How Buyer Intent Can Transform Your Sales and Marketing Strategy in B2B Food and Nutrition

📅 10 September 2025 | ⏱️ 6 minute read

Not every lead is ready to buy. Some are just curious, others are browsing, and still others are comparing products and suppliers. But those precious few? They are actively looking for a solution like yours and ready to buy. The problem is that most sales and marketing teams don’t know which is which—until it’s too late.

In today’s competitive food and nutraceutical market, wasting time on low-potential leads isn’t just frustrating. It’s costly too. That’s where buyer intent comes in. It helps your teams identify, prioritise, and act on leads that actually matter—the ones already moving toward a decision.

In this blog post, we’ll explore what buyer intent really means, how it works in practice (and especially within Smartcore Lead Insights, our AI-powered lead intelligence tool for the B2B food and nutraceutical industry built for Fi Europe and Vitafoods Europe exhibitors), and how your sales and marketing teams can start using it to drive more focused, efficient, and profitable results.

Who are we? An Informa Markets brand, Smartcore is your best-in-class B2B food and nutrition marketing solutions partner and the official digital marketing provider for exhibitors at Vitafoods Europe and Fi Europe. We help ingredient suppliers boost visibility and reach their buyers, nurture them across their buying journey, and drive business growth. Our invaluable first-party data of 409,000+ buyers, data-driven insights, and specialised digital content channels and solutions set us apart from the rest. Download Smartcore's 2025 Digital Media Kit.

What Is Buyer Intent and Why Should You Care?

Buyer intent is a prospect’s likelihood of making a purchase. It’s not based on guesswork, surface-level metrics, or broad demographics like job title or company size. It’s a behaviour-based insight that is built on how, and how often, a buyer interacts with your brand across multiple touchpoints. Think of it as a spotlight that cuts through the noise. Instead of chasing every contact, your sales and marketing teams can zero in on the ones actively signalling their readiness to buy.

And it’s not a future trend; with the power of artificial intelligence (AI), it’s already here. This HubSpot 2025 Sales Trends report tells us that a striking 92% of sales reps use AI in their work—think chatbots and text generation tools, but also those that offer revenue intelligence, productivity boosts, and opportunistic features with their CRM and other sales tools. If that doesn’t convince you of the increasing importance of leveraging AI in your sales and marketing nowadays, these top emerging sales trends (mentioned in the same report) will: AI will become a native part of the sales and buyer research process and AI-powered signals to predict buyer intent and improve lead scoring will help indicate purchasing readiness and guide towards the most promising opportunities. That’s why intent data is becoming a must-have for modern B2B marketing strategies, not just a nice-to-have.

Now, here are just a few examples of what these signals could look like:

Downloading resources such as whitepapers, infographics, or brochures

Attending industry-specific webinars or in-person trade shows

Revisiting key landing pages multiple times.

By analysing these behaviours, alongside engagement depth and recency, you can prioritise the leads that are showing clear buying intent, allowing your sales and marketing teams to act faster and smarter with their follow up strategies.

Why Buyer Intent Is a Game-Changer for Sales and Marketing

Your sales pipeline may be full but as we know, not every lead is equal. With limited time, budgets, and resources, it becomes challenging for sales and marketing teams to treat every lead follow-up the same way. Here’s exactly how having buyer intent insights changes that. It brings clarity and focus to your strategies, plus:

1. It helps Sales teams:

Focus outreach on leads showing real signs of purchase readiness

Match contact and follow-up timing to the buyer’s journey

Prioritise actions that make a measurable impact.

2. It helps Marketing teams:

Segment audiences based on their engagement levels
Build nurture campaigns that reflect real buyer behaviours
Improve performance by focusing resources where intent is strongest.

And when sales and marketing teams align around buyer intent, they master data-driven decision and start engaging in ways that are timely, relevant, and effective.

Actionable Tips for Using Buyer Intent in Your Strategy

Knowing about buyer intent is one thing. Making it part of your day-to-day sales and marketing is what really drives results. Here are some practical ways to start:

Spot early signals – Track actions such as repeat content views or event registrations to identify buyers moving from awareness to consideration.

Fine-tune nurturing – Design campaigns that match intent level, offering educational resources for early-stage leads and product-focused content for high-intent ones.

Align sales and marketing touchpoints – Share intent insights across teams so outreach is consistent and based on the same signals.

Review and refresh regularly – Intent isn’t static; build in checkpoints to reassess scores and update engagement strategies accordingly.

These small but focused steps turn intent data into something actionable, helping your teams spend less time guessing and more time closing.

How Smartcore Lead Insights Leverages Buyer Intent in Food and Nutrition

So how do you put buyer intent into play in the B2B food and nutraceutical industry? That’s where Smartcore Lead Insights comes in. Built specifically for suppliers of ingredients and finished products in this industry, Smartcore Lead Insights goes beyond generic scoring tools and uses buyer intent signals unique to this space. It captures these from across the Informa Markets’ events and digital ecosystem, including:

Interactions during Fi Europe and Vitafoods Europe, such as visiting your stand or session activities.

Attendance through the Fi Webinar Series and Vitafoods Insights Webinar Series or content downloads and views on Ingredients Network, Fi Global Insights, and Vitafoods Insights.

Networking or behavioural actions such as confirming meetings or favouriting your company or product in the event app.

All this activity is scored and layered with demographic and firmographic data to give your team the full picture, not just who your lead is but how engaged they are and what they’re interested in. The benefits? Focus on the leads already moving towards a decision, tailor follow-ups to what buyers have actually engaged with, and allocate spend to where it drives real ROI. Instead of chasing every lead the same way, Smartcore Lead Insights helps you put intent data to work—so your teams can move faster, close smarter, and connect with buyers at the right moment.

Partner with us

Smartcore Lead Insights isn’t just another MarTech tool. It’s built specifically for the B2B food and nutraceutical industry, for suppliers of ingredients and finished products who are ready to move beyond basic lead generation and act on real buyer intelligence.

With Smartcore Lead Insights, you’ll zero in on the buyers who matter most, spot engagement signals before your competitors do, tailor your outreach for higher impact, and – best of all – align sales and marketing for stronger results.

Ready to see it in action? Book your live 30-min deep-dive demo with Gregory Varghese, our Digital Sales Manager at Smartcore Lead Insights, Informa Markets. Let’s turn intelligence into impact—together!

Written by Serena Botelho

Serena is a digital marketing enthusiast with a passion for storytelling that empowers businesses to elevate their successes. Determined to inspire audiences, she enjoys collaborating with expert marketing teams to produce insightful content tailored to B2B audiences. In her free time, Serena loves cooking, creating content, and playing music.