which floor.
- Setup complexity is a recurring complaint. Getting real value from intent data requires defining your topic taxonomy before you buy (which 4–6 topic clusters map to your ICP's actual buying journey?), integrating signals into your CRM, and building rep processes so a high surge score triggers different outreach behavior than a standard cold sequence. Teams that skip those steps report the data sitting unused in a dashboard nobody checks.
- The core pattern: prioritization tool, not prospecting tool. Intent data performs better for accounts you already know than as a source for discovering new ones. The teams reporting strong results have a defined target account list and use surge signals to decide which accounts to sequence now. The teams reporting weak results expect it to surface new unknown accounts worth pursuing — which is not what it's designed to do.
The platform tier above Bombora
6sense occupies a different position in the market. Rather than selling a data feed, it combines intent signals with AI-driven account scoring and advertising orchestration in a unified platform. Gartner named 6sense a Leader in its Magic Quadrant for ABM Platforms for five consecutive years through 2025, ranking it highest for ability to execute.
6sense's intent data layer pulls from its own proprietary signals as well as third-party sources. The platform ingests over one trillion buying signals per day across 40 languages, according to its published specs. The practical difference from Bombora is that 6sense attempts to predict which buying stage a given account is in, not just whether they're researching a topic. That's a more ambitious claim and, based on the Forrester evaluation, one that has enough supporting evidence to take seriously.
But 6sense is enterprise software, not a data feed, and implementations take weeks. Contracts are opaque on pricing and typically start well above Bombora's entry point. Reviews on TrustRadius note that while the depth of intent signals is genuinely useful, persona-level targeting has limitations, and the abundance of signals can create noise if your team doesn't have strong prioritization processes in place. The platform generates value proportional to the operational maturity of the team using it.
The activation requirement most demos skip
Both Bombora and 6sense will show you demos where intent data flows cleanly into your CRM, triggers sequences automatically, and produces a Monday morning list of accounts to work. That outcome is achievable, but it requires specific infrastructure to already be in place.
Your CRM needs to be configured to receive and surface intent data, not just store it (most modern CRMs handle this, but it requires a real integration, not a data dump). Your topic taxonomy needs to reflect how your buyers actually research your category: "Marketing software" is too broad to produce useful signals, whereas "marketing attribution platforms" or "multi-touch attribution tools" generates actionable surge scores. Your reps need a playbook that connects a high surge score to a specific outreach action, because a score with no associated behavior change changes nothing. And someone needs to own an ongoing QA process to audit which surging accounts actually match your ICP, because broad topic clusters will surface companies well outside your ideal profile.
None of this is hidden or deceptive on the vendor's part. It's simply the operational overhead that separates teams who extract value from this data and teams who renew their contract out of inertia. The G2 review data reflects this clearly: the gap between satisfied and unsatisfied Bombora customers tracks closely with how much setup work they did before going live.
The company-size and maturity calculation
Bombora's entry-level pricing for Company Surge starts at roughly $25,000 per year. Most mid-market implementations land between $50,000 and $100,000 depending on topic count and data volume. 6sense is higher than that, and pricing is not publicly listed.
At $25,000 to $50,000 per year, intent data needs to produce a measurable lift in pipeline to justify the cost. That lift depends on several factors that have nothing to do with data quality.
- Account list definition. If your TAL contains 500 named accounts and you're trying to prioritize which 50 to sequence each quarter, intent signals give you a defensible method for that decision. If you're prospecting open market without a defined account list, intent data adds cost to a problem that isn't primarily a prioritization problem yet.
- Outbound volume. If your team sends 200 to 300 sequences per quarter, intent data can produce a detectable improvement in conversion rates on prioritized accounts versus non-prioritized ones. If you're sending 20 to 30 sequences per quarter to tightly defined targets, the sample size is too small to distinguish signal from noise in your results.
- Ops capacity. Someone needs to own the taxonomy, maintain the CRM integration, and audit the data quality on an ongoing basis (not a full-time role, but a recurring one). In teams without a dedicated marketing ops or RevOps function, intent data frequently underperforms because no one is maintaining the system that makes it useful.
The Forrester Wave confirms that the technical capability of the leading platforms is genuinely strong. The evaluation criteria included data quality, signal volume, integration flexibility, and roadmap strength, and the Leaders scored well across those dimensions. The performance gap between what vendors promise and what buyers report on G2 and TrustRadius is not a data quality problem at the platform level but an activation problem at the buyer level.
Three questions to answer before the demo
Before you talk to a vendor, three questions are worth settling internally.
- Do you have a defined target account list? Intent data is a prioritization tool for companies you already know are in your market. If prospecting starts with an open database search, that problem needs solving before intent data adds value to it.
- Does your team have someone who can own the integration and maintain it? The G2 data is consistent: teams that extract value from intent data have an ops-oriented person managing the topic taxonomy and auditing signal quality. That doesn't require a dedicated hire, but it requires a named owner with recurring time allocated to the work.
- Is your outbound volume high enough to measure improvement? Intent data is useful when it changes which accounts you prioritize, and that change has to be detectable in your conversion data. If you're running too few sequences to see a statistically meaningful difference, you won't know whether it's working, and renewal decisions will be based on gut feel rather than evidence.
If all three are in place, the data quality among the Forrester Leaders is strong enough to justify the spend and the Forrester evaluation gives you a solid basis for comparing vendors. If one or two are missing, buying intent data before solving them doesn't accelerate your pipeline. It adds a subscription that underperforms until the foundations catch up, and you'll have no way to tell whether the data is the problem or the process is.
If you're evaluating data enrichment and prospecting tools alongside intent data, see our comparison of Clay vs Apollo for data enrichment.