Selling to Scientists: Sales Intent

Sales intent tools watch behavior — they tell you an account is researching your category. They can’t tell you what a researcher is working on, what they’re stuck on, or what would make them reply. I sold to AI researchers for a decade by reading their papers and asking questions only someone who read them would ask. I built the system I wish I’d had the whole time: a seller defines their product, target accounts, and ideal buying signals in plain English; the engine mines papers, linked repos, and adjacent sources, then surfaces named opportunities with openers grounded in real pain quotes from the buyer’s own writing. The novel part isn’t the retrieval. It’s that the seller’s domain expertise becomes the system’s input — captured as natural language signals, not keywords or trained models — and the LLM applies that expertise across a corpus the seller could never read on their own.