Abraham calls enterprise intent data a waste in outbound
He says account-level signals never tell him which person inside a 100,000 plus employee company to email.
Nick Abraham says enterprise intent data is one of the biggest wastes of money in B2B outbound, naming 6sense and Bombora as the companies that built large businesses selling it. His objection is not that the data is fake. It is that he has never worked out how to consistently act on it.
The example he gives is simple. Say Google gets flagged as showing intent for "B2B lead generation". All he knows is that somebody at Google searched for something related to what he sells. He does not know who searched, what exactly they searched, or which person inside a 100,000 plus person company he should contact. As he puts it, he paid for an intent signal and still has to figure out who to reach out to.
The standard he sets
Abraham's test for the category is one line. If he is paying for intent data, he wants it to tell him who to contact and give him a reason to contact them. Account-level intent, by his account, does neither. He says he has never seen anyone turn this kind of data into an outbound play he thought was really good, and allows one possible exception, a narrow ABM motion (account based marketing, where you pick the target accounts up front) where you already know the accounts you want. Even there he says he is skeptical.
He ends the post by asking what he is missing, which is worth reading as framing. This is a question put to the room, not a result. There is no campaign behind it, no send volume, no reply rate comparing intent-sourced lists against a flat list of the same accounts. It is the opinion of someone who runs a lot of outbound, which is worth more than the opinion of someone who does not, but it is still an opinion.
For people sending
The gap Abraham is pointing at is between an account signal and a contact. Most sending workflows need a named person, a reason, and a line of copy, and an account-level flag gets you none of the three on its own. If you are already paying for that layer, the question his post implies is whether anything downstream of the signal actually changed who you emailed yesterday, or just confirmed a list you would have built anyway.
The counterargument he is inviting is the one to watch. If someone replies with an intent-to-contact workflow that produced numbers, that is the useful artifact here, not the complaint itself. Until then, the only claim on the table is that a prolific sender cannot make the category work and wants to be shown how.
If I’m paying for intent data, I want it to tell me who to contact and give me a reason to contact them.
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