Person-Based vs. Account-Based Intent

Intent data has become essential infrastructure for B2B marketing and sales. But not all intent data is created equal. The fundamental divide in the market is between account-level intent and person-based intent — and the difference changes how fast you close deals.

What Is Account-Level Intent?

Account-level intent tells you that a company is showing research activity on a given topic. A surge score might indicate "Acme Corp is researching identity resolution." That’s useful, but Acme Corp has 5,000 employees. Which one is driving the evaluation? Which department? What stage of the buying cycle are they in?

Providers like Bombora, 6sense, Demandbase, and ZoomInfo operate at this level. They map behavioral signals — content consumption, topic searches, website visits — to company domains or IP ranges. The output is a list of accounts showing elevated interest.

The core limitation: account-level data tells you where to look, but not who to talk to. Sales teams receive a company name and have to guess which individual to contact. The result is broad outreach, low response rates, and wasted cycles.

What Is Person-Based Intent?

Person-based intent identifies the specific individual whose research behavior has changed. Instead of "Acme Corp is surging," you get "Sarah Chen, VP RevOps at Acme, has researched 3 competitors this week and her activity has accelerated 4x above her personal baseline."

This requires a fundamentally different architecture. Person-based intent depends on a deterministic identity graph that can resolve anonymous web activity to a verified individual — not just match to a company domain. It requires behavioral baselines per individual, not population averages.

Delivr.ai is the only provider delivering person-based, off-domain intent at this scale: 35B daily signals across 52K+ topics, resolved against 5.1B verified email records.

The Five Key Differences

Resolution: Account-level tells you a company is in-market. Person-based tells you which individual to call, their role, and what they’re researching.

Actionability: Account-level requires sales to research and guess who to contact. Person-based delivers a named individual with behavioral context — ready for immediate outreach.

Signal quality: Account-level aggregates all employee activity into one score, creating noise. Person-based scores each individual against their own baseline, so you see genuine acceleration — not just a busy intern.

Buying group visibility: Account-level sees one surge score for the whole company. Person-based sees when multiple individuals at the same account begin accelerating simultaneously — revealing coordinated buying processes.

Competitive intelligence: Account-level shows topic interest. Person-based shows which specific competitors each buyer is evaluating and how intensely they’re researching each one.

When Account-Level Is Enough

Account-level intent still has a role. For broad awareness campaigns, territory planning, and market sizing, knowing which companies are showing interest is valuable. If your sales motion is purely account-based and your team has the capacity to research contacts manually, account-level data provides a reasonable starting point.

But for demand generation, sales development, and any motion where speed-to-lead matters, person-based intent is the clear evolution. The companies achieving 225% more deals than Bombora-only campaigns are the ones who know exactly who to call.

The Market Is Moving

Forrester’s 2025 Wave elevated "persona-based analysis" as an evaluation criterion. Intentsify’s Orbit identity graph is moving toward contact-level. The market recognizes that account-level data alone is no longer sufficient.

The question for B2B teams isn’t whether to adopt person-based intent — it’s how quickly they can transition. Every month spent targeting companies instead of people is pipeline left on the table.