What Bombora, 6sense and G2 Intent Data Actually Tell You
Intent data gets sold as a single category, but Bombora, 6sense and G2 are measuring three different things. Confusing them is how a team ends up chasing a company that read one blog post as if it were mid-evaluation.
Knowing what each platform is actually tracking, and how much weight that deserves in your process, matters more than which one you buy.
Vendors Covered in this Article
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Three Different Signals Wearing the Same Label
Bombora's Company Surge data comes from a cooperative of B2B publisher sites tracking what topics a company's employees are reading about, aggregated and anonymized. It tells you a topic is trending inside an account, not that a specific buyer is ready to talk.
6sense layers predictive modeling on top of first-party and third-party behavior to estimate where an account sits in a buying stage. It's built for account-based orchestration, which makes it heavier to set up but more actionable once it's tuned to your funnel.
G2's buyer intent comes from people actively researching software categories and comparing named vendors on G2 itself, which is a narrower but more direct signal: someone is genuinely shopping, in your category, right now. It's the closest of the three to a real hand raised, since the person doing the research chose to visit a review site rather than simply appearing in someone else's ad network data.
Matching the Signal to How Fast You Should Move
Treat these as a speed dial, not a single alert. A G2 comparison-page visit for your category is close to a raised hand, worth a same-day, specific outreach that references the actual evaluation they're doing.
A Bombora topic surge is earlier and vaguer, closer to a reason to add an account to a nurture list or a targeted ad audience than to call immediately. 6sense scoring sits in between, and its value depends heavily on how well the model has been trained on your own closed-won accounts.
Mixing up the speed dial is a common failure mode: a rep who calls the moment a topic surge fires, before there's any specific reason to believe someone is evaluating vendors, tends to come across as if they're guessing, because they are.
Where Reps Get Intent Data Wrong
- Treating a topic surge as if the company already knows your product exists
- Sending a generic "noticed you're researching X" email that names the topic but nothing specific about the account's situation
- Never checking whether the signal correlates with your actual won deals before trusting it as a prioritization input
- Letting intent alerts pile up in a Slack channel nobody owns instead of routing them into a queue with an owner and a response window
- Assuming every buyer persona at the account is equally in-market just because one signal fired somewhere in the org
That last point is worth sitting with. A surge on a topic your product addresses might be coming from someone in a department that will never touch the purchase decision, and reaching out to the wrong persona with a confident, targeted message can do more damage to your credibility than a generic email would have.
Building the Response Instead of Just the Alert
The signal is only half the system. You still need a defined next step: who gets notified, what the outreach says, and how quickly it needs to go out to matter.
A rep responding to a lead within the first hour is roughly seven times more likely to qualify it than one who waits even a little longer, and intent signals decay the same way a fresh inbound lead does1. A surge alert that sits in a dashboard for three days is close to useless regardless of which vendor generated it.
Build the response before you buy the platform, not after. Decide who owns the queue, what a same-day touch actually contains, and what happens to an account that gets flagged but doesn't respond, before the first alert ever fires.
Deciding Whether You Need One Platform or a Combination
Small teams often start with G2 alone, since it's the cheapest to interpret correctly and the signal is the most direct. Bombora or 6sense make more sense once you have enough volume and a defined ABM motion to justify the setup and tuning time.
Whatever you choose, feed the enriched, intent-flagged accounts into your existing contact tooling like Apollo rather than running a separate list in a spreadsheet that reps have to check manually. A signal that lives outside the tools reps already open every day is a signal that gets missed.
It's also worth revisiting the choice after six months or so of real usage. A platform that looked right on paper can turn out to generate more noise than signal for your specific market, and switching or dropping a layer is a reasonable outcome once you have enough data to judge it fairly.
What Good Looks Like
A working intent program routes each signal type to a matching response speed and checks, on a regular basis, whether the signal actually correlates with accounts that end up closing.
Building The Capability (5-Stage Skill Ladder)
How to Get Started
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Once an account clears your intent threshold, Apollo is a reasonable place to route it so the enriched contact and the alert live in the same system a rep already works.
Lusha works as a quick fallback for filling in a direct dial once an intent-flagged account needs a fast, personal follow-up rather than a generic email.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is G2 intent data better than Bombora's?
They're not really comparable. G2 tells you someone is actively comparing vendors in your category, which is a stronger buying signal. Bombora tells you a topic is trending at a company, which is earlier and less specific. Use G2 for speed, Bombora for building a longer nurture list.
Do we need 6sense if we already have Bombora?
Not necessarily. 6sense adds predictive scoring and account orchestration on top of intent signals, which is valuable if you're running a mature ABM program with defined target accounts. If you're not there yet, the extra layer of modeling may not earn its setup cost.
How quickly should a rep follow up on an intent alert?
As close to same-day as the signal allows, especially for a direct signal like a G2 category comparison. Weaker signals like a topic surge can sit in a nurture track, but anything that looks like active evaluation loses value fast if it waits.
Sources
Where we quote a benchmark, we show its source. Other figures in this guide are estimates or general guidance, so check them against your own numbers.
- Qualification advantage of responding to leads within 1 hour. Harvard Business Review, 'The Short Life of Online Sales Leads' (2011), via Motarme summary, 2011.
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